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Don’t Kill Santa Claus Too Soon
In his bestselling book, “The Closing of the American Mind,” Allan Bloom describes a contemporary professor who sees his task as that of setting people free by breaking taboos: “He
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God Overcomes Scrambled Eggs
Some years ago, a young man came to me for confession. It was a difficult confession for him. He had been having an affair with a girl and she had
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God Speaks Through Children
We live by images, and we never have enough of them. Artists don’t sleep because there is always that restlessness to capture an image, to create a symbol. The rest
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Single Life Offers Opportunities
“The refusal of woman is fault in my chastity…and all my compensations are a desperate and useless expedient to cover this irreparable loss which I have not fully accepted. “I
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Make Space For Christ In Life
At the beginning of this Advent, someone handed me a batch of stickers which read: Keep Christ in Christmas. “Do something with these,” he lamented, “put them on your car,
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A Recipe For Life’s Blender
Cross-fertilization always makes for interesting combinations, novel sparks. Recently, I ran a number of very different kinds of writers, C.S. Lewis, John Updike, G.K. Chesterton, Iris Murdoch, William Auden, Keith
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Taking The Sting Out Of Life
“Mother tended to become riveted on what she felt as a personal slight or insult but she would not discuss it with you…She silently brooded over the incident and carried
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Pagan Saints For Modern Sinners
The idea of invoking the saints for help has fallen on hard times. Most Christians have no patience whatsoever with this concept. Generally, saints within the church are either benignly
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God Beats Small-Time Blues
Sigmund Freud once stated that neurosis is the disease of the normal person and that everyone is neurotic to some degree. This is true if one defines neurosis as he
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Make Your Welcome Hearty
In October of 1933, Peter Maurin wrote the following poem and commentary in The Catholic Worker: People who are in need and are not afraid to beg give