“Somos de tu misma sangre,” dijeron los ancianos de Israel a David antes de ungirle como rey....

We come from the same flesh and blood as you, the elders of Israel said to David before anointing him as King....

The mother didn’t say much as I watched the physical therapist work with her son. The look in her eyes said it all: a combination of shock at the car accident that had literally turned their world upside down and fear about an unknown future. Everything had changed in an instant, and her life would never be the same. How could she possibly put her life back together again?

My cardiologist the other day was telling me about an angry patient who came in for the wrong appointment. She tried to correct him and he called her racist. It’s the terrible tenor of this election, she confided in me. It’s put everyone on edge. In the same conversation she spoke also of a recent medical mission trip to Haiti, where she cried every night, as she saw suffering children who would certainly die. ...

When I taught high school, I fantasized sometimes about going into a witness protection program. My day began about 7am when I walked the fifty feet from the Jesuit residence to the school. Most days students were waiting on me...

A story that I heard when I was a novice continues to challenge me ten years later. It’s a story about a father and a daughter....

Here is my homily for our community Mass today. You can find the readings here. The audience is my Jesuit community, but I think it preaches to anyone bogged down in the middle of Lent, the middle of the semester, or the middle of life. Replace "studying Latin" and "working on your thesis" with whatever seemingly lifeless task threatens to suck away all of your daily energy.

Guilt names a wrongful relationship between a man or woman and their God. It differs from regret and from awareness of having made a mistake. These we recognize and our culture guilds us to correct them. But guilt? Apart from a conviction that it is a mindset bred into me by my upbringing or my culture, we do not recognize it. Yet, if we do not and do not repent of our sin, we will live – as one man in his sixties put it – with a monkey clawing into our back with sharp claws.

For my psalms class, we had to write our own Psalm. After a particularly trying day, I wrote this Psalm. Like a good Jesuit, I can't help but include the themes of pilgrimage and gratitude. I think it fits perfectly with this season of traveling for Thanksgiving.

After the jihadist terrorist attack in Paris, a number of my friends and correspondents are sharing reflections about Muslims being terrorists, Syrian refugees bringing in clandestine terrorists, and American security being so defective. The mood of twitters is fear. It is not my mood and the reason goes back to the beginning of the pilgrimage I am writing about.

I am just back from a prayer pilgrimage. We visited holy places and we felt their holiness. As we went and prayed, I thought about the “middle class holiness” that Pope Francis sees all around him. So I considered what “holiness” might be for us middle class Americans.