Possession is less demanding than belonging, but it raises anxiety nonetheless to an aging person.

You need more than superpowers to flourish in your family and in life.

Beauty, at least the kind of beauty the impressionists captured, can for now be only momentary.

The more of Christ we have in the world, the more peace and human flourishing we will have.

To offer a penetrating and nuanced vision of grace, like Victor Hugo does in Les Misérables, takes an attentive, serene, generous, creative, and skillful pen.

The Four Seasons are portraits carefully crafted by each season’s elements, and questions our notions of the human face and the sentiments it evokes.

We are not neutral to the outcome of our spiritual journeys. As objective as we try to be, we want to arrive at some outcome, be it belief or disbelief.

Drama–at the theater but also in movies, books, TV–is a modern religious mechanism.

Do we want to be healed, say, of our greed or bad moods? I’m not quite sure. Being healed includes changes and sacrifices.

We feel pressured to live and work as a salvation project where I’m the hero of my own story.

It is easy to deconstruct other points of view but what about your own views?

We are hungry for it, but we fear it so much. Bend space and transcend time, no worries, but don’t ascribe it real meaning.

Now a refugee in Italy, Sayid is running away from his past. He fled his Middle-Eastern home when charged with blasphemy after he confronted an Iman who often abused sexually a boy.

God is not an idea. Or concept. Or system of doctrines. Or force.

I liked the Psalm’s image of the tree because it measures our prosperity not in the base of how much we receive but in how much we give.

I’ve found that biographies are a great way to take our minds to other periods, “live” someone’s life, learn some of their lessons, and reassess our own lives.

Art can help us unwrap the riches of Scripture. Our world was created by the greatest of Artists, after all.

What about the gospels not included in the Bible? Why were they not chosen? What do they say? 

When we are caught with the silverware, God offers also the candlesticks.

I don’t know where Fitzgerald got his inspiration for Benjamin Button, but it got me thinking about another baby who was born old.

The extension of the plot beyond the ecstatic falling in love of romantic comedies surprised me.

If you look at it realistically, Jesus was a very unattractive messiah to believe in. He was a peasant who lived in an obscure corner of the Roman Empire.

Jesus understood that when religion springs out of fear it becomes really a religion of power.

Gaga’s video is a lucid cultural depiction of sin. She  knows who the right guy is, and yet cannot leave the wrong one.

In our context in Rome, Italy, adult baptism has a counter-cultural ring. Most people here are baptized when they are infants.