Tag: The Work of Mercy

Doubts can be located in the emotions, intellect, or will. Emotional doubts can be potent, but very often, when you interrogate them, there’s no There there at all. Those who

Doubt can be the emotional equivalent of a brief spring rain or a hurricane. People doubt whether to place two bucks on the Mariners (don’t) or whether the God in

The notion that Jew or Gentile can claim to be top dog in the pedagogy of salvation is like the idea of patients in a cancer ward squabbling about who

Back in 1971, when experiments in educational theory were just becoming all the rage, my fellow seventh-graders and I were pulled out of what used to be called a “junior

The ambiguity of our position as fallen creatures is on full display in how we treat the dead. In the Old Testament, burying the dead is as much a pious

“The body,” I was taught growing up, “is just the shoebox for the soul.What matters are the shoes, not the box. So when it’s time to go to heaven, we

Not surprisingly, the way Jesus described his mission was precisely in terms of slavery and ransom for the captive. It is worth quoting the passage in full, for it reveals

It’s been a while since the Crusades. As a general rule, when our president goes abroad, he does not get waylaid and find himself in the hands of brigands who

The conviction that Christ makes clean what was unclean animates the Christian tradition and urges on us the duty to visit the sick. This conviction also links, in the Catholic

We moderns can be awfully smug when it comes to Old Testament taboos. Many people assume such taboos were nothing but superstitious, prescientific attempts to avoid disease—as though the Israelites