Emmaus Walk with Bishop Jos!

My father suffered from dementia toward the end of his life. I watched it happen — slowly, tenderly, and painfully. He would forget what happened yesterday, but could tell you, in vivid detail, a story from forty years ago. Short-term memory goes first. The present slips away. And I remember sitting beside him, thinking: this is one of the most heartbreaking things I have ever witnessed. I tell yo...

Shirley Chisholm’s observation cuts with surgical precision across decades: “When morality comes up against profit, it is seldom that profit loses.” She said this in the 1970s, but it reads like a dispatch from this morning’s news cycle. Some truths are stubborn that way. There is a useful distinction worth making at the outset. Animals operate by instinct — they react, they survive, they pursue....

One of the most remarkable testimonies of our time is the witness of Mother Teresa of Calcutta — a woman who spent her life finding the face of Jesus not in cathedrals, not in the comfortable pews of the powerful, but in the gutters of Kolkata, in the hollow eyes of the abandoned, and in the trembling hands of the forgotten. She knelt beside Hindu men ravaged by leprosy and saw the crucified Chris...

Did you know that God Has Always Met Us in Gardens? God did not place humanity in a temple. He placed us in a garden. From the very beginning, the sacred has been woven into the sensory — into soil and seed, into morning light through leaves, into what the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called “the dearest freshness deep down things.” The divine has always smelled like earth after rain. And here is wh...

On Holy Monday, I sit with one of the most jarring scenes in the Gospels. Jesus enters the Temple — the holiest place in Jerusalem — and what he finds there is not worship. It is a marketplace. Merchants hawking animals. Money changers turning profit from pilgrims. The sacred has been colonized by the transactional, and I am struck by how deeply I recognize this — not only in history, but in the i...

The Hunger We All Share Let me be honest with you — I feel it too. The quiet ache for something that will not slip through my fingers. You may have felt it standing in a home you love, wondering how long you will be able to keep it. Or sitting across from someone dear to you, silently hoping this — this person, this warmth, this moment — will somehow stay. We are creatures who crave permanence in...

I. THE GOD WHO SEES WHAT OTHERS MISS There is a field outside Bethlehem where a young man tends his father’s sheep. He smells of livestock and dust. He is sunburned and overlooked. His own father did not think to call him when the prophet Samuel arrived. And yet — God said, “This is the one.” In 1 Samuel 16, when Samuel comes to Jesse’s house to anoint the next king of Israel, he surveys seven imp...

We live in a world unrecognizable from even a year ago. Wars rage across continents, people flee their homes in desperate waves, and uncertainty hangs over the future like a storm that will not break. In times like these, the human heart naturally cries out: Where is God? But before we look outward for answers, we must look inward — because much of the turmoil we see in our world is, painfully, se...

My dear, think back to the day you were born. Not one of us entered this world with a map. None of us knew what life would entail, the heartbreaks we would endure, or the heights we would reach. We simply stepped into the first day, and we have been stepping into new days ever since. If you feel the weight of uncertainty today—if you are looking at a future that seems veiled in mist—take heart. Yo...

I realized something about Jesus. He looks at a crowd of ordinary people—fishermen, tax collectors, and weary souls—and tells them something radical: “You are the salt of the earth. You are the light of the world.” Notice He doesn’t say you might be, or you should be if you work hard enough. He says you are. You are! You are the ones who give this world its flavor. You are the ones who preserve it...

Who was Jesus? This is the question that stands at the center of our faith and our history. We believe Jesus is the Son of God who came down to earth to become part of the human race. In a profound act of love, the Creator decided to become the creature. But we must be very clear about the nature of this arrival: Jesus came for the human being. Everything else—religion, country, language, and soci...

My Dear Sisters and Brothers, I generally make it a point to stay away from the “drama” and the “spats” that often define our social media landscape. I know that people come to the digital square from vastly different emotional spaces and lived experiences and they are all valuable. However I often feel my time is better spent watching Tom and Jerry! However, I am writing to you today because some...

Before you drew your first breath, before the world could label you, define you, or limit you, you were known. The prophet Isaiah tells us, “The Lord called me from the womb, from the body of my mother he named my name” ( Isaiah 49:1 ). This is not just a poetic sentiment; it is a fundamental theological truth. You are not an accident. You are not a biological afterthought or a random occurrence i...

