While I am Catholic, I have family members who are Jewish, including my 13-year-old nephew Elijah. He recently celebrated becoming a bar mitzvah (meaning “son of commandment”).
A guy I knew had drifted away from his faith. He had gone to Catholic school and had even been an altar boy. But when he became a teenager, religion seemed too limiting: “It cramps my style,” he said.
In grammar school I dreaded composition class. I just couldn’t understand the concept of a thesis statement and outline. My problem was I couldn’t think ahead. How do you know what you’re going to say until you say it, I’d wonder.
Every few years I like to take a long car trip somewhere all by myself. It accomplishes a lot of different things for me. Mostly, it gives me time to think. Traveling the same distance in an airplane does not afford me the same sense of distancing myself from all that I am leaving behind.
In the past few years I've been to more funerals than I care to count as my parents' generation crosses the threshold into all that is unseen.
He was the toughest kid on the block. As 10-year-olds, we didn’t admit it, but we were afraid of him. He’d take the ball we were playing with and throw it on a garage roof where we couldn’t get it.
The "Hands Project," a collection by the late photographer Martin Lueders, contains pictures of hands from all over the world: Hands working, hands praying, hands fighting, hands creating.
On Christmas Day of 1886, while listening to a choir singing the evening vespers service in the Cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris, the teenage Paul Claudel—who would become a prominent French poet, dramatist, and diplomat—experienced a conversion back to the Catholic faith of his childhood.
What would Christmas be without light? We celebrate with lights on our homes, in our windows, on our trees, and each light is a small bit of praise to God. But we don’t have to wait until Christmas.
“This is what I believe to be true. . . You have to do everything you can, you have to work your hardest, and if you do, if you stay positive, you have a shot at a silver lining.”