Anna Caruso

                 Today is Palm Sunday, the beginning of Holy Week 2022.  Most of us have stood at this place many times before.  We know from memory the names of the people who played a part in the suffering and death of Jesus.  Through their association with that tragic event, some of them have become famous and some infamous.  But for a moment let us focus our attention on one of the lesser-known personalities of Holy Week.                 His name was Simon of Cyrene.  The only thing we know for sure about him is […]

In the early years of the nineteenth century Napoleon Bonaparte was the emperor of France and the architect of a vast empire.  With military might and genius, he conquered all of Europe, and had dreams of ruling the world.  But that was not to be.  On June 18, 1815, Napoleon was totally and finally defeated.  His army was conquered by British forces under the command of the Duke of Wellington.  That battle is one of the most famous in history.  Everyone knows about the Battle of Waterloo. Less well-known is the truth that Napoleon’s downfall began three years earlier.  In […]

                  If we preach the Gospel in its entirety, if we continue Christ’s work which has become a countersign in today’s world, we shall encounter misunderstanding, rejection, and persecution.  Jesus prepares us for this in advance when He warns: “The reason the world hates you is that you do not belong to the world… Remember what I told you:  No slave is greater than his master.  They will harry you as they harried Me.”                 We can survive the indifference and the hostility of those who do not want their consciences troubled […]

We live in a world where things move along with a certain regularity.  Night follows day, and day follows night.  The seasons unfold at about the same pace year after year.  Spring, summer, fall and winter are as predictable as the cycles of the sun.  In the midst of all that steadiness, it is easy to become prisoners of the routine and forget just how wonderful life really is. Thornton Wilder wrote a play about that which he called “Our Town.”  It is the story about Emily who lived in Grover’s Corners until she dies in her early twenties.  Then […]

Commonly, we think of our Christian faith as a personal relationship between the individual and God.  It is that, but it is not exclusively that.  We need to remember that faith is also a family affair.  We came from homes, we live in homes, and some look forward to establishing their own homes.  This means that the success and happiness of our individual lives are deeply dependent upon the fate and fortunes of the family. For that matter, so is the future civilization.  What happens in the home in large measure determines what happens on the streets, in the factories, […]