The season of Advent, and Gaudete Sunday in particular, invites us to rejoice. In Year C, our readings on Gaudete Sunday include a passage from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Philippians in which he exhorts his readers, “Rejoice in the Lord always. I shall say it again, Rejoice! . . Read more…
According to J.R.R. Tolkien, author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, there are two kinds of hope. These two kinds of hope are expressed by two different words in an Elvish language Tolkien invented. The words are amdir and estel. Both words can be translated by the Read more…
Spe Salvi (“saved in hope”) is the title of a marvelous encyclical letter written by Pope Benedict XVI in 2007. The Pope begins his encyclical with these words, but he puts them in quotation marks, because Spe Salvi, before being a title of a papal encyclical, was part of a phrase Read more…
There are great joys that people in health care get to experience. Patients get well, receive favorable diagnoses, overcome difficult bouts of illness, and emerge from sickness with deepened gratitude and fresh perspective. Those who care for those patients feel that joy too, along with the satisfaction of having helped Read more…
“Hope” is a word that can mean different things. It can mean looking forward to something good that might happen in the future. One might hope for good weather on the day of an upcoming picnic. It can mean thinking that something good is likely to happen. One might be Read more…
For he assumed at his first coming the lowliness of human flesh, and so fulfilled the design you formed long ago, and opened the way to eternal salvation, that, when he comes again in glory and majesty and all is at last made manifest, we who watch for that day Read more…