Recently I experienced a rather serious injury. The official version is that I fell off a 15-foot ladder while rescuing a child from a burning building. 

Curiosity is not my first response. The little voice is so imploring: “Is there just one more packet of seeds in this drawer, Mommy? I just need to plant one more packet of seeds.” I am making dinner, on a timeline, and the combination of little hands in the junk drawer and the garden boxes raises my blood pressure. I just want to finish cooking. Who has time for curiosity?

I read George Orwell’s 1984 when I was in high school. We were still in the midst of the Cold War and were taught it was a book about the evils of communism. 

I can never decide whether it’s the optimist or the masochist in me that believes the relentless assault on conscience rights is set to collapse under its own absurdity.

In our liturgy, Catholics confess that we have “greatly sinned, in my thoughts and in my words, in what I have done and in what I have failed to do.” Sin takes more than one form, and often what we fail to do makes as much space for evil to grow as do our overtly sinful actions.

As proud parents, we basked at the Queen’s University convocation ceremony earlier this month where our son received a Bachelor of Arts (Honours) in History.

One of the great joys of the Church on the Street has been the memory of a spiritual group that used to meet at a women’s shelter. 

Ascension Thursday. Forty days after the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, as it says right there in Acts 1:3, the first reading for Mass on that solemn feast. 

There is a similar scene in many movies. It is a cliché but one most of us enjoy: the skinny kid, representing good, enters the ring with the brutish bully, representing evil. Think The Karate Kid and the like.

Faith and food are two of the best parts of my life. So when I stumbled across a cookbook that brought these life-giving elements together, I was hooked.