A number of springs ago, I came to the Easter Vigil Mass with the joyous anticipation of Easter muted a bit.

The classical atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, philosophers such as Frederick Nietzsche and Ludwig Feuerbach, taught that all religious experience is simply human projection.

A friendly gesture by a couple of neighbors of bringing over a few bags of slightly fading vegetables, and then my swapping some back, has become a full-fledged food mini-ministry.

Not long ago, I was sorting through some of my dad’s old papers and I came across a candy wrapper and a Father’s Day card tucked into an envelope that bore a March 2001 postmark from Rome.

If you’re like me, you were impressed by the athletes of the Milan-Cortina Olympics. In them we witnessed both the rewards of hard work and the traumatizing effects of extreme expectation.

During Catholic Schools Week, my three youngest children, middle school students at St. Francis de Sales School in Spooner, were given a talk on vocations by Fr. Papi Yeruva Reddy.

Recently, my neighbor died. When I was at the funeral home and when I arrived at work late after his funeral, I was asked how I knew the gentleman who passed away. It was almost sheepishly, or with a note of apology, that I said he was a neighbor.