God is always present in love and in suffering.
Chloe kept drawing and hiding and peeking out to look at my tattoos again. Did those hurt? she asked, which was right around the time I noticed the shiny thin lines on her arms. I thought to myself.
But we’ve lost the plot if we use religion as the place where we escape from difficult realities instead of as the place where those difficult realities are given meaning.
Because, after all, it was Jesus who had all the powers of the universe at his disposal but did not consider his equality with God something to be exploited. Instead, he came to us in the most vulnera...
Because sometimes the most holy thing we can say is: No. Not on my watch.
As the social philosopher and mystic Simone Weil said, Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.
And anyway, it has been my experience that what makes us the saints of God is not our ability to be saintly but rather God’s ability to work through sinners.
This desire to learn what the faith is from those who have lived it in the face of being told they are not welcome or worthy is far more than inclusion. Actually, inclusion isn’t the right word at all...
Getting sober never felt like I had pulled myself up by my own spiritual bootstraps. It felt instead like I was on one path toward self-destruction and God pulled me off of it by the scruff of my coll...
And to say Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy, Lord have mercy is to lay our hope in the redeeming work of the God of Easter as though our lives depended on it. Because they do. It means that we are...
And then I remember: it doesn’t matter. The fact that I sometimes don’t get it is my shit, and I should not confuse my shit with my job. My job is to just love my parishioners. And I do. Not perfectly...
And every single time I die to something—my notions of my own specialness, my plans and desires for something to be a very particular way—every single time I fight it and yet every single time I disco...
A sexual ethic that includes concern means seeing someone as a whole person and not just a willing body.
What they don’t tell you when you get sober is that if you manage to stay that way, you will bury your friends.
Purity most often leads to pride or to despair, not to holiness. Because holiness is about union , and purity is about separation .
I keep making mistakes, even the same ones over and over. I repeatedly attempt (and fail) to keep God and my fellow humans at arm’s length. I say no when I should say yes. I say yes when I should say...