Homilies

Why Advent? Lent is sort of obvious: as Jesus makes His way to Jerusalem, to His trial and Cross and tomb, we accompany him with hushed voices, downcast faces, wearing the colour of his bruises.

Today’s Gospel scene (Lk 1:26-38) is probably one of the most memorable in the Bible

One of the best Italian comedies of recent years was Edoardo Falcone’s Se Dio vuole – God Willing (2015).

In The Brothers Karamazov the Russian author Fyodor Dostoyevsky famously wrote that ‘hell is the suffering of being unable to love’. A serious Christian himself, though one who experienced grave doubts

In early 1818, the English romantic poets Percy Shelley and Horace Smith took up a friendly competition to each write a sonnet on the same theme.

Corporal Roger Morgan, of Richmond, Victoria, joined the 1st Australian Field Ambulance in 1915, and arrived on the fields of France a year later.

You are a temple… Treat your body as a temple. It’s a tenet of new age spirituality. Indeed the hippie blogsite Feel Good

Sometimes Jesus seems a bit deaf. When people ask Him about fasting, rituals, family respect, punishing an adulteress, divorce, paying taxes, being born again, and the like

It’s one of the harshest lines in the Gospels, certainly one of the harshest to come from Jesus’ lips, and it’s addressed to the very man Jesus is preparing to lead after He has gone.

Today we celebrate the Spring Ember Day in the Catholic Church. Ember days in the Church roughly correspond to the four seasons, though in general in Australia we only celebrate the Autumn and Spring ones

“Hey you guys: don’t you realise you are God’s temple, with the Spirit of God within you?” so St. Paul says to us today (1 Cor 3:9-17).

Cynthia Voigt is a prolific author of novels for young adults. Homecoming, the first of seven books in her Tillerman series, was nominated for several international prizes and adapted for film.