The last of the seven deadly sins is pride--or perhaps I should say the FIRST of the deadly sins is pride because pride is at the root of all the others. We often misdiagnose bragging and arrogance and vanity as pride. Bragging, arrogance and vanity are symptoms of pride, but pride is much deeper. In my [...]
Scott Hahn's wife Kimberly was once asked what three things were the biggest obstacles to her conversion to Catholicism and she reportedly replied, "Mary, Mary and Mary." Other converts have said, "Once I got over the authority question Maty wasn't a problem. If this was a crucial part of the Catholic faith, then I'm good." I [...]
Living as we do in the Bible Belt--forsooth yea verily in the buckle of the Bible Belt--we are accustomed to various unusual Christian novelties. By "Christian novelties" I mean versions of Christianity that are novel. They are new. They have never been thought of before. They are the creation of entrepreneurial spiritual leaders with one eye on [...]
Envy doesn't seem so deadly does it? It's natural to feel a bit of envy isn't it, when somebody has something better than you? Why is that such a big deal? The French literary critic and philosopher Rene Girard writes about something he calls mimetic desire which is that desire at the root of our existence that [...]
One of the most common things I hear in the confessional is people confessing impatience and anger. But are impatience and anger a sin? We often confess things that make us feel unhappy about ourselves--things that mar our self image. Some of these failures are sins, but not all of them. For it to be a [...]
On Sunday, as always on the Second Sunday in Lent, we were given the gospel account of the Transfiguration of the Lord, and in Matthew's version it is clear that the disciples experienced a mystical vision. So what exactly happened? What did they see, how did they see it and by what process did they see [...]
The fourth in my series on the Deadly Sins for Lent 2026 Four of the seven deadly sins are sins of the flesh: Greed, Gluttony, Sloth and Lust. Three are sins of the mind and heart: Envy, Pride and Wrath. We feel most guilty and ashamed of the sins of the flesh because they involve a [...]
The third in my Lent 2026 series on the Seven Deadly Sins. Of all the seven deadly sins Gluttony is at once the grossest and the(apparently) least serious. It's so easy to both be disgusted by gluttony and amused by it. On the one hand we think of the typical glutton as the obese pig with [...]
The second in my Lent 2026 series on the seven deadly sins. Greed is right up there with Sloth, Lust and Gluttony as one of the gross sins of the flesh. Like the other three, Greed seems obvious. Greed is the fat cat banker, the shyster, the conman, the slumlord. The greedy person is not only [...]
For Lent 2026: Here begins a series here on the seven deadly sins. First one is the one most forgotten or dismissed as unimportant: Sloth. The common understanding of sloth is probably extreme laziness: the equivalent of couch potato. Sloth is the teenaged slob of any age slouched out with a bowl of junk food to [...]