An Excerpt from the Jacket:
Priest and theologian F.X. Durrwell begins In the Redeeming Christ, his forgotten masterpiece, with "The Christian's salvation lies in his personal sanctification. There too lies the salvation of others, "First published in English in 1963 and now back in print with an introduction by Scott Hahn, Durwell's classic offers a hopeful and lucid vision of the Christian spiritual life to inspire and teach readers about the mystery of living in personal holiness --- and becoming most truly themselves --- by being "in Christ" as members of his body.
An Excerpt from the Book:
A Loving Faith
A letter from God must be read with loving faith. Kierkegaard said people should read the Bible not so much as critics and scholars, but "before God," as a man would read a letter from his fiancee. For to understand one must love. St. Paul asks that the eyes of our heart be
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Haste is our enemy. It puts us under stress, raises our blood pressure, makes us impatient, renders us more vulnerable to accidents and, most seriously of all, blinds us to the needs of others. Haste is normally not a virtue, irrespective of the goodness of the thing towards which we are hurrying.
In 1970, Princeton University did some research with seminary students to determine whether being committed to helping others in fact made a real difference in a practical situation. They set up this scenario: They would interview a seminarian in an office and, as the interview was ending, ask that seminarian to immediately walk over to a designated classroom across the campus to give a talk. But they always put a tight timeline between when the interview ended and when the seminarian was supposed to appear in the classroom, forcing the seminarian to hurry. On the way to the talk, each seminarian encountered an actor playing a distressed person (akin to the Good Samaritan scene in the gospels). The test was to see whether or not the seminarian would stop and help. What was the result?
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Author: Tom Stella
Skylight Paths. Woodstock, Vermont. 2013. Pp. 126
An Excerpt from the Jacket:
"No longer sustained by easy answers, we may find ourselves standing before a three-pronged fork in the road: we can wander in the direction of conventional beliefs and practices, we can reject God and turn away from religion altogether, or we can embrace our uncertainty as an invitation to a more vital understanding of both God and religion."
An Excerpt from the Book:
Discovering God in the Midst of Evil
Theodicy is the defense of God's goodness and omnipotence in the face of evil. An apology of sorts, theodicy attempts to prove what has come into question, to make a case for God's benevolence despite evidence to the
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Appreciation
Fr. Andrew Greeley, an eminent sociologist of religion who also happened to be probably the best-selling priest-novelist of all time and the Catholic church's most prominent in-house critic, died Wednesday in Chicago. He was 85.
Over the course of a career that generated a staggering 72 nonfiction books and 66 novels, Greeley became the voice of the liberal American Catholicism of his generation -- critical, but deeply loyal. Greeley could be too Catholic for both some on the secular left and the most embittered of the church's dissidents, as well as too outspokenly liberal for the Catholic establishment, but he was always a compelling and commercially successful player on the American stage.
Born into a large Irish Catholic family in Oak Park, Ill., in 1928, Greeley was ordained a priest of the Chicago archdiocese in 1954. He earned a doctorate in sociology from the University of Chicago in 1962. Buoyed by both the Kennedy-era New Frontier and the reforming spirit of the Second Vatican Council (1962-65), Greeley's early sociological work focused on the emancipation of American Catholics into the country's
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In a marvelous little book entitled, The Music of Silence, David Steindl-Rast highlights how each hour of the day has its own special light and its own particular mood and how we are more attentive to the present moment when we recognize and honor these "special angels" lurking inside each hour. He's right. Every hour of the day and every season of the year have something special to give us, but often times we cannot make ourselves present to meet that gift.
We grasp this more easily for special seasons of the year. Even though we are sometimes unable to be very attentive to a season like Christmas or Easter because of various pressures and distractions, we know that these seasons are special and that there are "angels" inside them that are asking to be met. We know what it means when someone says: "This year I was just too tired and pressured to get into the Christmas spirit. I just missed Christmas this year!"
And this isn't just true for special seasons like Christmas and Easter. It's true too, perhaps especially true, for the season we call Ordinary Time. Each year the church calendar sets aside more than thirty weeks for what it calls "Ordinary Time", a season within which we are supposed to meet the angels of
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Author: James Cowan
Paraclete Press. Orleans, MA 2013. Pp. 287
An Excerpt from the Jacket:
When the Holy Family fled Bethlehem to escape the wrath of King Herod Antipas, they journeyed three years in Egypt, mainly along the Nile River, keeping Herod's agents at bay. Using an ancient 4th-century test written by Patriarch Theophilus of Alexandrea as his guide, James Cowan takes the reader on a fascinating journey through 21st-century Egypt in the footsteps of Mary, Joseph, and the infant Jesus. Cowan follows their tracks around the Delta region and up the Nile to a place called Mount Qussqam, where they are believed to have resided for six months.
