Kerry On

A few years ago I was interviewed on Catholic TV and on Sirius Radio about my meeting Mother Teresa in 1989. We met in Kentucky during a fundraising event. Lucky me, my friend brought a camera with him and called my name. I looked up at him after I gave Mother a big smooch on her cheek. He took this amazing photo.  Mother Teresa was intentionally present. Whether she was comforting the dying, or sitting at a dinner or speaking engagement, or writing one of her many letters, she was present to the people in front of her. Anyone who has lived a public life can attest to the difficulty of this task. For those few moments of time reading a letter and responding, her attention was focused solely on you.  Here is a letter she sent to me after i invited her to Cincinnati, Ohio. It is typed on a simple typewriter on paper that is stamped with the Missionaries of Charity to make it a letterhead.  Mother Teresa signed it in her handwriting. Such attention!  My interviewer wrot...

Artificial intelligence is a complex achievement of human making. It demonstrates technē at an unprecedented scale. I decided to look at this advancement in techne through the brilliance of Pope Benedict XVI. Pope Benedict XVI addressed the relationship between techne (technique, craft, applied science) and episteme (rational knowledge, understanding, science) by arguing that modern, purely functional, and utilitarian approaches to technology (techne) must be guided by a deeper, ethical, and metaphysical understanding of reality (episteme). He applied an ancient philosophical distinction that is increasingly urgent today—the distinction between technē and epistēmē. If AI is evaluated only in terms of efficiency, prediction, and utility, deeper questions about meaning, freedom, dignity, and truth risk being displaced. A society guided solely by technē risks losing sight of the epistēmē that ought to govern it. It risks losing its soul and nous . Soul (psyche) is the animating, life-givi...

Patrick Padley, a speaker at the Catholic New Media Conference, made this insightful statement, “We are not just consumers of Christ.” Receiving communion and adoration of the Blessed Sacrament are not an end in themselves. Consuming Eucharist is a call to go out to others. Father John Jay Hayes writes, “When we eat the heavenly food of the Eucharist…we become what we eat. ‘What material food produces in our bodily life,’ the Catechism says, ‘Holy Communion wonderfully achieves in our spiritual life’ [No. 1392]. We, who have been made members of Christ’s body in baptism, become his members afresh in the Eucharist. The Catechism says: “Communion with the flesh of the risen Christ … preserves, increases, and renews the life of grace received at Baptism.” [No. 1392]. Through the Eucharist we become people through whom Jesus continues today the works of love and compassion which he accomplished during his earthly life through his physical body. United with him in the Eucharist, we are un...

Mary Hathaway wrote:  Like "The Comforts of Home" is a direct reference to St. Thomas driving out the prostitute his brothers sent to him to try to get him to quit his vocation. It makes everything that much funnier in her stories. I suppose there are quite a few people who read Flannery and can't quite grasp it all because they're like the widow in "The Displaced Person," watching the last rites being given and are on the outside looking in. She bowls me over every time. I would also add that every widow should also be considered an image (very imperfect of course) of the Blessed Mother as much as it is a reference to Regina O'Connor. The Widow McIntyre is the Widow Carpenter, a title Mary the Mother of Jesus rarely is given, but yet that is exactly who she would have been referenced as in her life on earth.

"Our experience of the grotesque should result in bafflement" (Wilson Yates). Wildcat is imaginative, faith-filled, and baffling, a genuine Flannery O'Conner come to screen. Robert Giroux, friend, and publisher described his relationship with Flannery as "strange and trusting" while he said her dreary chair at the University of Iowa glowed ( The Complete Stories Flannery O'Conner ). Her teacher Caroline Gordon described O'Conner's writing as "baffling the reviewers." Giroux confirmed "They all recognized her power but missed her point." One of the points to get to right away is Flannery’s use of descriptives that many consider racist. DW, who keeps the weblog Becoming Flame wrote, Flannery “writes about racism, prejudice, and white privilege in almost every story, exposing them for what they are and showing how firmly and pervasively and subtly they lurk in our culture. "I’m not saying don’t take offense at it; that wou...