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Excellent post, Jennifer. I had similar feelings watching the conventions and politicians. It makes me think of the Jesus' quote, "Not all those who call out, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the Kingdom of God, but those who do God's will."
By Their Fruits You Will Know Them
“Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but inwardly they are ravenous wolves. You will know them by their fruits. Do men gather grapes from thornbushes or figs from thistles? Even so, every good tree bears good fruit, but a bad tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot b...
Thank you, June-Ann, for reminding us of the wise insights of a theologian we lost all too early. It was a great treat to have met her in person in the early 2000s, for which you were responsible, I believe.
Lo cotidiano: The Narrative Voice the Church—and the World—Still Needs
Times of crises will scatter people into different directions to make sense of what is occurring or to gather ideas for what can be done. The current global condition of fear and disruption caused me recently to amble through some older documents and articles, and happily I came across several e...
Great job, Gerry! Without your post, these two documents would have escaped my--and many others'--attention. The Australian plan sounds very promising; let's hope the bishops discern it positively. A lot is possible if leaders and laity try. As you sum it up, "It’s as if because they wanted to be inclusive, they found a way."
Embodying Church Reform: A Tale of Two Documents
‘Imagine a sower going out to sow …’ In this case the seed is the theological vision and rhetoric of a synodal church, sown by Pope Francis. The crop will be the translation of this vision into a changed ecclesial culture and law, embodied in the nuts and bolts of the structures and institutions...
Excellent discussion about the limited imagination of many parishes in reaching out and building community, as difficult as that was and remains. When I asked my parish to have a rosary for justice outside the church in the days after George Floyd's murder, we did, about 40 people with pro-black lives signs as well, and it was more meaningful and connected than any videoed mass we had.
Being Church in a Time of Pandemic
Images of a priest-centered church have been on vivid display following the onset of COVID-19, when public health and government officials issued directives to shelter at home and severely limited public gatherings, including public worship. The reflex of many pastors was to livestream the eucha...
Your writing is beautiful and invites deep reflection, Jennifer. Thank you!
In Praise of Not Knowing
In his December column ‘Apologies, Apologies, More Apologies,’ my fellow blog contributor Myroslaw Tataryn challenges clerical certainty. “The human mind can never fully fathom the divine,” he writes. “Yet, somehow, over the centuries, the Church has forgotten that humility and succumbed to the ...
Excellent! There's so much going on here; I need to re-read and ponder it several times.
Being a Catholic College in a Neoliberal World
The challenges to Catholic higher education continue, though they are not what they were 20 or 30 years ago. The battle with the institutional church is won, but the embrace of the secular world has come to be fraught with more peril than we might have imagined. Hope for the future, which is sur...
Great job on this post, Jennifer! I think you are completely right about how St. Francis is so relevant for us today, and I love how you relate him to your new home city of Santa Fe and to your interfaith chaplaincy work.
Francis: A Saint for Our Times
The title of our blog, ‘Go, Rebuild My House,’ comes from the words St. Francis heard in the spring of 1206 at San Damiano, a little church in ruins near his home town of Assisi. The young Francis was praying there, contemplating an icon of Christ on the cross, desperately wanting to hear from G...
Good job, Brent. I appreciate your literary examples and use of Nussbaum.
The Catholic Imagination and the Challenge of Apathy
Recently, I had the joy of attending a conference on the Catholic Imagination at Loyola Chicago University. Over three days, the attendees heard presentations by fiction writers, poets, scholars and even filmmakers. It was a powerful reminder that Catholicism, as a living, breathing tradition, b...
As the author of this post, I want to make a few follow-up comments. First, I am happy to say that my own pastor I consider to be one of the exceptions to poor preaching. Second, I'm aware that Catholics want a lot of different things from their services. What one parishioner thinks is a poor homily, another might really appreciate. While one might want more social-justice preaching, another wants more opportunities for praying the rosary after Mass. But the "big church" that Catholicism is should be able to meet a lot of diverse needs *if we are more bold and experimental. That will likely entail more contention and hard conversations in the church, but it's better than playing to the safe, bland middle. It seem to me that from the parish level up to diocese pastoral planning, we mostly rearrange deck chairs on the Titanic. I appreciated that Archbishop Lori called for us to be bolder.
A Yearning to be Engaged
Archbishop William Lori of Baltimore recently wrote a column titled “Half Measures” reflecting on how parishes can respond to this challenge: “Mass attendance is down. Our absent Catholics aren’t merely out of town; many are gone. For a variety of distressing reasons, they are disconnected from ...
Great job on this post. Nouwen and Vanier and Adam modeled the humility and mutual servant leadership that is the essence of Christian community.
WHY THE CHURCH NEEDS L’ARCHE MORE THAN EVER
Like many Catholics, a few weeks ago I watched online the funeral mass for L’Arche’s founder, Jean Vanier. Those who know the mission of L’Arche are familiar with Vanier’s commitment to building communities that welcome people with developmental disabilities, not out of conventional charity, but...
This post is very good. It led me to go read the emeritus pope's letter, which I had not gotten to yet. For whatever mild benefits in Benedict's letter, his simplistic blaming of the 1960s based a few personal anecdotes is ridiculous. Op-ed responses (which do better than "hot takes") by Michael Sean Winters (https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/distinctly-catholic/benedicts-letter-about-sex-abuse-crisis-regrettable-text) and Tom Reese (https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/signs-times/benedicts-unfortunate-letter-ignores-facts-catholic-sex-abuse-crisis) are worth reading. Both make two obvious points: that the great bulk of priest abusers where educated in the pre-Vatican II seminaries (Winter's link to some data is helpful) and that Benedict mentions nothing about the hierarchical cover-ups.
Finally, back to that "Pope Emeritus" title: Reese makes three great points about how retired popes should comport themselves and how the Church should deal with them: 1) speak with prudence, 2) only one pope at at time (return to your baptisimal name), 3) stop canonizing popes so soon after their deaths.
The Church Is Not Western Civilization
Two recent events have, in different ways, called to mind an influential yet deeply problematic strand of thinking – the equation of the church with a civilizational strand sometimes described as Western civilization, sometimes expanded to include “Judeo-Christian civilization” to avoid the appe...
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May 2, 2019
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