This weekend's homily at the Cathedral: "Jesus Christ lays claim to the whole of our lives and calls us to see everything in his light, to view all reality through the lens of the Gospel."

Homily for Xmas Day, on John's eagle eye: "[John] stares into the blinding sun of infinite love and sees that the story of the birth of Jesus is a story rooted in eternity, a story that stretches back before any creature ever was, before Mary or Joseph, before the shepherds or even the angels."

This Sunday's homily at the Cathedral: "Ahaz had a problem and a plan, but it was not God’s plan. Joseph had a problem and a plan, but it was not God’s plan. We have problems and plans, but are they God’s plans?"

Homily for this evening at Corpus Christi on Paul & the POTUS: "Perhaps the best way to prepare ourselves to welcome Christ this Advent it to reflect on how we have been welcomed by Christ and to ask ourselves how we can extend that welcome to others."

Video of Sunday's homily:

"Respectability tells you to get a good night’s sleep; Jesus tells you to stay up late awaiting his arrival." homileticdiakonia.blogspot.com/2025/11/adve...

A homily for Christ the King, on bearing the sign of the cross and being a good thief: "Death seeks to dissolve me but in you all things hold together. And if you remember me, if you hold me in your heart, then I will live eternally in you." homileticdiakonia.blogspot.com/2025/11/chri...

I don't often have occasion to discuss Gospel non-violence, so I'm grateful to the folks at Forging Ploughshares for taking the time to talk with me.

"Even our efforts are given us by God so that we might be caught up in the great work of God, so that God might labor in us & through us— we who on our own are mere unprofitable servants, but who through faith can shine with the fire of the Spirit." homileticdiakonia.blogspot.com/2025/10/27th...

Lazarus & Dives, w/assist from Murdoch: "the parable is not a prediction, but a warning and an invitation— an invitation to imagine... what it might be like to be someone else, to break out of the confines of our ego, to be saved from our separation." homileticdiakonia.blogspot.com/2025/09/26th...

The unique occasion of preaching at the convalidation of the marriage of close friends on the Feast the the Exaltation of the Cross provides me the opportunity to reflect on what the Cross tells us about marriage and what marriage tells us about the Cross.

This weekend's homily (with 10% more math!): "being Jesus’s disciple... is an invitation to live a life that hurls us beyond the limited horizon that the world offers us.... It is an invitation that makes us ask, 'what would happen if we kept going?'”

At the Cathedral we're celebrating our patronal feast this weekend: "We who acclaim the handmaid of Nazareth as Queen of Heaven are just strange enough, just weird enough, to believe in the peace of Christ that passes all human understanding."

This weekend's homily, with JH Newman, Clemens Non Papa, and Bedlam: "He is with us in our chaos and disorder; he is with us in our yearning for God’s fire to set ablaze our hearts and our world. He is daily born into the bedlam of our lives whether we can feel him there or not."

This Sunday's homily: "God calls us to radical hospitality, for in receiving the stranger we receive the God who receives us."

Homily for this evening at Corpus Christi: "Success is not part of the assignment— Jesus is coming whether we succeed or fail— but faithfulness is."

This weekend's homily: "We say we believe that Christ’s body broken and his blood poured out for the life of the world are truly here under sacramental signs; can we not also believe that his kingdom of justice & peace is present even now as we partake of his feast?"

“Remove yourself, remove, I repeat, yourself from yourself; you just get in your own way” (Augustine, Sermon 169.11).

A bit by me on how we don't know anything about what kind of Pope Leo will be, and why that's not really a bad thing.

"Students are badly prepared for the workplace when education in the school is treated as though it itself were an apprenticeship in the workplace." --Alasdair MacIntyre, Ethics in the Conflicts of Modernity, 173.

Sunday's homily at both CMOQ & CC on the Council of Jerusalem and the Spirit as Advocate: "it seems that the Spirit not only can be at work within processes of legalistic bureaucratic compromise, but this is actually the Spirit’s special skill set."

“O what wonderful good news! He who for our sake became like us in order to make us his brothers and sisters, now presents to his true Father his own humanity in order to draw all his kindred up after him.” —Gregory of Nyssa, Oratio 1 in resurrectionem

Today's homily, on love and loneliness, featuring Dorothy Day and Pope Leo: "The Catholic tradition expects the tribe to gather weekly, on the day of Christ’s resurrection, to celebrate the Eucharist... to bear with our unbearable neighbor for at least one hour."

