“We’re all contradictory. We all have the potential for great good and the potential for great sin — that’s the human condition.”Gayle recently spoke with Father John Bartunek, a priest in the order of the Legion of Christ, a religious congregation. Father . . . . Continue Reading »
Not long ago, and I’m sure you remember it as if it were yesterday, I wrote about my search for the perfect prayer book. Help Help Help, &c. Well, God and reader Ed P. have heard my cry. Ed P. writes: . . . I commend to your consideration the “Monastic Diurnal” published by . . . . Continue Reading »
Anne Lamott wrote once that prayer boils down to saying either Help Help Help or Thank you Thank you Thank you. The description’s accurate enough, as I have some reason to know, and as a default mode for prayer, I guess a person could do worse. To believe in God to begin with, and to believe that . . . . Continue Reading »
The Anchoress has posted this beautiful video of the Nashville Dominicans, whose postulant classes, like those of the Dominican Sisters of Mary, Mother of the Eucharist in Ann Arbor, have been overflowing in recent years. Meanwhile, we — our parish, that is — were visited recently by . . . . Continue Reading »
Yesterday was the Feast of St. Monica, the mother of St. Augustine. This feast was the occasion on which the the Venerable (soon to be Blessed) John Henry Cardinal Newman preached a characteristically brilliant sermon called “Intellect, the Instrument of Religious Training.” The whole thing is . . . . Continue Reading »
As a Catholic growing up in the years before Vatican II, I knew very few Protestants, much less evangelicals, even though I lived in Kentucky and southern Indiana, heartland of Protestantism, and not the Episcopalian variety. As a matter of fact, until I went to college, there were no blacks and not a single person I would have been able to identify as Jewish among my acquaintances. Such was the status and class separation of the 1950s, an outcome of the hermeticism of middle-class life of that era. Continue Reading »
It is time for evangelicals to recover a fully biblical appreciation of the Blessed Virgin Mary and her role in the history of salvation—and to do so precisely as evangelicals. The question, of course, is how to do that. Can the evangelical reengagement with the wider Christian tradition . . . . Continue Reading »
A Methodist friend of mine has always been puzzled by the emphasis Catholics place upon ready-made prayers. She considers recourse to the Hail Mary to be little more than prayer on autopilot, the rote droning of words learned and memorized as children. How, she wonders, can it possibly produce an . . . . Continue Reading »
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