Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this weekend is a marvel. It's from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and it's a theological gem, but it's also something of a literary masterpiece because Mark manages to sandwich one very dramatic [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'm always delighted when the Church gives us the opportunity to reflect on the book of Job. The book of Job is one of the profoundest, most difficult, challenging books in the entire Bible. I might encourage you to read [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, with this Sunday, we return to Ordinary Time. And I want to return to my consideration especially of the first readings from the Old Testament. And so it brings us today to the book of the prophet Ezekiel, which is one of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come today to this wonderful feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. But the full title of this feast is the Solemnity of the Body and the Blood of Christ. I wonder at times if we put a hyper-stress on the Body [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come to Trinity Sunday. It's been called the preacher's nightmare. I've never agreed with that. I think Trinity Sunday is wonderful and a wonderful opportunity for preaching. Look, the Trinity is easy. It's one God. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to the marvelous Feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, who is the lifeblood of the Church. He’s the soul of the Mystical Body of Christ. I submit to you that the Holy Spirit is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the very end of the Easter season: the seventh Sunday of Easter. Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. I mentioned how, in the first weeks of Easter, we sort of focus on the radicality of the Resurrection, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the sixth Sunday of Easter, and boy, do we have magnificent readings for today. I'm going to focus on the first reading and the Gospel. First reading from that First Letter of John. Might I recommend, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the fifth Sunday of Easter. So we're entering the sort of end of the Easter season, these Sundays five, six, and seven. And if the first Sundays of Easter gave us a chance to meditate upon the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this fourth Sunday of Easter, our first reading is from one of the magnificent early kerygmatic sermons of St. Peter. The "kerygma" means the basic proclamation. So here's Peter, in the earliest days, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this third Sunday of Easter, I'm going to harp on something. I'm going to harp on it because: the Bible harps on it a lot, and because our culture, I think, often misses it. What I'm going to harp on is the very [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on the second Sunday of Easter, Mercy Sunday, we read from the magnificent twentieth chapter of John's Gospel. St. John, of course, is a theological and spiritual genius, but also a literary genius. And all his powers are [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to Palm Sunday and therefore to the beginning of the holiest week of the year. It's the Church's custom, as you know, on Palm Sunday, to read the entire Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this fifth Sunday of Lent is taken from the thirty-first chapter of the book of the prophet Jeremiah. And there's a passage I want to draw your attention to at the very beginning here, which is super [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this fourth Sunday of Lent contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible. And I'll get there. But first, I want to provide a little context. Our reading is taken from that marvelous third [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the third Sunday of Lent. We continue this journey through the holy season of Lent. I've often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military, or it's like two-a-day workouts before the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this second Sunday of Lent, the Church gives us the awful reading from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis about the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. In Hebrew called the "akeda". It's at the very [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, one of the most important periods of the liturgical year. During Lent, the Church asks us to do three things. It's really activity-oriented. We're asked to pray, to fast, and to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this weekend is that marvelous story from the Gospel of Mark, of Jesus healing a man with leprosy. But to get the visceral power of this story, we have to follow the Church's recommendation and read this [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I want to focus this weekend on our second reading, which is taken from St. Paul's magnificent First Letter to the Corinthians. By the way, if you're starting with St. Paul, it's not a bad place to start. You'll find it [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is from the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of Pentateuch, the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy from "deuteros nomos," meaning "second law". Deuteronomy really is just a series [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the marvelous book of the prophet Jonah. I am always delighted when I have the opportunity to preach on Jonah. One of the shortest books in the Bible. It's maybe three pages in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've moved now through the Advent and Christmas season and with the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. And what I want to do is pick up my sermonizing on the Old Testament text. And we have a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to this great Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jesus baptized by John. Here's the first thing to realize. The Gospel writers compel us as it were, to pass through John to get to Jesus. What I mean is, all [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, the readings for this fourth Sunday of Advent are very dramatic. And they place us right in the heart of a central mystery in the Bible, which is the mystery of God's providence, that God cares for his world, but often [...]

When, let's say, one corporation or a conglomeration of corporations monopolizes an aspect of the economy, it's bad. They can set prices at their whim. They eliminate competition. They exclude people from free participation in the market. They drive [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the third Sunday of Advent is traditionally called Gaudete Sunday. Now, "Gaudete" is a Latin imperative. It's a command. So the Church is telling us to be happy. And it gives us in our first reading, which is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on this second Sunday of Advent the Church gives us really marvelous readings. And the second reading from Second Peter is wonderful indeed, but I'm going to focus on the first reading and the Gospel. The first reading of [...]

Peace be with you, and happy new year. As we come to this first Sunday of Advent, we come to the beginning of a new liturgical year. Advent, like Lent, is properly a penitential season. We don't often make that connection. We see it clearly in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've come to the end of the liturgical year, which means the feast of Christ the King. We always end the year with this reflection on the kingship, the lordship of Jesus. It's interesting how this feast was instituted at [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the marvelous book of Wisdom. The problem is, it might easily slip past our minds, but gosh, it shouldn't, because it articulates what is arguably the principle of biblical [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, this year, November the 1st, All Saints Day, falls on Sunday, so it gives us the opportunity to reflect on this wonderful feast day, and more particularly, on what it means to be a saint. One of the advantages of All [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading contains a wonderful little passage on the moral law that God gave to Israel. If you look through the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, you'll find that Israel is this people structured [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from that wonderful middle section of the prophet Isaiah. I think I told you before, Isaiah is divided by the scholars into three sections: 1 through 39, they call it Proto or [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, what is it about mountains that's just so compelling to us? Now, maybe it's because I'm from Chicago, where everything is flat, but whenever I've seen mountains, I'm just drawn to them. I remember the very first time I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah's probably the prophet we read from the most in the Old Testament throughout the liturgical year. So, again, when you have a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is taken from the fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah. Can I recommend something? Someone teased me, by the way, on the comments because I'm so used to preaching in churches. I say, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the marvelous book of Sirach. Maybe some older Catholics would remember it as the book of Ecclesiasticus, it was so listed in some earlier translations of the Bible. It was [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, the Gospel for today is a very important theme, the theme of, to give it its traditional name, fraternal correction. So the act and the art of constructive criticism of our brothers and sisters. Now, here's the problem [...]

Peace be with you. Friends when I was a doctoral student in Paris, I had the great opportunity to go to some of the principal museums at off times, when the tourists weren't there, when it wasn't busy. I'd go to the Louvre. I'd go to the Picasso [...]