[This article is a sequel to the 9/19/21 email newsletter, "See the Unconquered Fortress of a Mighty Archangel".] Why does the Church venerate an invisible warrior? Because spiritual warfare is the lot of Christians on this earth. Pure and simple. The great Archangel, St. Michael, is known as the Prince of the Heavenly Host [...]
Italian folk songs are often performed using an artistic technique the Italians have perfected. They call it “Bel Canto”, a name that literally means beautiful song or music. The Harvard Dictionary of Music describes the vocal technique as placing “emphasis on beauty of sound and brilliance of performance rather than dramatic expression or romantic [...]
My excellent Latin teacher in college caught me by surprise one day. I thought I’d impress him with my deep culture by telling him how much I liked listening to the Ave Maria in Latin. He responded, “Oh really? Which one?” (There I was – busted – I didn’t know there was more than [...]
One day in a big city, the managers of a supermarket looked at their profit-loss sheets and discovered that they were losing business to their local competitors. They knew they had to figure out some way to generate more interest in the store and increase sales. They settled on the idea of holding a [...]
Have you ever found yourself so transfixed by the beauty of something that you become totally absorbed in it, or found yourself listening to a single piece of music over and over because it speaks so deeply to your heart and soul? That is what happens to me each time I listen to the [...]
Although the small rural town of West Nickel Mines in Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, might not be familiar to most, the tragic shooting of Amish schoolchildren that took place there in 2006 probably is. It is notably one of the saddest incidents in the whole history of school shootings in this country, but it is [...]
In 1910, a newspaper column carried the following story: Jimmy, age 10, was a devoted brother to his sister, age 6. He nearly panicked when his sister fell off her bicycle and cut a large artery in her leg. The bleeding was profuse, and by the time a doctor arrived at the scene, the [...]
A few years ago I met a woman named Carolyn who, with her husband, had joined their church’s prison ministry team and were volunteering at a local prison. We were attending the same seminar where, in small group sharing, she told a riveting story. I honestly don’t recall any other details of the seminar [...]
Can a secular dance routine be a sacred window? It’s a fair question, and if I were a lawyer (or a Jesuit) I’d answer with a resounding, “It depends.” The key notion in discerning transcendent values in our world is not so much whether something is religious or secular – although the former has [...]
[This article follows the article of August 8, 2021, “Were These Brothers the Greatest Tap Dancers of All Time?” See also the email newsletter version.] “I think it's pretty safe to assume the Nicholas Brothers were superhuman,” was what one commentator had to say to the Nicholas Brothers’ performance in the 1943 film, Stormy [...]