Who am I?

I’m a priest of the Roman Catholic Church belonging to the British Province of the Society of Jesus. That’s what the “SJ” at the end of my name stands for. My full-time occupation at the moment is at Loyola Hall Jesuit Spirituality Centre in the north of England. I work as part of the retreat team giving various courses, retreats, and spiritual direction.

I spent most of the 1990s living in Berkeley, California, where I was working as a doctoral student at the Jesuit School of Theology — part of the Graduate Theological Union. Though ill-health has stalled the dissertation my particular interests are in theological cosmology, the theology of creation, and ways of doing theology out of the practical experience of God, particularly in spiritual direction.

While in Berkeley I was lucky enough to work in the excellent parish of St. Mary – St. Francis de Sales in the Oakland diocese. On its way to becoming the community of Oakland’s cathedral the parish now has a new name, the Parish of Christ the Light.

Homilies

This site hosts most of the homilies I have preached since being ordained. Most of the Berkeley homilies were given for the assembly at the church of St. Mary-St. Francis de Sales in downtown Oakland or in the Chapel at the Jesuit School of Theology. The parish community is fascinating in it’s diversity–three largely non-geographical communities trying to live and worship as one. A large Vietnamese community and a smaller Filipino community made up the church of St. Mary. A few years ago the remnant of the Oakland cathedral community joined them in their pilgrimage when the Cathedral of St.Francis de Sales had to be demolished after the 1989 earthquake. The negotiation of change and the challenge of multi-cultural ministry echoes through these homilies.

The more recent homilies were preached in a retreat setting at Loyola Hall. They tend to be shorter and less formal than the parish preachings.

I am not sure how coherent any of them will be to the casual reader since they often show their location in time and place only too clearly, referring to events that seemed important in the news or issues alive in the community.

I have also resisted the temptation to edit these homilies or winnow out the weaker ones. They are all here much as they were delivered. Some continue to move me deeply on re-reading; others hardly touch me at all. I hope that you experience some sense of spirit through them.

Other Stuff

This site also hosts some papers and reflections I have written on theology and spirituality and the occassional ‘thought’.

I’ve also included a collection of components I wrote a few years back for the Delphi computer programming language. They are all rather dated now but might still be useful in some way.

More recently I’ve added a number of plugins written for WordPress, the content-management software which powers this blog.