God often has something else up his sleeve. And he likes to make sure we know that he sees us and that he’s walking right by our side.

The favors of the Lord are not exhausted, his mercies not over and done; every morning they are renewed, so great is his faithfulness (Lam 3:22-23).

Longtime fans of Karina Fabian’s “Rescue Sisters” stories will be quick to point out that the review of this month’s novel is a decade overdue. To them one can only reply that, after all, Christ gave the full day’s pay to the latecomers in his parable of the vineyard workers, and this reviewer is similarly grateful to have discovered such an excellent work of speculative fiction, even if a bit belatedly. Discovered, of course, being the operative word, as in any good work of science fiction.

I know there are people who say that a child learns best when they need to deal with the consequences. But I think there are enough hard consequences in life. The lessons I want to teach my children are to respond with compassion.

What can his fellow Catholics do for Jimmy Lai at the moment? We can hold him in prayer every day. We can urge the Administration to continue to press for Jimmy’s release and we can urge our representatives and senators to press the Administration to keep pressing the Chinese regime.

If the original marriage is presumed to be a true and binding one, then living as a married person with a new spouse is technically committing adultery — even if most divorced and remarried people wouldn’t subjectively experience it this way.

In linking the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence with the devotion to the Sacred Heart, the bishops invite us to reflect with gratitude on the blessings God has bestowed on our nation but, at the same time, devotion to the Sacred Heart demands that we consider how we might foster truth, justice and charity in American life.

The heroic love of God and neighbor that motivated her was formally recognized in 1946 when Frances Cabrini was declared a saint. That made her the first U.S. citizen to be canonized — even though she remained, in the words of a historian, “Italian … to the very marrow of her bones.”

Hypothetically, what would happen if the bishop accidentally left out the part of the ordination Mass where the future priest promises celibacy? That wouldn’t mean that the new priest was actually free to marry, would it?

As America approaches its 250th birthday, it would do well to remember that the emblematic figure of the second half of the twentieth century had such high hopes for us: hopes that now seem a call to a national examination of conscience.