Lent – Perpetual Adoration

April 3, 2021

A Plantation Hymn for Catholics

Did you know that there’s an old plantation hymn that Catholics traditionally sing in church on Good Friday? The hymn was composed in the 19th century by African American slaves and was first published in 1899 by William Eleazar Barton in his hymnal, Old Plantation Hymns. Here’s the first verse of the hymn:

March 27, 2021

Categories

The Skilled Assassins Who Murdered Jesus

During the mid-1980s, there was a weekly television series called The Equalizer. The show aired on CBS for five seasons, and was about a former CIA spy who had a mysterious past and used his knowledge and skills to obtain justice for innocent people who had no one else to turn to.

March 6, 2021

Shut it Down!

I graduated from high school in 1975 (45 years ago). The school I attended was in a rural area of Peoria County. Most of the students in the school were from families in which at least one parent worked in a blue-collar job, such as manufacturing or the building trades. I came from one of those families.

January 30, 2021

Categories

From Trix Cereal to Iron-Willed Discipline

The spring semester of my junior year in college (1978) was the best semester I ever had as a college student. It was also the most challenging. I had a full load of 300-level classes in accounting and business, and competition among my fellow students was very high.

January 24, 2021

Categories

How to Deal with the Evil in our Society

Last week, I wrote about how a 1989 committee that was acting under the authority of the National Council of Churches in Christ U.S.A. removed from the Gospels of Mark and Luke a critically important thing that Jesus told His apostles. While previous versions of the Catholic Bible quoted Jesus as saying that certain evil spirits could only be cast out by “prayer and fasting,” the newly revised version of the Catholic Bible did not include our Lord’s statement that fasting had to accompany prayer before certain evil spirits could be cast out.

February 29, 2020

Categories

A Little Bit of Knowledge Can be Dangerous

When was the last time you used a proverb while you were speaking to someone else? I would bet that if I followed you around for a day, I would hear you repeat a popular proverb to get your point across to a person you were talking to.

December 21, 2019

Categories

The Christmas Candy Conundrum

When I was 12 years old, I took over a paper route delivering newspapers for the Peoria Journal Star. The route included the neighborhood that I grew up in, which consisted of several of my relatives. The first year that I had my paper route, I was pleasantly surprised when I received gifts from several of my customers during the Christmas season.

June 14, 2019

What “Truths” Govern Your Life?

My wife and I were married in June 1980, which was a month after I finished my first year in law school. One of the weekly television shows that we watched together during the first year of our marriage was the prime-time soap opera, Dallas. We’ve come a long way since then. Today, there’s no way we would waste our time on that type of show.

April 8, 2017

Categories

The Empathy Switch

Whenever I give a closing argument to a jury, I include comments about the importance of empathy. I tell the jurors that while the law does not permit them to have sympathy for my client, it does permit them to have empathy.