References in the popular culture to letters written but never sent appear in literature, film and even songs. Nights in white satin, never seeming to end; Letters I’ve written, never meaning to send. – Justin Hayward, The Moody Blues 1967 Abraham Lincoln, Harry Truman, even John Kennedy, were all writers …

What are we saying this year? Season’s greetings? Holiday greetings? Merry Christmas? Anecdotal evidence would seem to indicate that how we greet others at Christmas time has more to do with fear than with conviction. We fear that we will offend someone or instigate an unpleasant confrontation. So we default …

Labor Day has just passed and as the nation celebrated the end of summer and the joys and glory of working, a cherished memory came. Dad went to a car dealership in 1959 and came home with a 1957 red Lincoln Premier two-door coupe. It displayed all of the excesses …

We can learn as our children grow. Solomon asked God for wisdom and God should have told him to listen to his children. I learned the concept of “inside voice and outside voice” when my oldest child started grade school. She explained to me one day when her brother and …

Hope has long gathered dust in my closet of virtues. Always quick to correct the grammatical misuse of the adverb, “hopefully,” I was just as quick to label “whimp” when hope was used in any reference. Faith – that takes courage; love – that takes strength. But hope? In mid-June, …

The young news clerk at the newspaper I edited in North Carolina had a healthy, if peculiar curiosity about Catholics and our beliefs. Did we really pray to statues? Did we pray in a language (Latin) also used by Satan? Did we really drink blood at Mass? Did all Catholics …

Simon Sinek, a current bright star on the leadership and management scene, has some interesting thoughts on social media. He thinks there’s more wrong with it than right, at the very time the entire world seems to have decided otherwise. Sinek, who is just a few months older than my …

The Catholic Church seems to be engaged in a slugfest. I know a scant bit about boxing because my Dad enjoyed the sport, something he learned in the Army. He felt the manly art of self-defense was something I needed to learn because I was hopelessly not fleet of foot. …

Two of my grandchildren saw war – real war — for the first time in August. They saw the picture of five-year-old Omran Daqneesh, sitting dazed and bloody in the back of an ambulance in Aleppo, Syria. It was published on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. His …

Members of the archdiocesan central office staff recently attended a workshop that featured an extensive session on prayer. I’ll never pretend to be a theologian  but I have navigated tough situations and times over many years on instinct. That alone tells me that the Jesus’ teaching in Luke 11 should …