‘We proclaim and define it to be a dogma revealed by God that the immaculate Mother of God, Mary ever virgin, when the course of her earthly life was finished, was taken up body and soul into the glory of heaven.’
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When I was a child, travelling was an entirely different experience from what it is today. Fewer cars meant more people on trains, buses, and coaches – they were often overcrowded. Even relatively short journeys by today’s standards took ages due to the combination of winding roads (no motorways) or old railway tracks and unreliable rolling stock and coaches. There were…
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World hunger could have been well and truly sorted out, had Jesus repeatedly been pulling the same trick we heard about last Sunday: feeding the crowd by miraculously multiplying the meagre resources at his disposal. Unfortunately, it happened only once, as reported by all four gospels; Matthew and Luke reported another event of this kind, but it might well have…
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“Do you have faith?” Isn’t it a bit dumb to ask such questions at a religious ceremony? Isn’t having faith the main reason for coming to church regularly in an ever more secular country, where religion seems to be an increasingly uncommon lifestyle choice? And yet, let me ask again: “Do you have faith?”
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In 1966, when photographer Nat Finkelstein was photographing the artist Andy Warhol for a proposed book, a crowd gathered, trying to get into the pictures. Warhol supposedly remarked that everyone wants to be famous, to which Finkelstein replied, “Yeah, for about fifteen minutes, Andy.” That’s the anecdotal story (one of few) on how the famous quotation was born: “In the…