Click here for the complete Mass readings for January 31, 2016. A reading from the book of the prophet Jeremiah. The word of the LORD came to me, saying: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you A reading from the Gospel according to Luke. But Jesus passed through the midst of them and went away. In today’s Gospel, Jesus pulls a neat trick. He causes a riot and then disappears. The pairing with Jeremiah seems strange at... Read more
Aleteia has launched For Her, a web magazine for women that is “finely focused” through a Christian lens. As much as I dislike being shunted into a special section for girls, I was at least a little bit excited to see how a Catholic site about “what the church really teaches” would speak directly to me. The evangelical magazine Christianity Today has a blog, her.meneutics, where women writers analyze secular and Christian culture, books, and media. I’ve written for them, and I recognized some of the... Read more
“The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” Jack Kerouac, On The Road When Jess and I started this blog, we envisioned a space where we could write about the journey of faith with honesty and candor . We knew that many of the artists, writers, saints and sinners who have inspired and articulated our longing for God had difficult journeys themselves, marked by a titanic amount of struggle. Every week we want... Read more
The Washington Post described Lutheran Pastor Nadia Bolz-Weber as a “superhero from Planet Alternative Christian:” In her body and her theology, Bolz-Weber represents a new, muscular form of liberal Christianity, one that merges the passion and life-changing fervor of evangelicalism with the commitment to inclusiveness and social justice of mainline Protestantism. She’s a tatted-up, foul-mouthed champion to people sick of being belittled as not Christian enough for the right or too Jesus-y for the left. Not Christian enough for the... Read more
Click here for the complete Mass Readings for Sunday, January 24, 2016. A reading from the Gospel According to Saint Luke. Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had grown up, and went according to his custom into the synagogue on the sabbath day. He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah. He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written: The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed... Read more
A few years ago, I sat at a bar in Canada during a fierce snow storm. I’d traveled there to help a good friend of mine, a First Nations chief, write his memoir. We’d traveled to Calgary from the reservation so he could sign a treaty with the Canadian government. He’d gone to bed early and I decided to write while watching hockey and drinking a beer. As often happens when I’m in a strange place, I started talking to... Read more
Click here for the complete Mass readings for Sunday, January 17, 2016 A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Corinthians. Brothers and sisters, There are different kinds of spiritual gifts but the same Spirit; there are different forms of service but the same Lord; there are different workings but the same God who produces all of them in everyone. To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit. To one is given through the... Read more
“We have foolishly conceived you to be a tyrant over human life.” –St Augustine I’ve had a lot of trouble finding a priest who believes in the devil. They usually dismiss my fears of the man with the pitchfork and speak instead of an amorphous evil or darkness at work in the world, if they’ll acknowledge evil at all. Evil is out of style. We’re the Church of Mercy. But a Catholicism that’s obsessed with hell had a stranglehold on... Read more
With this post, Sick Pilgrim is joining the conversation on My Badass Book of Saints for the Patheos Book Club. I just finished writing a story about “Green Nuns” and every sister I interviewed made me want to go out and get a composting toilet. These women were inspiring. They were brilliant. They were strong. They saw the writing on the wall years ago about the looming ecological crisis—and the Church’s vocational crisis—and instead of slipping quietly into obscurity they... Read more
THE DARK DEVOTIONAL is Sick Pilgrim’s weekly feature on the Sunday Mass readings, published every Friday. These meditations may provoke, depress, or inspire, depending on where your heart is. But we hope they’ll help us to see a little better in the dark. “I once received a letter from an old lady in California who informed me that when the tired reader comes home at night, he wishes to read something that will lift up his heart, and it seems... Read more
Sick Pilgrim
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In