In the Gospel of known to be that of Luke, in the context of the Jerusalem temple Jesus says that the temple will be destroyed without a stone upon another. In the year 70 AD, the Jewish community was under great persecution by the Roman emperor and their only temple was completely destroyed. It is widely believed that this Gospel was written in the 80s. Although during his lifetime Jesus may have spoken many things about the temple, the end times, and the persecutions that w

In English there is this word Bullying. I think we don't have an exact word for this in Malayalam. The dictionary definition is "A person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those whom they perceive as vulnerable". It is something very common in our schools, workplaces, society, public spaces and especially in the cyberspace. At the college level bullying has come to be called in India by an appeasing term "ragging". Bullying involves imposing one's physical, psycholog

The last three months of the year are my favorite. The feasts of four saints whom I love most are in October: two women and two men. In December, comes Christmas- the most tender time of the year. Then there are also the feasts of six saints towards whom I have special veneration to. Sandwiched between these two months is the month of November with most profound celebrations- other than the usual celebration of individual saints. Since it is the last month of the liturgical

The last three months of the year are my favorite. The feasts of four saints whom I love most are in October: two women and two men. In December, comes Christmas- the most tender time of the year. Then there are also the feasts of six saints towards whom I have special veneration to. Sandwiched between these two months is the month of November with most profound celebrations- other than the usual celebration of individual saints. Since it is the last month of the liturgical

Remember? -the Malayalam movie titled 'ABCD'? Two young Malayali friends who grew up in America without any sense of responsibility are in a way deported to India by one's father without providing any financial security- was the background of it. In a sense, it was a survival movie. Those young people, in unfamiliar and poor conditions, take out their survival skills and manage to return to the United States was the theme. If we consider it in another way, the story was about

Seminary training has never been perfect. There is not much of a difference between me and those who came out before me and those who came out after me. All those who give a serious thought about the renewal of the Church arrive at the seminary. It has been six months since Pope Leo XIV took office. He has already commented about it several times. He has put forward similar interests to that of his predecessor, Pope Francis. Priestly training should be aimed at forming proph

When I was in the Philippines for a while, I lived in an ordinary parish in Metro Manila. I was the fourth in presbytery aside from the Parish Priest and two associate priests. Since I didn't know Tagalog, the national language, my pastoral involvement was very limited. When someone dies there, the body is brought to the funeral homes. The funeral takes place after seven or nine days. The family stays with the embalmed body for those days. Mostly they ate and slept there. In

The orca whale, is one of the most endangered species in the world. Only 73 of them are alive today. An orca named Tahlequah - the one in the picture -gave birth to a calf in 2018. For some reasons, the calf died within minutes of giving birth. The mother whale could not bear the sorrow of the death of her baby, which had grown in her womb for eighteen long months and had given birth with great pangs. She carried her baby's dead body above her nose and travelled in moaning. S

"The Seventh Seal" (1957) is one of the masterpieces by the legendary filmmaker Ingmar Bergman (1918-2007). The film, which is in the surrealist drama genre, is considered one of the classics in the history of world cinema. After spending ten years in crusade service, Antonius Block, a knight, gets tired of it and returns to Sweden, his native land. When he arrived, the plague called Black Death was slowly getting spread in the country. The plot of the film is Antonius' doubt

It's the Solemnity of all the Saints. Yahweh is the name of God in the Old Testament. The etymology and other things have been discussed before. The people of the Old Testament understood the holy name Yahweh as the one who is; the one who is in oneself; the one who is there; one who is everywhere. When interpreted, the meaning becomes that God is everywhere, God is in himself, God is in himself- and so on. When this is understood rightly, the 'I' in me becomes a holy space a

The parable that I think is perhaps the most problematic or devastating of all the parables that Jesus had told is the parable of the Pharisee and the Publican. Jesus begins the parable by saying, ‘Two men went up to the temple to pray: one a Pharisee and the other a Tax collector.’ After referring to the body language of their prayer, he briefly describes the exact prayers both of them made. The Pharisee’s prayer has several issues in it. The tax collector’s prayer was a si

Family has no single form in nowhere in the world. If you take ten families in the same neighborhood, they will all be ten different. They can range from families with very narrow family-values and strict rules to families that are very transparent, democratic and progressive. They can range from families that are very patriarchal to families that practice gender-equity and equal partnership. The term 'family' has never been uniform in all over the world. Therefore, generaliz