Foot-washer

  Holy Family Catholic Church Gold Mass (Feast of St. Albert) Wis 13:1-9  Mk 9:2-10 How many of you have heard of “Tiktaalik?”  Do you know what a “Tiktaalik” is?  I’ll say the word again: Tiktaalik.  Tiktaalik is the name of an animal that lived 375 million years ago.  It was a fishlike aquatic creature that was among the first to evolve the ability to crawl out onto dry land. Tiktaalik’s fossils were found by paleontologists Ted Daeschler and Neil Shubin twenty years ago in the arctic on Ellesmere Island, in Nunavut, northern Canada.   Tiktaalik is called a “transitional fossil,” which embodies a transition from one major evolutionary stage to another. A second example of this is archaeopteryx, which embodies the transition of dinosaurs to birds.  Tiktaalik is sometimes referred to as “a fish with wrists” having fish-like qualities, but limbs that could support its weight as it crawled onto land, as an early ancestor of the amphibians....

What does the resurrection of Jesus tell us about the relationship between science and faith?     The answer is in the baked fish that Jesus ate in the presence of his amazed disciples.     But first, a story.       A few years ago, I was out fossil hunting with my wife and a group of other paleontologists in Northern Kentucky.  You may not know this, but the Cincinnati area contains an incredible trove of fossils from an age of natural history called the “Ordovician Period.” My wife, Dr. Kate Bulinski, is a paleontologist who specializes in this period and the invertebrates that populated it.   Fossil hunting often involves going to “road cuts,” which are places where hills or other rises have been blasted and dug out to allow a road to pass through.  This exposes a wide cross section of rocks and, in some places, fossils.     After a long day of visiting several of these cuts, I remember standing next...