Not by Bread Alone
Prayerfully journey through Lent with inspiring and meaningful reflections on the daily Mass readings. In just a few minutes each day, the insightful meditations of Not by Bread Alone can deepen your experience of this solemn season of prayer and penance.
Forthcoming from Liturgical Press, November 15, 2026.
Steeped: The Chemistry of Tea
Tea is the world’s most popular beverage. Dive into a cup of tea with a chemist and discover the rich molecular brew that can be extracted from the leaves of the Camellia sinensis plant. Tea contains over a thousand different chemical compounds which contribute to its color, taste and scent — and its stimulating effects. The best-known is caffeine, but how does caffeine end up in tea and how can you get it out? Beginning with the leaves, Steeped explores the chemistry behind different styles of tea, from green teas to pu-erh. It tackles the age-old question of when, or even whether, to add milk. And it puts the chemistry to use with advice on how to brew a better cup.
Upcoming Events
Lost in translation
Se’vIr lIngDI’ tamlertej, tlhIngan Hol QaQ law’ DIvI’ Hol QaQ puS
(Should chemists publish in Klingon rather than English?)
I found the book tucked among the organic chemistry texts, manuals for ancient software, models of improbable molecules, and the odd coffee mug — thankfully clean — left behind on the lab shelves by several generations of departing research students. The cover of Chemistry Through the Language Barrier promised readers they could learn to scan the chemical literature in any language, including Russian and Japanese. I have loved languages as long as I can remember. I am competent in German and Spanish, and can claim a smattering of Italian, Swahili, Latin, Greek, ASL and Klingon. Intrigued, and looking for an excuse to take a break from clearing out the lab, I pulled the book off the shelf and skimmed the foreword.
The author of the foreword argued that the time for specific language requirements for graduate students in chemistry was past. It was, after all, 1969, and the array of languages in which chemistry was published was expanding rapidly beyond the German, French and English triumvirate. What should replace it? Certainly not FORTRAN, he sniffed. Having led the expansion of the language requirement in my department in the late 1980s to include FORTRAN, I would disagree. Who wrote this? I skipped to the end to see a familiar name. My late father-in-law. A crystallographer with a deep love of language.
The language barrier for chemists today looks very different from the 1940s when James Perry published a series of lessons in Russian for chemists...
Read the full article in the April 2026 issue of Nature Chemistry for my take on the auxiliary languages of science, and what we can learn from considering a Klingon option.
Prayer Prologue
At its core, prayer is the act of turning toward God, responding in love to the One who created us. In prayer not only do we call out to God, but God endlessly calls out to us, ever enfolding us in mercy, drawing us close in love.
Why do I pray? You might as well ask me why I breathe. I breathe so I can sing. I breathe to pause. I breathe, awake or asleep, whether I’m aware of it or not. So, too, do I pray. I pray like I breathe, that I might live. Prayer is, as St. John of the Cross said, the “breathing of God in the soul, of the soul in God.”
Yet unlike breathing, prayer is something we must learn and—again and again—choose to do. The Scriptures have much to teach us about prayer. The passages and commentary contained in this small book barely touch the surface. My only hope is that these brief reflections will encourage and support those who seek the face of the Lord and long for him (Ps 42:3), those who wish to breathe in Christ.
Of course, it is not enough to read about prayer. We must practice it. And when we are anxious about prayer, worried whether we are “doing it right,” pastor and spiritual director Daniel Ruff, SJ, has reassuring advice: “The only way to go wrong in prayer is not to do it at all.” All the wisdom of Scripture, saints, and sages can be summed up in a single word of instruction: pray.
From Prayer: Biblical Wisdom for Seeking God, which was an honorable mention title at the 2022 Catholic Media Association Awards.