Category: Columns

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Jackson Fonder

One at a time

Fonder Ponders column by Jackson Fonder

Sometimes I feel like I am too small and the problems around the world are so big. I watch the news or read an article and get exhausted from the onslaught of depressing, discouraging, and sometimes crazy news stories. The presidential election. Immigration. Police issues. Racial disparity. The list goes on.

It’s overwhelming. And then I remember how Mother Teresa focused on helping just one person at a time. What a great lesson.

I’ve asked Jerilyn Robinson, our director of family programs, to give an example of how Catholic Charities is doing this with our Behavioral Health in Schools (BHS) program.

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Tony Magliano

We can transform the world

You are the light of the world. Don’t take my word for it, that’s Gospel truth from Jesus himself (Mt 5:14). And it’s a tall order, indeed.

Now on the other hand in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” Now that at first glance makes far more sense. After all, Jesus — God in the flesh — is obviously “the light of the world.”

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

Embryos and the ‘14-day rule’: Mechanism devised to justify experiments on human embryos

Arguments in favor of research on human embryos typically play off our unfamiliarity with the way that we ourselves once appeared and existed as embryos.

Humans in their tiniest stages are indeed unfamiliar to us, and they hardly look anything like “one of us.” Yet the undeniable conclusion, that every one of us was once an embryo, remains an indisputable scientific dogma, causing a “fingernails on the chalkboard” phenomenon for researchers every time they choose to experiment on embryos or destroy them for research.

To enable scientists to get beyond the knowledge that they’re experimenting on or destroying fellow humans, clever stratagems and justifications have had to be devised.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Bill Nye is not the philosophy guy

Reliable sources have informed me that for the millennial generation, Bill Nye is a figure of great importance, due to his widely-watched program from the 1990s called Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Evidently, he taught a large swath of American youth the fundamentals of experimental science and became for them a sort of paragon of reason. Well, I’ll take their word for it.

But judging from a recent video in which Bill Nye discussed the relation between science and philosophy, I can only tell you that he sure is not the “philosophy guy.”

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William McKenna

Is gratitude an antidote to depression?

Guest Column

Question: How does gratitude help me day to day? I have heard a lot about how practicing gratitude helps with depression but I don’t know how to practice it in an effective way.

Response: by William McKenna, M.S. Clinical Psychology Extern at Catholic Charities

Great question! Gratitude is a powerful antidote to depressive thoughts and feelings for a number of reasons, many of which I am sure you know.

Possessing only an abstract understanding of gratitude makes putting it into practice difficult.

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Tony Magliano

How marvelous is the miracle of life

I experienced a miracle! A few days ago, I held in my arms my first grandbaby — newly born Faith Annmarie.

Thank God she’s healthy and perfectly formed. And as I was looking at her, I reflected how wonderfully she is made: arms, hands, fingers, legs, feet, toes, eyes, mouth, nose, ears, as well as what I couldn’t see but was just as real — hundreds of different tissues, dozens of organs including the remarkable brain, and trillions of cells.

And then I reflected on her divinely infused eternal soul.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Daniel Berrigan and nonviolence

Fr. Daniel Berrigan, SJ, passed away April 30 at the age of 94. Though many younger Catholics might not remember him, Father Berrigan was one of the most provocative and controversial religious figures of his time.

Standing in the tradition of principled non-violence proposed by Mahatma Gandhi, Thomas Merton, Dorothy Day, and others, Berrigan led the charge against America’s involvement in the Vietnam conflict and its on-going participation in the Cold War and the nuclear arms race.

He was most famous, of course, for his leadership of the “Catonsville Nine,” a group of protestors who, in the spring of 1968, broke into a building and burned draft records with homemade napalm. To say that he was, during that tumultuous time in American history, a polarizing figure would be an understatement.

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