I'm dubious about a lot of the political tea-leaf-reading going on about Pope Leo, but this one strikes me as pretty smart:

If my parish got a new pastor and this was his homily on his first Sunday, I would be happy and hopeful:

Today's homily is on forgiveness in El Paso, couples preparing to marry, and Pope Francis's final words to the world. In other words, it's on resurrection:

I wrote a little thing for the Episcopalians on Pope Francis:

"I can understand people who do not keep Good Friday at all; they are indeed very ungrateful, but I know what they mean; I understand them. But I do not understand at all, I do not at all see what men mean who do profess to keep it, yet do not sorrow, or at least try to sorrow." -John Henry Newman

For Palm Sunday: "Alas for us Christians if we turn our backs on this mystery, preferring the ruler of this world, with his blustering power and his empty show, to the true king who comes in the Lord’s name."

Homily for the Third Scrutiny: "He weeps because he is truly human— like us in all things but sin— and the truly human thing to do in the face of death is to weep together."

For tomorrow's Scrutiny of our catechumens: "we have hope to see as God sees, to see as the saints see: a clarity that pierces through the fog of sin to reveal a world saturated with the colors of grace."

“Strictly speaking time does not exist (except within the limits of the present), yet we have to submit to it…. We are really bound by unreal chains. Time which is unreal casts over all things including ourselves a veil of unreality.” —Simone Weil, Gravity & Grace

Today’s homily on perishing just as they did. “What if the stakes are as high as Jesus said they were?” fatherjoshuawhitfield.com/homily-on-pe...

Sunday homily: "illness and uncertainty and mourning are real and we should not pretend that they are not. But God is more real. The love of Jesus is more real. The power of the Spirit is more real."

“God has given abundantly to all the basic needs of life, not as a private possession, not restricted by law, not divided by boundaries, but as common to all, amply and in rich measure.” —Gregory Nazianzen Oratio 14 Commie.

This weekend's homily: "No drama. No devil with horns.... Just fleeting thoughts like water dripping on a stone, tiny temptations that gradually wear away your soul... And the worst part is, living this diminished life won’t even bother you; it will seem natural and normal."

Marriage now includes joint podcast appearances. Who would have guessed that when we started out in 1988?

Because there's nothing I won't hold forth on, me on Nietzsche: churchlifejournal.nd.edu/articles/wil...

"Do small things as though they were great, because of the majesty of Jesus Christ, who does them in us and lives our life; and great things as though they were small and easy, because of his omnipotence." --Pascal, Pensées §751/919

“As the Son of God suffers the impurity of our life, we should not find it strange that he endures the vanity of our words, until he delivers us, having entered into the liberty of his children, from the Tyranny of sin, and from the servitude of Eloquence.” —J-F Sénault, L’Homme criminel (1644)

Video of this evening's homily at the Cathedral:

"So in the end, it comes down to this: do you believe that Jesus Christ is alive? Do you hear in his blessings and woes not a voice from the distant past that echoes faintly down the ages in the memory of his followers, but the living voice of the one who is calling you from death to life?"

“Belief in the resurrection is a high-stakes game in which the player has bet the bank and, if there is no resurrection, loses.” --Hans Urs von Balthasar, Light of the Word.

"We are all full of ignorance and errors and yet it is the most difficult thing in the world to draw from our mouths this admission which is so accurate and describes our natural condition so well: 'I am mistaken, and I know nothing about it.'" --Arnauld and Nicole, Port Royal Logic

Glad to see Papa Francesco catching up to me and Maureen on this issue:

“How hollow and full of garbage is the heart of man” --Pascal, Pensées §171 (Sellier ed.).

Tomorrow night's homily at Corpus Christi: "'Put out into deep water' and 'Do not be afraid.' These two commands pretty much sum up the Gospel."

Maureen and I finally wrote something together. Naturally it is on the intersection of Aquinas and immigration:

"We see manifestly that they become more knowledgeable from day to day in the Scriptures and in good Theology, but we never see that they become more considerate in their discourse and in their judgments, nor more fervent in their piety, nor that they advance in humility and patience." --St-Cyran

I had a great time at @berrycollege in Rome (Georgia) giving their Lumen Lecture (insert Severance joke). Great students who ask great questions (and received, I hope, adequate answers).