Cowan's itinerary, retracing holy steps from 2,000 years ago according to Coptic tradition, was revealed to Theophilus in a dream. Documenting his journey, Cowan finds himself in the midst of a spiritual revolution going on in Egypt itself. He meets with monks and health workers, desert mystics and visionaries, all of whom have a stake in the story of the Holy Family's journey. This 2,000 year-old legend is full of beauty and relevance for our world today.
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Thomas Reese
The National Catholic Reporter
Pope Francis
Like his two immediate predecessors, Pope Francis has no experience in international diplomacy. In the past, many popes like Pius XII, John XXIII and Paul VI came from the Vatican diplomatic corps. With many years of service as Vatican diplomats, these popes were comfortable as statesmen with a diplomatic roles. They already knew the Vatican line on international issues, and if they wanted to change it, they did it consciously.
Francis, on the other hand, has been thrust onto the international stage with little experience and limited knowledge of Vatican diplomatic negotiations. Luckily, Francis has said little in the past that would upset any country. In his book, On Heaven and Earth, he wrote little about international issues except globalization, which I treated in an earlier posting [1].
One country that could be upset with him is Turkey, since he refers to the "genocide of the Armenians." He compares what happened to them to what the Stalinist Communists did to the Ukrainians and the Nazis did to
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John L. Allen Jr.
All Things Catholic
The National Catholic Reporter
To no one's surprise, the Monday release of the Vatican's 2013 statistical yearbook, which surveys the global Catholic population as of 2011, confirmed the shift in Catholicism's center of gravity away from Europe and North America [1] to the southern hemisphere.
The Annuario shows that the global Catholic population, now 1.2 billion, kept pace with overall growth in 2011, but with major regional disparities. Catholicism in Africa increased by 4.3 percent and in Asia by 2 percent, both twice the general rate, but in Europe only 0.3 percent. The trend applies to Christianity generally. According to the Center for the Study of Global Christianity, the demographic heart of the faith is now in Timbuktu, Mali, and by 2100, it will have shifted even further south to Sokoto, Nigeria.
On the lecture circuit, Catholics in North America and Europe curious about how this will play out often ask two very intriguing questions:
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Hans Kung
The Catholic Reporter
Pope Francis
Essay
Who could have imagined what has happened in the last weeks?
When I decided, months ago, to resign all of my official duties on the occasion of my 85th birthday, I assumed I would never see fulfilled my dream that -- after all the setbacks following the Second Vatican Council -- the Catholic church would once again experience the kind of rejuvenation that it did under Pope John XXIII.
Then my theological companion over so many decades, Joseph Ratzinger -- both of us are now 85 -- suddenly announced his resignation from the papal office effective at the end of February. And on March 19, St. Joseph's feast day and my birthday, a new pope with the surprising and programmatic name Francis assumed this office.
Has Jorge Mario Bergoglio considered why no pope has dared to choose the name of Francis until now? At any rate, the Argentine was aware that with the name of Francis he was connecting himself with Francis of Assisi, the world-famous
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Several years ago, at a conference that I was attending the keynote speaker challenged his audience in this way: All of us, he pointed out, are members of various communities: we live in families, are part of church congregations, have colleagues with whom we work, have a circle of friends, and are part of a larger civic community. In every one of these there will come a time when we will get hurt, when we will not be honored, when we will be taken for granted, and treated unfairly. All of us will get hurt. That is a given. However, and this was his challenge, how we handle that hurt, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of our lives and determine what kind of person we are going to be.
Suffering and humiliation find us all, and in full measure, but how we respond to them will determine both the level of our maturity and what kind of person we are. Suffering and
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John L. Allen Jr.
All Things Catholic
The National Catholic Reporter
In exactly two months, Pope Francis will make his first overseas trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, for World Youth Day [1]. It shapes up as the biggest Catholic blowout of the early 21st century, a massive celebration of history's first Latin American pope folded into what's already the Catholic version of Lollapalooza.
At one level, it's tempting to start writing success stories now. The crowds will be huge and enthusiastic, Brazil desperately wants the event to go well to showcase its status as the emerging superpower of the developing world (and as a trial run for both the World Cup next year and the Summer Olympics in 2016), and Francis has already proven that he's more than ready for prime time.
Beneath the hype, however, there are four challenges
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Joshua J. McElwee
The National Catholic Reporter
For every two U.S. priests who prefer a new set of Vatican-ordered English translations of the Roman Catholic Mass, there are three others who say they do not, according to a survey released Tuesday by Saint John's School of Theology in Collegeville, Minn.
Fifty-nine percent of priests surveyed said they do not like the new Mass translations, which all Catholic parishes in the country were mandated to use beginning in fall 2011.
Eighty percent said they agreed with an assessment that the Latin to English translation is "awkward and distracting," according to the St. John's study. Sixty-one percent also said the new language needs to be revised "urgently."
