By now the entire country has seen a video of a supposedly racist confrontation, in front of the Lincoln Memorial, between a grinning young high school student and a Native American elder, chanting and beating a drum.
Nemo dat quod non habet. This Latin phrase has shown up several times in the last six months. The first time occurred in a talk at our annual seminary retreat in August. I then saw it in Timothy Cardinal Dolan’s book “Priests of the Third Millennium” this fall.
What’s still unfinished in your life? Well, there’s always a lot that’s unfinished in everyone’s life. Nothing is ever really finished. Our lives, it seems, are simply interrupted by our dying. Most of us don’t complete our lives, we just run out of time.
In November, a Chinese scientist named He Jankui (known to his associates as “JK”) claimed he had successfully produced the world’s first gene-edited human babies using “gene surgery.” The twin girls, he said, were born somewhere in China with a modified gene that makes them immune to infection from HIV, the virus that causes AIDS.
There is a common, and I’ll admit somewhat understandable, interpretation of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy that sees the great work as a celebration of the virtues of the Shire, that little town where the Hobbits dwell in quiet domesticity.
Quick reminder for those of us who attend Mass regularly.
Shusaku Endo, the Japanese author of the classic novel, Silence (upon which Martin Scorsese based his movie) was a Catholic who didn’t always find his native land, Japan, sympathetic to his faith.
I do not want to die from some medical condition; I want to die from death!
Recently, I attended a symposium where the keynote speaker was a man exactly my age.
Sexual Orientation Change Efforts (SOCE) rely on professional therapy and counseling, often in a religious context, to assist those struggling with unwanted homosexual inclinations who would like to diminish their same-sex attractions and grow in their ability to abstain from same-sex behaviors.