Because it is Beautiful

In my 20s, I briefly served as the junior-most member of a church board. My implicit assignment may have been to bring new energy and a fresh outlook to bear, and while I might have done those things to a passing degree, mostly I learned an awful lot. I loved this church, my home church in Washington, DC; it was an urban congregation located in a stretch of the city blighted by the riots of the late Sixties and left fairly desolate for decades afterwards. Several of our older members would drive a ways in from distant suburbs, but the younger members tended to live within the city limits, and we were all looking to be good neighbors. Continue reading →

Shades of Faith

When my nieces were younger, they were more devout than they are now. They’ve lost a good deal of their religious fervor in recent years. Part of that trend may just be developmental, a process of their moving through the necessary stages of spiritual development and personal maturation, including the highly skeptical one specific to adolescence. But I believe something else is also at play: Confirmation classes.  Those seem to break the spirit of a lot of Catholic kids these days. Continue reading →