The first part of the academic year of many schools in the English-speaking world is called "Michaelmas Term." 

What a frightening prospect is the destiny of the backslider!  Yet even for the worst of us sinners, God offers hope.

I was getting ready for my quadrennial inveighing against the World Cup, remaining as I do immune from the excitement of the nil-nil thriller, as for example the one Netherlands and Costa Rica delivered the other day.

The extended Independence Day weekend occasions some reflections on patriotism.

There are personal memories, such as those kept in diaries and scrapbooks, and sometimes kept only in the heart; and there are collective memories recorded on cenotaphs and invoked on memorial days and shared at family reunions.

When Jesus had given instructions sending two of his disciples into Jerusalem where they would find an upper room in which he would institute the Eucharist, "The disciples went out and came to the city, and found everything just as he had told them" (Mark 14:16).

Are we living in the age of the Laity?

Religion really is a mass problem. "There cannot be a personal Christianity unless there is also a social Christianity."

Most church feasts celebrate events and people.

In the 6th century B.C., God promised, through the prophet Ezekiel, that He would gather his people, cleanse them and impart to them a new spirit: "I am going to take you from among the nations and gather you together from all the foreign countries, and bring you home to your own land.