In her profound work When God is Silent, Barbara Brown Taylor writes: “In order for communication to occur, you need someone watching who also knows the language.” We often move through our lives under the delusion that because we share a vocabulary, we share a reality. In the midst of the misunderstandings, anxieties, and fears that have defined recent years—particularly surrounding the complex c...

Last Sunday, as I stood before our congregation in Nampa, Idaho, my heart was heavy. I found myself navigating a narrow, difficult space—simultaneously angry and afraid. The Gospel reading anchored us in a pivotal moment: “When Jesus heard that John the Baptist was arrested, he withdrew to Galilee.” Initially, the word “withdrew” can feel like a retreat of fear. We might ask: Why did He leave? Why...

After my Christmas sermon, a few people reached out to me. They were kind, but they suggested that perhaps I was exaggerating. They felt I was being a bit too anxious. “Bishop,” they implied, “it isn’t going to happen. Nobody is going to create a list. We are a civilized nation.” On Christmas day, I shared how “It always starts with a list.” How King Herod began his work by making a list. That lis...

I am often asked, “Bishop, what is prayer?” It is a question that follows me, and no matter how I answer it for others, I always end the day asking it of myself. Did I pray today? What did I ask for? Did God listen to my woes, or was I simply talking to myself? When someone asks me to pray for them, I always say yes. And I do. But how I pray for them has changed deeply over the years. I have learn...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer was a man whose pastoral identity was inseparable from his theology. For him, the Gospel was not a static doctrine to be admired, but a command to be obeyed. His life serves as a haunting mirror for modern Christians, particularly those in the West who find themselves tempted by the same political adulation that once paralyzed the German church. Bonhoeffer’s journey reminds us...

The power of God’s call is not a reward for the perfect, but a summons for the willing. The first truth we must grasp is that God does not show partiality. No matter who you are, or where you have been, you are the beloved of God. When we look at the stories of the Bible, we see a gallery of the “unqualified” according to world standards. God chose them, prepared them, and then sent them out into...

When Christmas approaches, my family and friends often ask the same question: “Jos, what do you want this year?” They know me well. They know I have no use for trinkets or things that gather dust. I am a man of utility and simple rhythms. So, I tell them the truth. Give me a box of tea candles. Give me some snacks from the Indian grocery store—maybe some spicy murukku or sweet ladoos. If you want...

Last night, I returned to Elie Wiesel’s Night—that searing testament to the Holocaust, that chronicle of unspeakable suffering witnessed through the eyes of a boy who lost everything. Forty million souls caught in humanity’s darkest hour. Among the book’s many haunting passages, one phrase pierces through: “Clench your teeth and wait.” This advice came to young Elie when the anger, pain, and strug...

“I want Greenland. I want Venezuela.” Whether it is a literal island, a neighbor’s oil, a distant water source, or the very autonomy of other human beings, the cry of the powerful remains the same across the centuries. We live in a world where we always seem to want more than we need. We have given it many names—colonialism, manifest destiny, national interest, economic security—but beneath the po...

The Day of Epiphany is often celebrated as a feast of pure radiance—the “Great Manifestation” of a star so bright it pulled men across deserts. We are taught that light makes life easy; it reveals the path, clarifies the destination, and fuels our imagination. But as I look at the stars in my own life, I’ve begun to realize that the light is only half the story. There is a profound, necessary imag...

I was a child, maybe four or five years old, when I first met her. The Blessed Mother of Lourdes. I was a tiny member of the Sodality of Mary, wearing a ribbon that felt far too grand. I didn’t know what that was for or why! Ha. But it was amazing. We stood before the grotto, a cool place of stone and shadow. We prayed like a bullet train—Hail Mary’s rushing past like heavy wind. The scent of bees...

If someone came to me today with a claim as outrageous as the one Gabriel brought to Mary, I suspect my first instinct would be to check my pulse or look for the exit. To be told that the impossible is not only possible but is currently taking root inside of you—at a time when such a thing meant social exile or worse—is a terrifying proposition. Yet, as I sit with her story, I realize that Mary’s...