28 items found for your search. If no results were found please broaden your search.
The unexpected directions of the Holy Spirit
In a prior column, I wrote about times in my spiritual journey where the voice of our Heavenly Father has been clear (mostly in telling me I need to read the Psalms more frequently). And while it’s true that there are times where God speaks with what St. Ignatius would call a “clarity beyond doubt,” those are the exceptions that prove the cloudy rule: It’s hard to discern the voice of God as we strive to have a handle on the day to day. Sometimes, the Holy Spirit instead opts to speak through circumstances so otherwise implausible that if they were the basis for a claim in federal court, the judge would 12(b)(6) that claim so fast you couldn’t even say “Twiqbal.”
Fine-tuned prayer
I am an avid fan of shortwave radio. It was my Gram and Grandpa who got me into the hobby. For years, they've had this big Schaub-Lorenz radio from the 1960's at their house. The radio is so old that it lists frequencies in kilocycles (kc) and megacycles (Mc) because the hertz as a unit of frequency hadn’t been invented yet, but it works perfectly to this day in spite of the fact. That radio had four frequency bands: the standard AM and FM that any radio has (except AM was labeled “MW” for “medium-wave”), plus “SW 1” and “SW 2”. We grandkids knew the radio had these extra buttons, but neither we nor Gram nor Grandpa knew what they did, and whenever we pressed the button out of curiosity, all we heard was static, so we all kind of assumed that was the end of the matter.
Spotting the natural law
Often when I was an undergraduate at Michigan State, and occasionally nowadays here at Notre Dame, friends of mine and I have gathered around a table, and someone has suggested that we play a round of the card game known as Chairman Mao. I won’t spoil the game for those who have never played (half the “fun” is in introducing new players to the game), but essentially Chairman Mao is a game for those who love rules. More accurately, Chairman Mao is a game for those who love to make up rules… and not tell anyone what they are… and penalize those who break them. Indeed, the aim of Chairman Mao is to learn what gets you penalized to avoid penalties and obtain victory. To say any more than that would earn me a penalty in my next game of Chairman Mao.
Chevron, Perry the Platypus and transubstantiation
Once upon a time in my high school days I encountered a meme entitled “The Engineering Flowchart.” Translated into prose, it basically asserts the following four propositions: first, if it moves, and it’s supposed to move, you have no problem. Second, if it doesn’t move, and it’s not supposed to move, you also have no problem. Third, if it moves, and it shouldn’t, duct tape. Fourth and finally, if it doesn’t move, and it’s supposed to, WD-40.
Reflections on the Sacred Heart
Sacred Heart.
The machine gun method
When I was in Algebra II my freshman year of high school, we were taught a couple of different ways to solve a quadratic equation. A couple have fallen by the wayside (as we law students do not regularly employ math more complicated than the Hand Formula), but I remember two distinct methods that had almost opposite pros and cons: factoring, which we learned first, and using the quadratic formula, which we learned last. As my math teacher, Mr. Josh Taylor, explained and demonstrated, factoring is the easiest of the ways to solve a quadratic equation, but it doesn’t always work. In contrast, the quadratic formula always works, but it has the uncanny tendency to get unwieldy at the times when it would make the most sense to factor instead. As a result, Mr. Taylor gave the quadratic formula the nickname of “the machine gun method” — it always gets the job done, but sometimes by using more “bullets” than the job required.
Not worshiping ash, but preserving fire
Let me tell you a story. A couple of months ago, I was at an establishment at the Duncan Student Center that definitely shall not be named, securing a late lunch of chicken nuggets and waffle fries one Tuesday afternoon. Unfortunately, one of said chicken nuggets was exceptionally crispy, so much so that it chipped one of my teeth! And thus I was required to schedule a dentist appointment to get that taken care of. Eventually, once all was said and done, in early November I was able to get in to have my teeth X-rayed, and the dentist arrived at the conclusion that the cavity that had formed would need a root canal. So a couple of weeks later, I returned for the dentist to prepare my tooth for the root canal process, only for the dentist to find that the situation was not as bad as she had anticipated. I would only need a crown to handle the problem with that tooth. She placed a temporary crown over my tooth, and by the time you’re reading this, that crown will have been replaced with a permanent one.
The 2023 year of language
This beginning of a new semester at Notre Dame coincides with the beginning of the calendar year. While my friends know (perhaps more than they’d like) of my opinions about how we don’t emphasize Advent enough in the church liturgical calendar, the secular New Year provides just as solid an opportunity for introspection, reflection and resolution.
Footnote nine Chevron: when SCOTUS comes to South Bend
Well, I was the Doof.
Pursuing truth together
What JLEPP is about
Joseph Gergel, JLEPP editor-in-chief, NDLS ‘23