Friday, November 11, 20220349A popular praise-&-worship song takes its title from the opening words of Psalm 89: “I could sing of your love forever.” The song stirs emotions to a blissful pitch of gushing adoration for the loving and healing God who allows us to lift our hands daily in tranquil praise of His never-failing mercy.
Wednesday, October 12, 20220151While awaiting a sham trial and certain execution for high treason, Thomas More prayed and wrote. Henry VIII had declared himself head of the Church of England, and the Catholic More, who had served the king loyally as chancellor, refused to break his spiritual allegiance to the pope. He was utterly alone at this hour of his life; his...
Tuesday, September 20, 20220200I reached a new low recently when I felt an overwhelming and irresistible itch to catch up on emails mere minutes after my first check of the day, which happened mere minutes after I finished celebrating Mass. I had long lamented the sight of my students reaching addictively for their phones as soon as class ended, but the realization...
Monday, August 22, 20220224The future is not simply an adventure; it’s the adventure, according to the Latin roots ad, “to, toward” and ventura, “what will come.” While many students eagerly anticipate the start of a new school year and engaged couples impatiently count down the days to their wedding, dread of the approaching unknowns is familiar to...
Saturday, June 18, 20220227Being a father requires a man to acknowledge his mortality. From a purely biological perspective, the sexual drive is a program for reproduction that presumes the death of the one generating new life. Leon Kass, a brilliant physician and philosopher, asserts this truth in a stark manner: “Sexual desire, in human beings as in animals,...
Thursday, May 5, 20220196Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends to John’s presentation of Jesus’ ministry, and highlight the role of Mary as mother both of the Church and of every individual Christian.
Thursday, April 7, 20220146The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, declared in a book of prose that “the Scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.” For Milosz, whose life was scarred by the Nazi and Communist takeovers of his native land, the moral authority and literary beauty of the...
Sunday, March 13, 20220491A curious pattern of exile is evident in the endings of several Old Testament books. After God promises Abram the land of Canaan, the patriarch must immediately flee to Egypt because of a famine (Genesis 12); his descendants, the sons of Jacob, repeat the expedition for the same reason (Genesis 42-47).
Tuesday, February 15, 20220346St. Benedict concludes the Prologue of his Rule for monks with an uplifting exhortation: “Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation. It is bound to be narrow at the outset. But as we progress in this way of life and in faith, we shall run on the path of God’s commandments, our hearts...
Sunday, January 16, 20220292
By Father Thomas Esposito
Special to The Texas Catholic
Near the end of March 2020, the peoples of virtually all nations were enduring the first of many months of enforced isolation and the specter of sickness caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. At that precise moment, Pope Francis organized a worldwide hour of adoration, and...
