St. Luke is known as a fellow worker with St. Paul, an evangelist (the author of the Gospel that bears his name and the Acts of the Apostles) and a physician. For iconographers, St. Luke is revered as the first (according to tradition) to write an icon of the Blessed Mother. In iconography, the verb “to write” is used rather than “to paint,” as an icon is considered visual theology. Now, to my knowledge, there is no known or authenticated icon that can be directly traced back to the hand of St. Luke, but I for one have no problem with considering this tradition a possibility. Luke was obviously a well-educated and gifted man with many skills and abilities. In the first few verses of his Gospel Luke establishes that his sources were some of the very people who were “eyewitnesses and ministers of the word.” Luke is the only…

Part 3 of a 4-Part series on Eucharistic Adoration When I dragged a friend to Adoration recently, she pumped me with panicky questions while on the way. “Sitting for an hour in silence? But what do you do?” Her question was not unexpected. We live in a utilitarian society where everything in our lives, and indeed our own self-worth, is terribly bound up in what we do. It’s one of the first things we ask each other as new acquaintances—not “How do you be” but “What do you do?”—which is the question by which we measure another’s value and worth, not just materially but within the scope of humanity. The question reveals the entrenched mindset that permits society to consider the “benefits” of euthanasia, or the in utero genocide perpetrated against babies whose quality of life might be deemed not good enough—not useful enough—to permit their birth. Sitting before Christ…

The Voice has been on NBC for seventeen seasons after beginning in Holland, and it maintains its rank as one of the most inspirational reality shows on television. I settled in for my normal round of this show, sad that Adam Levine is gone, and I realized that I cannot make it through an episode without weeping. Not too long ago, I discovered that most of the time our weeping comes from an elevation or a degradation of humanity. Devastation in the Bahamas can lead to affectivity, and so can watching a family reunite with long lost relatives—a degradation and an elevation of humanity. Given that presupposition, I wondered at why something as trivial as The Voice would draw me into my heart and express itself with tears. It’s because of hope. Some of the contestants share their stories: how they started singing, what their…