The study was conducted by the school's Godfrey Diekmann, OSB Center for Patristics
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I don't mean to seem cheeky as if I am St. Dominic who received the Rosary from our Blessed Mother or Blessed John Paul who gave us the Luminous Mysteries, but I have come up with my own set of mysteries in honor of Mary's month of May. I wish that I could claim that I received these in a mystical state, but rather I tend to get easily distracted so these are the result of mental wanderings as I have said the beads.
Although the Gospels don't explicitly say that Mary smiled, we know that she must have since she is a human like you and me. I have chosen times in the life of our Lady and our Lord Jesus when she must have cracked a smile. While I don't expect Pope Francis to adopt these for the universal Church, perhaps you may enjoy my 5 Delightful Mysteries of the Rosary.
1. Jesus gets unusual baby gifts. - As the Magi laid down the gold, frankincense and myrrh, I imagine Mary's smile of gratitude mixed with an interior giggle. I imagine her thinking, "These guys know nothing about a newborn."
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Recently an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled, The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, is fair. Mostly he asks a lot of hard, necessary questions. Looking at the various sexual scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic priesthood in the past number of years, Bruni suggests that it's time to re-examine celibacy with an honest and courageous eye and ask ourselves whether its downside outweighs its potential benefits. Bruni, in fact, doesn't weigh-in definitively on this question; he only points out that celibacy, as a vowed lifestyle, runs more risks than are normally admitted. Near the end his column he writes: "The celibate culture runs the risk of stunting [sexual] development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?"
That's not an irreverent question, but a necessary one, one we need to have the courage
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Some years ago, a woman shared this story at a workshop. She had a six year-old son whom she had conscientiously schooled in prayer. Among other things, she made him kneel beside his bed every night and say aloud a number of prayers, ending with an invocation to "bless mummy, daddy, grandma, and grandpa". One night, shortly after he had started school, she took him to his room to hear his prayers and to tuck him in for the night. But when it came time for him to kneel by his bedside and recite his prayers, he refused and crawled into bed instead. His mother asked him: "What's the matter? Don't you pray anymore?" There was remarkable calm in his reply: "No," he said, "I don't pray anymore. The sister teaching us at school told us that we are not supposed to pray, she said that we are supposed to talk to God ... and tonight I am tired and have nothing to say!"
This is reminiscent of a scriptural story about King David. One morning, returning from battle with some of his soldiers, he arrived at the temple, tired and hungry, but the only food available consisted of
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by John Allen, National Catholic Reporter
1. A Cabinet, not a blue-ribbon commission
In some early reporting, the mission of this body has been described as helping Francis to reform the Roman Curia. Yet reading Saturday's announcement, that's not what it says. The key line states that Francis has assembled this group "to advise him in the government of the universal church," and only then "to study a plan for revising the Apostolic Constitution on the Roman Curia, Pastor Bonus."
In other words, curial reform is only the second task. The first is to advise the pope on decisions about the universal church, meaning there's almost nothing that falls outside its purview.
Introducing NCR's first eBook: Best Catholic Spirituality Writing 2012
To invoke parallels from secular governments, this isn't a blue-ribbon commission assembled to handle a single task, like reforming Social Security or recommending military base closings. This is
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The more I hear the variety of languages spoken around me today the more I am convinced that the English language as we know it will be greatly different with our next generation. We will actively be using a number of new and colorful words which once were foreign but have found a place in our individual vocabularies.
Whether I am in Washington, Chicago or New York, I hear at least 10 different languages spoken as I walk down the streets. At the Catholic University of America in Washington, we have student research assistants who speak Polish, Chinese, Portuguese and Croatian.
On a walk across the campus, during an evening at the Kennedy Center or strolling on the mall, I am likely to hear anything from French to Russian spoken. Foreign languages and customs are becoming second nature in the United States.
An article in the Washington Post reported how large a role Koreans are playing in the local street-vending business and how
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Anxiety, like all tensions, eats at us at various levels. More superficially, we worry about many things. Deep down though we are anxious in a way that colors most everything we do. So much of what motivates and drives us is an unconscious attempt to free ourselves from anxiety. We are forever nursing the hope that we can free ourselves from anxiety through achievement, success, financial security, fame, leaving a mark, and through power and sex. We nurse the secret belief that if we have the right combination of these our lives we will have the substance we need to feel secure and non-anxious.
But experience soon teaches us that these things, though good in themselves, are not our cure. Indeed they can, and often do, make us more anxious: As soon as we have financial security, we become anxious about protecting it; and as soon as we have power, we are constantly looking over our shoulders in fear about losing it. As well, success can quickly become a cancer because we have a congenital propensity to identify our self-worth with our achievements and this pressures us always to be doing
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