“This poor widow . . . . has contributed all she had.” College-student volunteers working in Haiti after the 2010 earthquake were, as you would expect, culture-shocked at the living conditions of most people they encountered in their attempts to help with cleanup. But what stuck Tom, a student from a Catholic university in the Midwest, was not the peoples’ poverty but their generosity.

Like the people in Jesus’ time, we have heard the commandment to love God with all our heart, soul, mind, and strength many times. The question is: “What does that mean exactly?” In the midst of commuting to and from work, working, preparing meals, raking the lawn, putting up storm windows (if anyone does that anymore), what would our lives look like if we were even partially successful at following this commandment? 

The great journalist A. J. Liebling was a boxing fan and once wrote about a boxer who fought under the name of Pete Herman. Liebling had seen one of Herman’s last bouts, when the fighter was nearly blind but not admitting it. Herman fought, Liebling wrote, “by a system of feint and touch.” As long as he was in some kind of physical contact with his opponent, he would get his bearings and could be devastating.

Toward the end of the last century management expert Robert Greenleaf initiated the modern servant leadership movement benefit on reforming the authoritarian business management model. The concept was simple and had actually been outlined by Jesus 2,000 years earlier: “Whoever wishes to be great among you will be your servant.

Recently an Australian mining heiress—one of the world’s wealthiest people—sparked controversy by suggesting that if you’re not a millionaire, it is because you are lazy and resentful. The lifelong billionaire followed that statement several weeks later with the suggestion that Australia was losing its competitive edge because of workers’ demands for a livable minimum wage and safe working conditions.

The letter to the Hebrews celebrates Christ’s liberation of all from death, and we know from the gospels that Christ saw his mission to be one who was “sent . . . to proclaim liberty to captives.” On the small island of Bastoy in Norway you’ll find a village with wooden houses, a school, a library, and a church. The men who live there are building, farming, cooking, doing their laundry. But you’re not in just any Norwegian village. You’re on a prison island.

THOUGH a grandson of the legendary Chicago Tribune publisher Joseph Medill, a member of the famed Medill-Patterson newspaper family, and the founder of the New York Daily News, the nation’s first tabloid newspaper and the most successful paper in U.S. history at the time, Joseph Patterson was nonetheless highly critical of the wealthy and preferred the point of view—and sometimes the company—of common people.

Our passions are the culprit behind wars and conflicts, and the only solution is to cultivate peace.

PAUL-EMILE Léger became archbishop of Montreal in 1950 and a cardinal three years later and was an active participant in the Second Vatican Council, but in 1967 he gave all that up in order to go to Senegal and Dahomey to work with disabled and impoverished children and those suffering from leprosy.

A handsome man in a brown flannel suit entered church one Sunday morning a few minutes after the start of Mass. He walked up the center aisle and positioned himself in the first pew.