I am grateful to him who has strengthened me, Christ Jesus our Lord, because he considered me trustworthy in appointing me to the ministry. Once I was a blasphemer and a persecutor of the Church, an arrogant man. But I have I have been treated mercifully because I acted out of ignorance in my unbelief. […]
The Epistle of Saint Jude is the final letter in the New Testament before the Apocalypse and one of the shortest books in the Bible. Only once does a selection from Jude appear in the lectionary, on the eight Saturday of Ordinary Time in Year II but the brevity and obscurity of the letter is […]
The disciple Ananias hurried along the Via Recta through Damascus to the house of a man named Judas, a leading synagogue member. The door opened and the occupant admitted Ananias and then led him through a hallway to a room at the back of the house where he found a young man rapt in prayer. […]
When Saint Paul met Jesus Christ on the road to Damascus he was about thirty years old. Paul was the son, as he testified in his own letters, of a Pharisee, who also was the son of a Pharisee. Circumcised eight days after his birth according to the Law of Moses, Paul came from a […]
Jesus Christ fulfilled the prophecies and the promises of what God had revealed to his chosen people, the Jews, long ago in the First Testament. This is why there remains such a close connection between Judaism and Catholicism, two religions rooted in biblical revelation and faith in one eternal and saving God who in ways […]
Last summer I went on a field trip. I attended a three-day seminar on Christian-Jewish relations. This happened at the Sacred Heart University in Bridgeport, Connecticut. I arrived on Monday, checked into my dormitory on campus, and we all enjoyed kosher cuisine with other divinity and rabbinical students as we kibitzed about what Jews and […]
Saint Paul on God and love is simple for to the saint these are one and the same. That is his statement to the Christians at Rome and he declares this squarely in the middle of his Epistle to the Romans, his 5,000-word tour de force on love, God, sin, death, resurrection, and the salvation […]
Saint Paul wrote that he was “all things to all people.” Paul was a Jew, a Roman citizen, a Pharisee, an apostle, a preacher, a teacher, a tentmaker, and an evangelizer. And Paul was a writer. Thirteen of the twenty-seven books of the New Testament are attributed to him, making him a prolific composer. He […]
PRAY DAILY. I had only been in town a couple of days when I started noticing these bumper stickers. I saw them on cars, trucks, and vans around the city, and many of the same cars bore another sticker that read, TRUST JESUS. I thought, “Could there be a correlation?” Pray daily. Trust Jesus. If […]
In the 1980 film Oh, God: Book II 11-year-old Tracy Richards believes that God is talking to her. In fact, God (played by George Burns) wants Tracy to tell everybody she knows that he is real. So she does. She drafts a slogan and message, just two words, is conclusive and clear: THINK GOD. She […]
