National Catholic Reporter

He hasn’t been canonized, but I think of Michelangelo as a sort of saint.  William Shakespeare, too.  And Emily Dickinson, Sergei Rachmaninoff, Frank Sinatra, Beethoven, Aretha Franklin and Chaucer. I [...]

When I used to come to the door at my granddaughter Emma’s house, she’d hide, usually behind the legs of her mother or father, peeping out on one side or [...]

Abraham Lincoln and my granddaughter Emma have gotten me curious about Jesus. I mean, about Jesus’s curiosity. It started when I was reading the review of a new biography which [...]

I’m Catholic to the core.  I lector at Mass.  My kids went to twelve years of Catholic school. I know the smell of incense and the flickering of altar candles. [...]

  I found God in the pain of my brother’s suicide. I don’t want to tell this story again — of my brother David, wracked with pain, dragging himself out [...]

The other day, I was at the First Communion of my great niece Maeve, and I was again struck, as I often am, by the holiness of beauty. Maeve is [...]

The video of me playing basketball didn’t exactly go viral, but it did cause a bit of a stir among my Facebook friends.  And, later, it got me wondering about [...]

  I have gotten to a point that I can’t go along any more with Michelangelo’s God on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.  Great art, but, gee, God as [...]

It may seem odd today, but, at one point, a half century ago, the top-selling popular song in America was made up of lyrics from the Bible — specifically, from [...]