August 2017

How My Father’s Death Led to a Book

My father’s  death, after almost a lifetime of absence, seems to close the yawning chasm between us. I feel him closer in death than when he was alive. The seed of an “inclination to look back on history” was planted the day I heard he had died.

Learning Psalm 131

Psalm 131 is “one of the shortest psalms to read but one of the longest psalms to learn”. It’s a lone prayer – a private prayer to God which expresses trust and a childlike dependence on God.

Secret Deal? Vatican Archives and the Holocaust

Secret negotiations between Heinrich Himmler and a Swiss Catholic politician, hired by a Jewish woman and helped by an Italian papal nuncio, may have contributed to ending the mass extermination of the Jewish people.