Giving God a story, 4: The fourth of five posts on Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, Chapter 10, on the Trinity. Elizabeth Johnson has taken us through some adventures and misadventures of the doctrine of the Trinity. She started with Karl Rahner’s and, much later, my suspicion that the doctrine was being understood, if at all, in a way that made it irrelevant to piety. The way to avoid such abstraction, she said, is to start with the... Read more
Giving God a story, 3: The third of five posts on Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, Chapter 10, on the Trinity. In this post I’m dialoguing with and sometimes taking issue with, Elizabeth Johnson on the doctrinal issue of three Persons in one God, the Trinity. But there’s no disagreement here with her conclusion concerning the low point in the development of trinitarian theology, the subject of the last post. Johnson concludes: No wonder [the Trinity] has not... Read more
Giving God a Story, 2: The second of five posts on Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, Chapter 10, on the Trinity. Elizabeth Johnson in Quest for the Living God joins a chorus in modern theology, starting in the last century, which has called for revitalizing Christian thinking about the Trinity. She wants that thinking to run in a different direction from what it has done in the not so long ago past. Then we started with the one... Read more
The first of five post on Elizabeth Johnson’s Quest for the Living God, Chapter 10, on the Trinity. God is perfect love. That must mean God didn’t just fall in love after creating a world to fall in love with – like Pygmalion falling in love with a statue he made. But what else is there for God to love? Maybe God is in love with God’s own self from all eternity, like another mythical Greek, Narcissus. That doesn’t seem... Read more
President Joe Biden became the first president to declare the second Monday in October Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In a separate statement, October 8, he also proclaimed the same date Columbus Day. Both proclamations paid tribute to the sufferings imposed on Native American communities. They honored indigenous peoples contributions to the country’s life and culture. Three years ago I wrote about this issue after the city of Mankato, Minnesota, joined other cities in replacing Columbus Day with Indigenous Peoples’ Day. In... Read more
Forty faith leaders, including Pope Francis and other representatives of major religions published an appeal to the nations on October 4, the Feast of St. Francis. They called for urgent action on the “grave threat” facing all the peoples of the world from climate change. Faith leaders from the main Christian denominations, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and others signed off on the need for international political action to guard and heal our wounded humanity and our stressed planet. Pope Francis... Read more
Imagine a person in a position of great influence and who lies about the danger of a virus and proper and improper medical interventions. Suppose as a result that virus kills half a million people that otherwise wouldn’t have died. I seems to me that liar would be guilty of that many murders. Now what is your moral risk if your political beliefs incline you to believe those lies? Say you take to social media to spread false information about... Read more
Missing Mystery is also missing in many Catholics’ Faith Ever since my long-ago younger days I’ve thought that there were some mysteries missing from the Rosary. (For previous posts on the mysteries of the Rosary, see here.) There were all the years between Jesus’ childhood (the Joyful Mysteries) and his passion and death (the Sorrowful Mysteries). It seemed that Jesus’ life between these two ends, especially his public ministry, ought to count for something. I would have liked a spot... Read more
With the concepts of altered states of consciousness and conversion, I argue for the truthfulness of the apostles’ experience of Jesus’ resurrection. Surely a better time to write about the resurrection is during Easter Season, which ended with the Feast of Pentecost. And yet, it’s appropriate to think about resurrection now if the suggestion I’m going to make is correct. That is: The certainty that Jesus was alive after he died on the cross may have taken a while to... Read more
The first of the two main parts of the Mass is a sharing of God’s word of salvation. We sit to listen to the Word of God except that we stand for the Gospel. That ought to tell us that there is more than listening going on in the Liturgy of the Word. This post on the Liturgy of the Word is the second in a series that will take a look at the way the Mass is celebrated in... Read more
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