Who Is This Child Anyway? The Gospel for the Twentieth Sunday after Trinity (a.k.a. the Twenty-eighth in Ordinary Time) is the next one coming up. It also so happens to be a fairly concise one—a lot of our remaining pericopes from Mark are—so I found I was able to knock out translation and commentary rather briskly. Christ and the Rich Young Ruler (1889) by Heinrich Hoffman The identity of “the rich young ruler” is a minor puzzle of the Synoptic... Read more
A Few Words on How to Bible Real Good Choosing a good Bible for devotional use, study, or both can be difficult, and the differences between translations can be confusing. Some variation makes sense, sure—but when you’re listening to a sermon on John 8.1-11, and you open up your own Bible to follow along, only to discover it hasn’t got a John 8.1-11 … I mean, how does that even happen? A page from a Gutenberg Bible Short version: the... Read more
A Sep-twofer I’ve combined the Gospel passages for both the 22nd and the 29th into a single post; neither is especially long or complex, and they do form part of a single discussion on one coherent topic, manifest under multiple forms. The topic arises fairly naturally after the promulgation of the Petrine office (the Gospel from the 15th), and the forms it takes in the texts I’m analyzing here are along commonplace lines: now that the top spot in the... Read more
Go here for Part I. “Thou Art Peter” The text we’ve now reached is Mark’s parallel to Matthew 16.13-28. This is where the famous verse that says “Thou art Peter [Rock], and on this rock I will build my Church,” etc. Mark provides less detail, mentioning only Jesus’ initial question and St. Peter’s answer, the latter slightly shorter than it is in Matthew. It then skips directly to the bit where St. Peter embarrasses himself; the praise of the special... Read more
A Celebrity Exorcist The back of a jubilee casting of the St. Benedict medal. The letters, first those of the cross and then of the outer ring, stand for the vade retro.1 In the interest of time, I will be skipping the one-week dip into Matthew we made on 1st September, and am discussing the Gospel texts both from the 8th and next Sunday in this post. Part of the reason for my delay was that I was toying with... Read more
An Episode of the Best Show Several years ago, a cartoon show aired on the Disney Channel.1 It was titled Gravity Falls, and still is, and it’s some of the best television in all of the television. In the rural Oregon town of Gravity Falls, twelve-year-old twins Dipper and Mabel Pines are summering with their deeply ornery Great Uncle (“Grunkle”) Stan, owner of a tourist trap called the Mystery Shack. While doing chores, Dipper discovers an anonymous journal: the cover... Read more
This post covers the Gospels for the Twelfth and Thirteenth Sundays after Trinity (a.k.a. the Twentieth and Twenty-First Sundays in Ordinary Time), as celebrated on 18 and 25 August, 2024 (Year B, weeks 20 and 21). The Peroration I’m here finishing my translation of, and commentary on, John 6, which I left off just before Assumption. This post covers the Gospel passages from both this past Sunday and the one before. When last we saw Jesus in the synagogue at... Read more
Here are links for Part I and Part II of the notes on this passage. Note a (because it proved to be gargantuan!) makes up Part II; I resume below with note b. I’ve printed the Scripture small, as it’s already been given twice. Revelation 11.19a, 19b, 12.1-6a, 6b-9, 10a, 10b-12, RSV-CE Then God’s temple in heaven was opened, and the ark of his covenanta was seen within his temple; and there were flashes of lightning, loud noises, peals of... Read more
Part II—of III! Following up from Friday’s post—and the first textual note turned out to be so long, I’ve had to split it again. I’ll reproduce the text in this post and the next, with the superscriptions for the notes. As I touched on in my last, even more so here, I’m indebted to Scott Hahn’s The Lamb’s Supper (which is about reading Revelation as an essentially liturgical book), and also to his introduction to Scriptural Mariology in Hail, Holy... Read more
(Should I Say It? It’s Such a Lame Joke. Yeah, I’m Gonna Say It) This post is kind of a one-off. 15th August is the Solemnity of the Assumption, one of the greatest feasts in the Church’s year outside the Paschal cycle; the Gospel for the Assumption, as for many Marian feasts, comes from the episode early in Luke known as the Visitation. In the interest of variety, I therefore opted to translate the first reading instead. Usually, I’m in... Read more
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