Daniel Amiri writes: What is grace, and how exactly does grace “work”? I don’t want to suggest to anyone that I have the full answer, but over the last few years, Pope Francis’ theology has reminded the Church, in important ways, about what grace actually is and what it is not. When I say, “Pope Francis’ theology,” I am primarily referring to the way Pope Francis prioritizes Mercy, the essential, most foundational proclamation of the Christian faith. Pope Francis writes... Read more
If you’ve never had a chance to read (or better yet, hear Carl Sandburg read) his stories from the Rootabaga Country), I highly recommend it. My wife Jan found a recording once of “How to Tell Corn Fairies When You See ’em” and we fell in love with it. His description of corn fairies sitting on split rail fences and singing “soft songs that go pla-sizzy pla-sizzy-sizzy, and each song is softer than an eye wink, softer than a Nebraska... Read more
So the other day, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who gets a load of death threats and hate from Good White Christianists, got wind that Paul Manafort, one of the crooks who worked for Trump, was going to be put in solitary confinement in a prison in the district she represents. Being a decent human being, she demanded he be taken out of solitary, describing this form of punishment as torture. She needn’t have done it. Were the shoe on the other foot... Read more
…is that we can still pray this prayer for the men who went into battle at D-Day, because God exists outside of time: We cannot, obviously, change known outcomes so that the dead are not killed or the wounded are unharmed. But we can still pray for those men, in that hour, that they receive the grace, help, courage, strength and every other divine gift they need. On this, the 75th Anniversary of D Day, may God yet hear our... Read more
Amy Welborn found this cool thing about the rise and fall of Catholic Ladder, of which I have never heard, even though they were invented in my back yard as a teaching tool a century and half ago: The next spring. from March 17-May 1, Blanchet held a mission event primarily for French Canadians, downriver from Fort Vancouver on the Columbia. He had expected few Native Americans to attend because he had not begun to actively evangelize them. Nonetheless, several... Read more
Strike the shepherd, says our Lord, and the sheep will be scattered. In times when the Church is decapitated, whether through persecution or corruption, you do not (to paraphrase the Chestertonian aphorism) wind up with people believing nothing. You wind up with people believing anything. Case in point, the rise of the Right Wing Catholic Conspiracy theorist Taylor Marshall’s farrago of crazy called Infiltration: The Plot to Destroy the Church from Within. We are living in hour when the bishops... Read more
John Steinbeck had us pegged decades ago: “Except for the field organizers of strikes, who were pretty tough monkeys and devoted, most of the so-called Communists I met were middle-class, middle-aged people playing a game of dreams. I remember a woman in easy circumstances saying to another even more affluent: ‘After the revolution even we will have more, won’t we, dear?’ Then there was another lover of proletarians who used to raise hell with Sunday picknickers on her property.”I guess... Read more
The story, interestingly, is told a couple of times in the liturgical calendar, once on the Feast of the Transfiguration in August and once in Lent. And now it’s one of the Luminous mysteries of the Rosary too. I have a fondness for this moment in the ministry of Christ because it comports well with my experience in trying to follow Christ. I have often gone through various spiritual crises where things become dry as a bone and dark as... Read more
Here’s a little taste of the Creed book I’m working on: The Resurrection appearances of Jesus culminate in an abrupt end after forty days when, as the Creed puts it, Jesus “ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.” The Ascension in Scripture The Ascension occupies a curious place in biblical teaching in that it is frequently alluded to in the New Testament, but only rarely described there as an historical event. That does not... Read more
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