On December 21, 1968, a spacecraft appropriately named after the pagan god Apollo left the earth on its three-day trip to the moon. Thirty some years ago we had, for the first time, a compelling image of the only home that all we humans can call our own. This image urges us to reflect on the brotherhood, mutual love, and respect that our common dwelling place mandates. The inhospitable blackness of the surrounding void is not an alternative, either literally or figuratively.
For all my newfound piety, I was still fifteen years old, and all too conscious of cool. Just months before, Id left behind several years of juvenile delinquency and accepted Jesus as my personal Lord and Savior. My parents, who were not particularly devout Presbyterians, noticed the change in me and heartily approved. If it took religion to keep me out of juvenile detention, so be it.
Compassion is formed in the real and heartrending experiences of deprivation. Shania Twains adversity formed her compassion and her strength, and it is to her honor and credit that it retains priority in her heart far above all the trappings of her extraordinary success.
She spent her life caring for the sick and dying, yet she could not hide her impatience with the doctors whose efforts only postponed her own death. She was a virgin, yet millions called her Mother. She disdained the limelight, yet people all over the world knew her by a single name. Like all heroes of the Christian faith, Mother Teresa lived a life marked by contradictions, both superficial and profound. The depth of her religious commitment made it impossible for her to fulfill the expectations of a secular society.
On September 11, hijackers didnt count on facing family man and daily Mass-goer Tom Burnett Jr.
Stratford and Leonie Caldecott established the Centre for Faith & Culture some seven years ago. The Centre is now housed in Plater College at Oxford in the U.K. and is having some considerable influence. It all began as a kind of "evangelization of culture," explain the founders, in this interview with Catholic World Report.
At the Catholic University of Lublin, Poland, the personal secretary to Pope John Paul II gave this unprecedented first-person account May 13 of the day the Holy Father was shot.
I once listened to a conversation between Mother Teresa and my mother at a meeting in the Bronx. They were like two neighbors chatting over a backyard fence.
There is nothing more riveting than the sight and sound of powerful truths being spoken quietly. Mother Teresa broke almost all the rules of good speech writing during her National Prayer Breakfast address in 1994, but delivered an enormously powerful and deeply memorable speech.
When a true genius is born, nothing in the family or its circumstances allows us to predict the new arrival.