JOYCE CORONEL

Phoenix is more than 7,000 miles from Mosul. And yet as I sit and pray here in sunny Arizona, my heart turns to the beleaguered city in Iraq.

Plowing through a formidable stack of mail that accumulated while I was away last month, my eyes fell on a large envelope from Food for the Poor. Inside was a tabloid newspaper with a bold red headline: “Answering the Call.”

You’ve seen them. Holding cardboard signs with scrawled pleas for help, they stand at freeway exits, hoping for a handout. Should you give them money? Should you circle around and return with food and water?

Dr. Nicholas Johns and his wife, Doris, are celebrating 76 years of wedded bliss and were recognized by the Worldwide Marriage Encounter this month as the longest married couple in Arizona. At 97 and 96 years of age, they’ve been married longer than most people on the planet have been alive.

Anyone who’s ever had the joy of having a houseful of teenage and 20-something males knows what I mean when I say that it’s all about the food. One local teenager stands apart from the crowd.

I was 9 years old when the U.S. Supreme Court invented the right to abortion. I still remember Dr. Carolyn Gerster, one of the...

The Child Jesus enters our broken, fallen world with His purity and innocence and fragility. He is born in the most humble of circumstances, in a temporary shelter, among sheep and oxen, and laid in a manger. He shed His first drop of blood for us eight days later at His circumcision, a foretelling of the blood that would flow from the terrible wounds of crucifixion.

When I first heard about what happened to Albert Quihuis, 90, and his wife, Sophia, 87, my initial reaction was outrage.

You know those emails that insist you “must” click on this link, view that video or delve into such-and-such a blog? Honestly, I end up deleting most of them. It’s just too much. Every now and then though — perhaps at my guardian angel’s prompting — I click.

A recent headline in The Wall Street Journal caught my attention: “Hard-wired for Giving.” The lead into the story questioned the Darwinian assumption that humans are basically selfish and pointed to a recent study in which scientists discovered the human brain is actually built for generosity.