Reflections on life, meaning and purpose

Russian Invasion in Ukraine: Testimonies From Catholics on the Ground

Courtesy photos (Clockwise from Left) Taken at the end of January during a prayer for the consecration of the village of Shirokine near Mariupol, where fierce fighting took place in 2014-2015, and now completely destroyed and uninhabited. Participants are CRS founder Andriy Olenchyk, General of the Order of the Knights of St. John Paul II Krzysztof […]

Putin goes Soviet: Shades of the 1956 Hungarian uprising…

I’m being asked for a sense of historical perspective to capture the gravity of what Vladimir Putin and his Russian troops are doing right now in the Ukraine. Is this unprecedented? Is there a parallel in recent Russian history? In recent Russian history, no. Modern Russia is post-Cold War Russia, the once-hopeful product of the […]

Are Christians supposed to correct the sins of others?

Back in your school days, did you ever have a teacher whom you really liked teaching you a subject you would not have otherwise cared about? The winsome way your teacher presented the material, and your personal respect and affection for her or him, motivated you to learn. Even back then, you recognized that your […]

UFOs, ETs and other Earths: The birth of a popular (but not scientific) idea…

When Giordano Bruno promoted the idea that the universe was full of other suns, orbited by other earths, the brilliant early-17th-century astronomer Johannes Kepler showed that science proved Bruno wrong, and that there was only one single sun: ours (see Part I in this series). But the idea of stars being suns had appeal, despite […]