Part of being human is experiencing fear and anxiety. From a very early age, we recognise that some things are a threat to us and even the thought of them can make us tremble. When fears become phobias they can be quite irrational and controlling.
In 1988 two brothers, Thomas and John Knoll, created a computer programme that would be so widely used that thirty-plus years later the noun has become a verb and describes an activity no matter what app is used. Photoshop was originally intended for graphic designers, but it’s now well and truly mainstream.
St Mary’s Cathedral, Sydney, 27 February 2022 Archdiocese of Sydney · Homily for Solemn Pontifical Mass of the 8th Sunday
Born in Darfur, Sudan, around 1869, a girl was kidnapped when aged 7 or 8 by Arab slave traders. She was made to walk barefoot 1,000 km to El-Obeid, forced to convert to Islam, and given the Arab name ‘Bakhita’ meaning lucky. Sold as a slave five times in all, she suffered repeated abuse, including elaborate scarification of her breasts, belly and arms, and being repeated lashed.
While having a bath, baby Tommy refused to part with a piece of parchment with the words ‘Ave Maria’ on it, and instead put it in his mouth and swallowed it.
Like the afflictions of Egypt, Australia over the past two years has known bushfires, floods, a mouse plague and, of course, the COVID-19 pandemic.
Some of you may know T.S. Eliot’s dramatic poem The Journey of the Magi, which he wrote in 1927 over half a bottle of gin.[i]It’s an unusual account of the expedition and its aftermath, told in the voice of one of the kings.
We all love a good ghost story. : In the highest grossing film of 1990, Ghost, starring Patrick Swayze, Demi Moore and Whoopi Goldberg, there was romance, comedy, mystery and cheesiness. But like many such films, it bumped up against the metaphysical problem of bringing spiritual and material beings together.
If ever you get to travel overseas again, and you find yourself in Florence, I suggest you stop at the Dominican Priory of San Marco. There between 1438 and 1452 the great Dominican painter, Blessed Fra Angelico, and team made over fifty frescoes and altarpieces, many of which are still in situ, making it the largest surviving group of related works by any Italian renaissance artist.
‘The great slave revolt’: so the 19th-century German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called the triumph of Christianity in the ancient world and he thought it no good thing.[1] Before Judaeo-Christianity came to dominate the West, he thought, morality was based on a distinction between virtuous individuals
There’s an old Peanuts comic in which Snoopy is doing his happy dance at the turn of the year. : The ever-bleak Lucy shouts out, “How can you be happy when you don’t know what this year has in store for you? Don’t you worry about all the things that can go wrong?”
“You are the rock on which I will build my Church,” Jesus says to Peter this morning (Mt 16:13-19). “You are God’s building… the temple in which the spirit dwells,” St. Paul says to the Corinthians as well (1 Cor 3:9-17). Why, then, do we bother to build churches for God of dead stones when each of us is His living building?
