Homilies

At the end of the Great Depression, social scientists enlisted a group of 268 sophomore students at Harvard, including the young John F. Kennedy, to be part of a longitudinal study aimed at better understanding happiness. The researchers traced the lives of the participants…

The British rock band Oasis recently sent the music world into a spin by announcing their reunion after a 15-year hiatus and proposing a 2025 world tour. One the most successful British bands of all time, Oasis dominated the 1990s pop scene, selling 70 million albums worldwide, until bandmates and blood brothers…

SEÑOR DE LA ASCENSIÓN CONCEPCIÓN PARISH, LA PRIMAVERA, CUMBAYÁ, QUITO “Stretch out your hand.” Simple words spoken to a man suffering from a withered hand—Luke tells us (Lk 6:6-11) it was his right one—which in the ancient world would have limited his ability to shake hands, do many jobs, earn a livelihood. It may well […]

The term ‘lawfare’ first came to prominence in 2001, when an American Air Force Colonel (now Major General and Professor of Law), Charles J. Dunlap Jnr, delivered a speech at Harvard University. He challenged what he saw as the weaponising of the legal system against the defence forces…

“Don’t shoot the messenger” is a popular saying, said to go all the way back to 441 BC when the great Sophocles wrote his tragedy Antigone. In one scene, a guard…

A distraught mother wails inconsolably as the corpse of her son is carried out for burial (Lk 7:11-17). We don’t know the cause of death, age of the deceased, or the family circumstances, but Luke the Beloved Physician is meticulous, as a health professional should be, in his observations and charting…

Stanislav Petrov: he’s been called “the man who saved the world”—a rather provocative title, since we know that Man and His Name wasn’t Stan…

The motto of the Olympics is ‘Citius, Altius, Fortius’, Latin for ‘Faster, Higher, Stronger’. It was proposed in 1894 by Pierre de Coubertin, the French educationalist, historian, and founder of the modern Olympic movement…

Parapraxis, according to Sigmund Freud, is an error of speech due to an unconscious wish or internal train of thought.[1] More than moments of humour and humiliation, these ‘Freudian slips’ (as they came to be called) are supposedly windows into our true thoughts and feelings…

The British evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins has an illustrious CV. For 13 years he held the University of Oxford’s Chair in the Public Understanding of Science and in 2001 was made a fellow of the prestigious Royal Society. He’s authored nineteen books and countless articles and received numerous honours. His most important work has been on the role of genes and DNA in evolution, culminating in his…