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One of the very first miniseries to appear on television was Roots back in 1977. Do you remember that? It was based on Alex Hailey’s book by the same name and traced his ancestry from Africa to America by way of the horrible slave trade. (Just as an aside, it was that very same week, back in 1977, that my father finally ditched our black and white T.V. for a colored T.V. Our exuberance was short lived, though, as the ...

Do you remember being in high school and being introduced to English literature, to Shakespeare and others classic writers and poets? Do you remember that? And do you remember being bored out of you mind and saying to yourself, “I don’t know how any of this is supposed to help me in life?” Most of us got through it to get a passing grade. It was more like a hoop we were expected to jump through. In grade 10, we ...

From a liturgical point of view, each year the Christmas Season begins at sunset on Christmas Eve and ends at sundown on the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord which is Sunday, January 10^th this year. (Don’t throw out your Christmas tree before then, or I’ll haunt you worse than the ghost of Jacob Marley haunted his old business partner, Scrooge!). Getting back to liturgy, we could subdivide the Christmas Season into two seasons.

The first division is Christmas, the ...

By next Sunday you will have figured out that our scripture readings are not chronological. This gospel passage is about Mary and Joseph presenting the baby Jesus in the Temple 40 days after his birth. Next Sunday, we are back to the Wise Men who saw the star above Bethlehem and are trying to find the new-born King. These wisemen are exactly that, wise men, and nowhere in Scripture are they called kings even though we still like to sing ...

If you were to ask people in the time of Jesus, people who lived in the Mediterranean world, the known world at the time, the Roman Empire, “Who is the Son of God, the redeemer, the saviour of the world?” Everyone would immediately answer “Caesar Augustus” and not “Jesus” as we would answer now. The emperor, in Jesus’ time, was seen as divine or at least as a demi-god, and if you were a good, law-abiding citizen of the Roman ...

When Fr. Richard Rohr, the great Franciscan I love to quote, was newly ordained, he concocted a private agreement between himself and God; they were going to be a team. It was going to be a 50-50 arrangement. God would do 50% of the work in bringing salvation to the world, and Richard would make sure, through hard work and dedication, that he did his 50% as well. A few years into ordained ministry, Richard, unilaterally modified the percentages to ...

Every Advent we are presented with one of the most perplexing figures in the entire Bible—John the Baptist. He is totally unorthodox. Orthodoxy in general, similar to Church orthodoxy, conjures up words like devout, structured, true blue, predictable, or traditional. An unorthodox person, however, would be described as unconventional, radical, off-centered, avant-garde or original. John the Baptist is definitely unorthodox even though he was born into an orthodox world.  John the Baptist’s father was Zechariah, a well-respected priest. Following orthodox ...