Spirituality

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

The history buff will likely encounter videos of World War II while perusing streaming menus and on Facebook pages. It never fails to strike us how such a great tragedy as that war and the resulting death of so many people occurred essentially due to the ambitions of a very few, as has happened for millennia. Hitler and Mussolini and essentially primarily a military junta in Japan during WWII, the Caesars, Alexander, Napoleon, Genghis Khan, and so many others, great and small. Megalomania is an awful, and awfully destructive, thing.

However, ambition is bad—and even evil—if Read More

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

People will often complain that it’s hard to be a good person in this day and age.  But is it, really?

Christians remember often those of early Christianity who had to worry about being hunted down and martyred in the Roman and other arenas … and, yet, many suffered even that rather than be unfaithful. Even today thousands of Christians are martyred annually around the world, but they remain faithful even while under threat of violent death.

A favorite in the Old Testament about faithfulness despite mortal danger is the account of Eleazar in 2 Maccabees 6 (in the “apocrypha” if Read More

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

Probably every budding young scientist has been fascinated in putting drops of food coloring in a glass of water and watching it spread throughout—diffusing until evenly distributed throughout the whole volume. Perhaps thus began in many the beginnings of scientific curiosity.

Now, early in the Bible’s Old Testament one finds quite a bit concerning cleanliness and uncleanliness of food, objects, etc., especially in the book of Leviticus which outlines much of the early Jewish moral and ritual laws. Certain foods were deemed unclean to eat, pork perhaps the best known Read More

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

I’m bad. You’re bad. We’re all bad!

Well, at least an alien from outer space might surmise such from all of the negative media—main and social—if monitoring our daily communications. Lots of stone throwing these days, even from people who live in glass houses—which is most of us to some degree, at least. Yet it’s not so much the level of imperfection that we’re currently in that matters so much as the sincere striving for improvement; after all, no race is begun at the finish line.

But what IS “improvement”? If we are to “improve”, we have to have some goal at which to aim.

Being the Read More

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

Priests and ministers and charities are often called upon to try to alleviate the sufferings of others, very often those in unforeseeable situations which lead to much financial distress. They try to give what they can and what their churches may be able to provide, as well as to direct them to sources of possible governmental assistance. But, alas, often it only scratches the surface of what is needed. We might cite a recent situation in which a young parent was fighting cancer with daily treatments and thus could not work … the spouse doing the best she could balancing the care Read More

By Fr. Glenn Jones:

Well, we hope you have a joy-filled, fun and safe Independence Day on this long weekend for many. A lot of people protesting this year because of a Supreme Court ruling not going the way they preferred, but one of the biggest things we celebrate on this annual holiday is our freedom TO protest; many people around the world do not have that freedom, and would be brutally crushed and persecuted should they dare even speak against the government. Remember Tiananmen Square? And neither can many peoples travel either abroad or within their own nations without official permission, Read More