Reluctant as I am to fiddle with the U.S. Constitution, I’m willing to consider an amendment banning any elementary school from opening before Labor Day.

I wonder if you can tell the age of a person by the number of dead people’s phone numbers he still has saved on his phone? It could be like judging the age of a tree by the rings on its core.

Q: I know officially the Catholic Church is against the death penalty, but what about Genesis 9:6?

A: It looks like there are two dimensions to your question: the Church’s teaching on the death penalty, and how we are to read the Old Testament as Catholics.

I hope whatever this new school year brings for our young people and their families, they know God is with them. And I hope they find joy in being brave.

As Dolly Parton once said, “I like trying to make people happy and lift people up and glorifying God. That’s my mission in life.”

In my youth I knew a mother who played cruel “jokes” on babies. With a little one seated on her lap, she would temptingly show a biscuit or a candy, and — just as the excited infant leaned forward, arms and legs churning, mouth open — she would devour it, with a laugh.

Leaving Quo Vadis, I felt a calling and a mission. For several years, I had been discerning a vocation to the priesthood, but that call often seemed to come more from my mind than from my heart. Through this retreat and the experiences I encountered there, that changed

My work taught me that recovery often begins only when accountability and hope exist together. Sometimes treatment was enough. Sometimes the prospect of jail provides the wake-up call that makes a person willing to enter treatment. In either case, the crucial step was a willingness to change.

Fiction can often convey the human texture of a time and place better than scholarly works of history. Herewith, and in honor of the national semiquincentennial, some novels that help tell the Catholic story in these United States through a fictional lens.

I was surprised. I’ve never had a car pause there so I could enter that stretch of road before. Everyone is always in a hurry.