Often we look for the Spirit in the extraordinary when God has promised to be present in the ordinary.
Like the sacrament of the Lord’s Supper, baptism is a microcosm of the entirety of Christian worship and the story of God, in Christ, reconciling the world to himself.
Education, then, is a constellation of practices, rituals, and routines that inculcates a particular vision of the good life by inscribing or infusing that vision into the heart (the gut) by means of...
Worship your intellect, being seen as smart—you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out.
Worship isn’t political only to the extent that it can be marshaled and invoked in contemporary partisan debates; it is always already political insofar as liturgy is the rite of citizens of the heave...
Worship again and again interrupts the course of the world. Through worship the Christian community testifies that the world is not on its own. And this also means that it is not kept alive by politic...
We have already seen how modernity does away with higher times, leaving us to the merely chronological tick-tock of secular time. However, our own experience suggests that the unstoppable homogeneity...
To recognize the limits of knowledge is not to embrace ignorance. We don’t need less than knowledge; we need more. We need to recognize the power of habit.
To be human, we could say, is to desire the kingdom—some kingdom. To call it a kingdom is to signal that we’re not talking only about some personal, private Eden—some individual nirvana—but that we al...
The eucharistic feast is a tiny normative picture of the justice that characterizes the coming kingdom of God, where none go hungry because of poverty or alienated labor
The announcement of the law reminds us that we inhabit not nature, but creation, fashioned by a Creator, and that there is a certain grain to the universe—grooves and tracks and norms that are part of...
So the emergence of art as Art creates room to expand unbelief; unbelief has somewhere to go without settling for the mechanism of a completely flattened universe but also without returning to a tradi...
Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.
Our sanctification is more like a Weight Watchers program than listening to a book on tape.
Our age makes higher demands of solidarity and benevolence on people today than ever before. Never before have people been asked to stretch out so far, and so consistently, so systematically, so as a...
Mark Hamilton is surely right when he points out that we allow athletics to dictate to us what school districts we will live in, what jobs to hold, how to spend our leisure time, whom we marry, what a...
For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view,...
A song gets absorbed into our imagination in a way that mere texts rarely do.
So too we extend mutual greetings because God has welcomed us. As recipients of God’s greeting, we become imitators of God by extending welcome to our neighbors and brothers and sisters.
Learning what seems insignificant can be training us for (and about) what’s essential—that what’s ultimate can unwittingly be at stake in what appears to be innocuous.