I was working with some particularly complex lab equipment last week, and it was not doing what I needed it to do. After I got it working, I realized that the words I was muttering under my breath as I struggled with it were not songs of thanksgiving. I won’t quote myself. But I am reminded by
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The theme of development can be identified with the
inclusion-in-relation of all individuals and peoples within the one
community of the human family, built in solidarity on the basis of the
fundamental values of justice and peace. This perspective is illuminated
in a
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One of the deepest forms of poverty a person can experience is
isolation. If we look closely at other kinds of poverty, including
material forms, we see that they are born from isolation, from not being
loved or from difficulties in being able to love. Poverty is often
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The woman caught in adultery, Peter, Augustine, Francis, Ignatius Loyola, Dorothy Day–all they needed to do was ask for reconciliation, and the Church opened its
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If there is a lack of respect for the right to life and to a natural death, if human conception, gestation and birth are made artificial, if human embryos are sacrificed to research, the conscience of society ends up losing the concept of human ecology and, along with it, that of environmental
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THE RISK OF EVOLUTIONARY DETERMINISM
When nature, including the human being, is viewed as the result of mere chance or evolutionary determinism, our sense of responsibility wanes. In nature, the believer recognizes the wonderful result of God's creative activity, which we may use responsibly to
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So when that Adversary learned of the new guy on the Jordan, whom John had baptized amid some sort of theophany, he did his own research. All these human messiahs had come and gone with a few carefully- placed temptation. Even the great King David had succumbed to a foreign woman bathing next
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The great bell called St Ferdinand at our diocesan cathedral tolls solemnly several times each month. Many years ago I heard the toll as my father’s casket was slowly pushed out toward its ultimate resting place. Each day the low sound of bells sound from Haiti to Hong Kong, from Reykjavik to
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I sold life insurance for many years, and since that time I have presided at many funerals. Few of those souls knew when they were going to die. The elderly grandmother didn’t know that her grandson was going to kill her for some drug money. The three boys I gave diplomas to didn’t know that
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What was Mary doing when she had her angelic epiphany, the one that changed the world forever? Was she deep in meditation, as the medieval paintings suggest? Maybe not. She surely wasn’t mowing the lawn, but I like to imagine her kneading bread, chanting a psalm and listening for the divine
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A couple of months ago, my daughter, who has four children, two of whom are in Catholic school, asked me “Dad, why are my children in Catholic school?” I know it’s a struggle, even with a doctor’s income. She faces an incredible tuition when two are in Catholic high schools and two in grade
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When I was younger, I would mow the lawn with ear mufflers on. It was a time to be with God and my own thoughts. Quiet time with lawnmower accompaniment. Once–just once and barely for a minute–I had a very quiet Epiphany. I remember it as if it were yesterday. I had turned a corner on the
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The problem for Isaiah, however, is that the filth and corruption was not outside Jerusalem, it was in it, in the hearts and on the lips of his people. That was the reason for all the invasions of Assyria and Babylonia. The kings of the north would be a purifying fire that would purge the sin
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A CHRISTMAS STORY: FILLING THE HOLE
One of the most popular films [of this season] is a little vignette set in the 50s called A Christmas Story. In the plot, young Ralphie sets his heart on an air rifle for Christmas, enduring ridicule and scorn in his quest for this gift he believes will make him
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Herod, the usurper tyrant, learned neither from Aristotle nor Moses and is thus known more as a bloodthirsty murderer than as the rebuilder of the Jerusalem Temple. This unnatural act of mass murder, which our political leaders today imitate in the form of
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In the middle ages–another time of global warming, by the way–the Church imposed penalties upon those who warred in the forbidden times. There were periods of respite from combat, when warring
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In a climate of mutual trust, the market is the economic institution that permits encounter between persons, inasmuch as they are economic subjects who make use of contracts to regulate their relations as they exchange goods and services of equivalent value between them, in order to satisfy their
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in every cognitive process, truth is not something that we produce, it is always found, or better, received. Truth, like love, “is neither planned nor
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The human community that we build by ourselves can never, purely by its own strength, be a fully fraternal community, nor can it overcome every
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"The logic of gift does not exclude justice, nor does it merely sit alongside it as a second element added from without; on the other hand, economic, social and political development, if it is to be authentically human, needs to make room for the principle of gratuitousness as an
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