No, this is not about how British and American and Canadian and Irish and Welsh and Scottish English differ.
This is about the difficulty of Christians talking to each other and for people of different faiths to speak to each other.
For instance, “original sin” is a blocker. Sin means for most people something terrible someone has [...]

Pope John XXIII, “good Pope John,” called the second Vatican Council on Oct. 11, 1962. He died a year later in June of 1963. Ancient history now, I suppose, but I remember exactly where I was on both days. I was in French III at Punahou when Maryknoll Brother Venard rang the parish bells to [...]

The book of Numbers is about the numbers of Hebrews that went with Moses across the desert to the promised land. It is a delightful book.
Part of the delight is how Moses handled the organization of this great crowd of ex-slaves. Foundational to the organization was a sense that Moses was a prophet…a leader who, [...]

That is an unattractive stark title about a two edged sword cutting across most camps.
Jason Byassee in 22 September issue of Christian Century reviews Orthodox theologian David Bentley Hart’s Atheist’ Delusions. One of Hart’s arguments is summarized as “paganism, whether ancient or modern, has no grounds for such tongue clucking [about the failures of religious [...]

Edith Wharton looked the very essence of a high society grande dame of 1900. Willa Cather for all her western and midwestern novels dressed fashionably and spent her last years in New York City. Both wrote books that are still companions revealing to me with empathy and deep insight the place of suffering, the cruelty [...]

I was walking in a gallery with a Mandarin speaking student. He looked at the English label identifying a ink painting from ancient China. He got rather sad at the “translation.” “Three pines by a river” was an accurate word for word translation but he said it missed almost everything of the Chinese title. There [...]

I was living in Hawaii 9/11/01. The attack was on a Tuesday. Thursday evening the secular Oratory met as usual. In that small group and in that parish so far from New York City we found that one couple had a son going to work at the World Trade Center at the time of the [...]

It is very hard for modern people to read anything written even a little way back in time. Even the recent past fades fast so we do not understand who the people are in the text or what the event is that the text talks about. Worse, we bring our experiences to the text first [...]

The Kennedy family was and is still part of American history, world history. Ted Kennedy’s brother was the first and only Catholic president. We now have an African American president. We have never had a woman president.We have not had a Jewish president.  I do not think we are post anything yet.
The rise of the [...]

August 11 is the anniversary of the death of John Henry Newman, “Cardinal Newman,” who if he had not lived into his late 70s would have died believing he was a failure. He was a brilliant, holy (a favorite motto, “holiness rather than peace”), church man who spent one half of his life in the [...]