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The Rise of Gender Fluidity and the Need for Truth At my son’s large public high school it is not uncommon to see kids in various states of  “gender fluidity,” but not simply in the sense of feminine boys and tomboy girls as I saw back in my own public high school in the 1980s. No, these kids are either formally “transitioning” or experimenting with opposite-sex alter-egos, both of which have become trendy and faddish. As parents, we are often lulled by a misguided compassion that ke …

Filling in the Gaps about the Eucharist We read of Jesus instituting the Eucharist in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. John gives us something different, which is not surprising: John wrote his Gospel long after the other three, and he assumes you’ve read them already. His Gospel is meant as a sort of “gap-filler,” covering important moments in the life of Jesus that nobody else had written down yet. He offers us the “t …

Recognizing the Presence of Jesus in the EucharistThose of us who believe that the Eucharist is really Jesus have to examine our own hearts and lives, too.Some time ago, I met a man who had once worked for a Western intelligence agency. He was embedded in a majority-Muslim country, posing as a businessman. Given the lawlessness of parts of the country, he had to be driven across it in the dead of night to avoid bandits. As they were speeding across the desert at high speeds, with the headlights …

The Role of Sacred Tradition in Early Christianity The first Christians didn’t learn their faith from the Bible because none of the books of the New Testament had been written yet. This is evident in Paul thanking the Corinthians for “maintain[ing] the traditions even as I have delivered them to you” (1 Cor. 11:2), and instructing his disciple Timothy,“what you have heard from me before many witnesses entrust to faithful men who will be able to teach others also” (2 Tim. 2:2). Paul thanked the …

The Sermon on the Mount related in Matthew 5-7 has much in common with the teaching of Jesus related in Luke 6. It is widely recognized that Luke 6 teaches in an abbreviated form what Matthew 5-7 teaches in greater detail. But there are also some significant differences. The sermon of Luke 6 takes place on a plain, whereas the sermon of Matthew 5-7 takes place on a mountain. There are also differences between the Beatitudes themselves in the two accounts. Luke recounts only four Beatitudes and …