I read a story about a man with a recurring nightmare. In the dream, he was pursued by a fierce lion which kept chasing him until he dropped from exhaustion and woke screaming. The dream disturbed him greatly and, eventually, he sought counsel from his pastor. As they spoke, the pastor asked if there was something troubling going on in his life:...

The other day a lady described a man she had met and I was about to see again. Her description was summed up at the end by, “he is a nice guy.” I shuddered a bit and reconsidered my options. Was this man really someone I wanted to meet? Then that got me thinking, why is it almost an insult to call a man a “nice guy”? There is nothing inhere...

Pope Benedict XVI illuminated the characteristics that marked Pope John Paul II as a saint by pointing out his “deep spirituality and courage to uphold the truth”. It was not so much in what Saint John Paul II said, it was in his actions. These days, we seem to best identify courage through its vice – cowardice; however, courage is much mo...

Six years of my priesthood were spent serving as the Vice Rector of Mount St. Mary’s Seminary in Emmitsburg, Maryland - my previous assignment. Emmitsburg is a small town with a great Catholic Heritage; But just eight miles north of the town is the historic Gettysburg National Battlefield in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania.  Since the National Park Ser...

You hear people ask all the time: why doesn’t God just fix all the world’s problems. Why doesn’t He just manifest Himself and save everyone? The answer may be . . . us. We are the reason why God doesn’t do these things. Strictly speaking God does not need us at all. However, God has chosen to save the world through the mediation of othe...

One of the blessings of teaching religion to high schoolers is that I get to witness to how God has transformed my life. This comes up in various ways through a myriad of lessons in all the grades I teach. Over the years, one particular topic, one special piece of advice, has resurfaced in various contexts: discerning one’s vocation. Everyone mus...

One of my favorite quotes from G.K. Chesterton – or from anyone for that matter – accurately distills the distinguishing characteristic of essentially every critique of the Christian paradigm and unapologetically defends that very paradigm in the space of less than twenty words. In fact, my description of the quote is already longer than the qu...

It seems that in the mind of many Christian men today, the ideas of humility and heroism are mutually exclusive. Meekness and humility are praised highly, as indeed they should be, but magnanimity and the virtues of soldiers are more or less swept under the rug. This is a great tragedy of our time. For, as Longfellow puts it in A Psalm of Life, ...

Jospeh Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI) is attributed with saying the following: “The world offers you comfort, but you were not made for comfort. You were made for greatness!” I have two problems with that quote. The first problem is that it does not actually define greatness. Is it wealth, power, popularity? Well, since he was a Pope maybe...

A brilliant and valiant teacher named John Senior is continuing to be discovered by those startled by today’s shadowy darkness, especially through a newly published biography. Interestingly, Senior could be described as an apostle of shadows, not because shadows are not real but because they point to the fact that things are real. How else could ...