In order to treasure the awesome significance of this simple, yet most revealing statement, we ought to limit the analogy to the image of a shepherd which an innocent child would have. Compelled by the realism imposed by life itself, we do not want...
Not too many people know what a gramophone is. For the young digital generation, a gramophone is a century-old device for recording and playing sounds and music. The old RCA logo pictures Nipper, a charming mutt perking his ears in front of a...
When he, (the Shepherd) has driven out all his own, he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him, because they recognize his voice. We have heard these words countless times. They are comforting and heartwarming; they conjure up images of us as...
On this Fourth Sunday of Easter, I want to tell you two of my favorite stories. The first is about a pop quiz that was given to a new class of nursing students in the first year of their training. Most of the students did well on the quiz until they...
I recently turned 59, and in my lifetime there have been some truly remarkable popes, or chief shepherds of the Church. I was born near the end of the lengthy reign of Pope Pius XII, a great but somewhat under-appreciated leader who led the Church...
In the United States, most of our ranches are self contained. By that I mean that the rancher has his own fields for crops or grazing and his own facilities to care for his livestock. That is not the case in the most of the rest of the world, not...
Back in Jesus’ time everyone knew about shepherds, their sheep, and how shepherds and sheep interacted with each other. The dynamics between them were well known. Not so today. Few of us have watched shepherds tending their sheep. But if we think of...
This week the Church celebrates Good Shepherd Sunday. In an agrarian society such as first century Palestine, the image of the shepherd was immediately recognizable by Jesus’ disciples. For those of us in twenty-first century America, the image may...
