Good parents are, by nature or necessity, persistent people. They call and call us to the dinner table until we straggle in. They nag us about our homework until the last worksheet is covered with the appropriate words and numbers.

Most of us have our hands full just taking care of what’s right in front of us. I can’t remember the last time I woke up in the morning, stretched and yawned and wondered what the day might bring.

Loyalty is a quality we value highly. We want our friends to be loyal. We expect our families to be. We hope for some modicum of reliability from bosses or employees. In fact, every meaningful relationship involves loyalty to be viable.

My Audubon friends refer to sparrows as “junk birds.” What this phrase suggests is that sparrows are too common, plentiful, and uninteresting to merit any attention.

A lot of folks are puzzled as to why Jesus asked his disciples not to go into pagan territory or to visit Samaritan towns on their first foray into ministry.

Opinion polls have become the thermometers of our society. With them we take the temperature of the body politic and find out what is ailing us as a community. Like a thermometer, the polls are not a cure of any kind. They simply report a result, and only by taking the right action does this information have any usefulness.

Moses is hands-down the greatest figure in the Hebrew story. But his outsized significance is not as well appreciated in Christian circles as in Jewish ones. Before Moses, God looms in scripture as creator and judge and absolute authority—a distant Almighty figure who might share a few words with one of his creatures but was otherwise unapproachable.

We live in a world in which power is the greatest and most valuable form of currency. People seek it, steal it, fight for it, and kill for it. The most heinous and desperate acts known to history come from the quest for power.

It’s often been noted that the Gospel of John is the gospel where “nothing happens.” Either the narrator is talking his way through mysteries of cosmic proportions, or else Jesus is. But in terms of plot, action, setting, and drama, we don’t have a whole lot to go on much of the time.

John Henry Newman puzzles over the mystery of why Jesus left his friends after reuniting with them in the Resurrection. Things couldn’t be the same between them, he suggests, after the “awful truth” of the divinity of Jesus was revealed to their formerly imperceptive imaginations.