Last month my twenty-year-old niece passed away suddenly. I spent ten days with my sister and her family trying to help them through what will likely be the hardest thing they ever have to endure. Perhaps the greatest fear of any parent is that something will happen to their children. Those of us who are parents know our own vulnerability, and we know the suffering that such a loss would cause. My sister and her family are trying to find a way to a new normal, but it is a …

The other night I attended a documentary on Climate Refugees. It was an assemblage of apocalyptic predictions about the mass migrations that could be triggered if warming continues unabated and the world warms 3 or 4 degrees Celsius. Things, the film suggest, are pretty much going to suck, I mean really suck. The goal of the filmmaker, I suppose, was to scare the crap out of us in the hope that this might motivate us to change. This approach bugs me.

In his book Tattoos on the Heart, Jesuit priest Greg Boyle writes about his work with gang members in Los Angeles. Tattoos is a beautiful book, full of stories both tragic and redemptive about his and other’s efforts to serve a population truly on the margins of American life. I am reading the book this semester with a group of Freshmen to whom I have been assigned as academic advisor. Yesterday, we discussed compassion, which Boyle believes, is at the heart of the Christian life. We have to be …

Ignatian spirituality, at least in its current expression, is gifted with many slogans and buzz words. Ignatian practitioners seek “the magis” and labor to “find God in all things.” One such slogan, which is slightly less known, urges us to “set the world on fire.” This is a very interesting image.
After researching this a bit, I discovered that St. Ignatius himself used to send people forth on mission with the injunction “ite, omnia incendite et inflammate” – “Go, set the whole world on fire and in flame.” He did this …