Even today, when our virtual “connections” have led to the widespread destruction of face-to-face and day-to-day literal connections, our hearts still long for the ties that George Bailey strained so long against.

Maybe silence, especially at a time of the year so filled with what the Grinch referred to as “NOISE, NOISE, NOISE” can be the way we can encounter Christ in a more meaningful way.

The small, struggling city where Jesus Christ was born holds a deeper urgency — and a quiet, heartbreaking beauty.

Splendor and reverence are largely absent from our daily lives, and mostly abandoned by the dominant secular culture that casualizes almost everything.

Keeping Christ in Christmas, or in any other day for that matter, is really the challenge of a eucharistic lifestyle. Our words are meaningless and empty when they are not upheld by our personal conformity in all we think, say and do.

It’s a tough time to be a Catholic parent these days. While there are some young adults who are embracing their Catholicism, often even its most traditional manifestations, the much larger number of Catholic younger adults have at best a tenuous connection with the faith of their father and mother.

I must have been about 5 or 6 that Christmas Eve. My grandmother was spending the night so she could wake up with all of us on Christmas morning. To make sure that Grandma had a bed, my oldest sister Maureen and I slept on the third floor of our Rodgers Forge townhouse. We were […]

J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth — the world of “The Lord of the Rings” and now the new animated film “The War of the Rohirrim” — was born, first and foremost, from Tolkien’s intense and lifelong love for language.

God uses the lowly, the humble and the unexpected to achieve his purposes. It perfectly sets the stage for the greatest “surprise” of all, that the King of Kings should come to us in humble circumstances, born of a virgin and laid in a manger.

Each day we stand before the doors of chronos and kairos. We can enter into the frantic, fast-paced, nonstop rush of consumerist culture, with its endless urgent cries of “buy, buy, buy” and “more, more, more.” Or we can turn and open another door, the quieter way of faith.