Voices and Perspectives
The Wedding Banquet: Hope for the Future
A banquet is a hopeful symbol of the future because it combines the delights of communion with God as host and being with family and neighbors. Is imagining a banquet as our future a fantasy and projection?... Read More>
The Moral Obligation of Voting is Not to Be Ignored
Catholic Social Teaching, and indeed the traditions of other religions, while encouraging voting and participation in public life, does not tell voters how to vote. Quite the contrary. But it does provide yardsticks to use in measuring candidates vying for political office.... Read More>
When Love Is Rejected, Justice Must Bear Fruit
Can the people who do not respond have any hope for a change, or must they simply brace themselves for punishment? Can a song that started out so beautifully end so bleakly?... Read More>
The Moral Cost of Stopping at “No” – NIMBY and YIMBY in Housing
We are accustomed to asking what a housing proposal will cost a community if approved. We are much less accustomed to asking what it will cost the people who need it if the answer is no. ... Read More>
Repentance Is More Than Saying Yes
Ordinarily, we think of sin as an offense against God. Bible readers would undoubtedly agree. Today’s readings do not exactly disagree, but both Ezekiel and Jesus shift the focus away from sin as an offense against God to the effects of sin on human beings.... Read More>
Hard Times Come Again No More
I don’t remember the first time I heard the song “Hard Times Come Again No More.” It has stayed with me for some time. Written in 1854 by Stephen Foster the song is a lament. A prayer breaking out from a spirit that knows, too well, the cruelty of the world.... Read More>
When God’s Ways Are Greater Than Ours
Why do we have to listen to Gospel and ruin a perfectly good Sunday?” It is worth looking at this Gospel more carefully as well as the other two readings to find an explanation. ... Read More>
The Blockbuster New Papal Encyclical Sees A.I. in the ‘Universal Destination of Goods’ Framework”
It is truly remarkable how Pope Leo’s document has received far greater and broader attention than any church document in recent memory. ... Read More>
Honoring and Dishonoring 9/11
We remember the nearly 3,000 people who were killed, the families who have carried their absence through a quarter century, and the first responders and ordinary citizens whose courage emerged amid unimaginable danger and mind-numbing uncertainty.... Read More>
Forgiveness Without Limits
Sin as “debt” had become a common metaphor several centuries prior to Jesus. In accord with the metaphor, one’s sins were imagined as recorded as debts in a heavenly register, and forgiveness consisted in erasing the debts by good works, especially giving alms to the poor. ... Read More>
The Importance of Keeping the “Faith” in Justice
Editor’s Note: The Weekly Word’s summer recess is over, and so we open our new season with this fitting essay from Fr. Michael C. McCarthy, SJ, Dean of the Boston College Clough School of Theology and Ministry. In his Pulitzer-winning biography of Martin Luther King, Jonathan Eig observes that many ... Read More>
Truth-Telling for the Sake of Community Peace
Truth-telling is a means to community peace. This sentence challenges concealing or burying differences to bring about harmony. ... Read More>
Finding Jesus in Everyday Encounters
Service is not simply about providing something that another person lacks. It is about taking the time to see the person in front of us. Every individual has a story. Every individual has value.... Read More>
Building Community Through Mutual Responsibility and Care
These experiences have taught me not only practical skills but also profound lessons about what makes community strong, resilient and truly sacred.... Read More>
Lose Your Life to Find It
Last week’s confession of Peter was the turning point in Matthew’s Gospel: Peter acknowledged that Jesus was Messiah and Son of the living God, and Jesus delegated to him authority over the Church (16:1-27). ... Read More>
Peter’s Mission to Lead the Church
This Sunday’s readings are about leaders delegated to guide God’s people. In the first reading from Isaiah, the palace steward Shebna is demoted by King Hezekiah, and in Matthew’s Gospel, Peter is given the keys of the kingdom of heaven. ... Read More>
Elected and Included
What does it mean to be among “the elect” and how we should think about “the others.”... Read More>
Facing Fear with Faith
Where then do genuine change and innovation come from? With escape from terror, pushing past roadblocks, facing what frightens us. At least that’s what Elijah in 1 Kings and Peter in the Gospel of Matthew did. ... Read More>
Manna, the New Moses, and the Pilgrim Church
The four gospels situate the events of Jesus’s life in a broad context. One contextual thread running throughout Jesus’s life is the exodus as a continuous story that begins with the seventy descendants of Abraham in Egypt where famine had driven them.... Read More>
Practicing the Turn: A Lesson from the Jewish National Day of Grief
It is a moment in the Jewish calendar when we sit on the floor. We take off our shoes. We read a scroll not by candlelight but by the dimmer, sadder glow of memory.... Read More>