1 March 2019

1 March 2019 Mother’s Day honours motherhood and is observed in different forms throughout the world. Celebrations of mothers can be traced back to the ancient Greeks and Romans, who held festivals in honour of the mother goddesses Rhea and Cybele. The clearest modern precedent for Mother’s Day is the early Christian festival known as […]

1 March 2019 When my siblings and I were young, the Easter Bunny would visit: on Easter Sunday morning we would wake up to find at the foot of our beds a basket full of chocolate eggs, including a large chocolate bunny. In my excitement I would inevitably eat a handful of the eggs and

1 March 2019 But it wasn’t for romantic reasons that his heart was aflutter. He was happily married and he’d just shared a pleasant breakfast with his wife. Nor was it the grey, monolithic tombstones, sprouting from the grounds of the cemetery that ran along the property’s edge. Rather it was anxiety, at the thought

1 March 2019 “Get your shorts on,” his father said as he came through the front door. “I’m taking you to the Little League tryouts.” Joseph blinked in surprise. His father, who worked long hours as a builder, had never bought him a baseball bat or mitt, or tossed a ball back and forth in

1 March 2019 All his stories conveyed messages of love, kindness, generosity, self-acceptance, forgiveness, reconciliation and many other virtues. These are also, of course, gospel values. Consider Jesus and the way he preached the gospel through the medium of stories. In fact, several of his parables are not overtly ‘religious’ and don’t even mention God

1 March 2019 Respect was a learned trait through the deeds and actions of my parents, grandparents and others; respect needed to be shown to my teachers at school, friends I played with in the street and the woman who ran the local grocery store. Politeness was drummed into me and even if I didn’t

1 March 2019 What makes Patrick a saint is the overall thrust of his life. And that thrust can readily be gleaned from two surviving writings namely, his Confession and Letter to Coroticus. In these letters three key elements stand out: (i) his life lived in union with Jesus Christ who is not only his

1 March 2019 The boy survived and after recovery said, “I’d skip out early in the morning before school and go to Mass. I knew my parents wouldn’t approve, so I never told them.” That five-year-old would live into his 90s and become a Trappist monk, author, lecturer, and a priest who re-introduced meditation and