THE WHEELS HAVE been in motion for more than a year in preparation for the October 2018 synod. Bishops, observers and other voices from around the world will gather to reflect about “Young people, faith and vocational discernment.” This is definitely a most timely conversation.
As a father of four, I am familiar with practice. There’s hockey practice, piano practice and lots of practicing patience. My kids are learning what a C-sharp sounds like and how to track the puck when they are playing defense. These practices form our family by training perception.
Where have my five years of priesthood gone? I always saw myself as a “baby priest,” but the reality is quickly fading away as 50 of my younger brothers have been ordained after me.
by Carol Powell
THERE ARE TWO feast days in June that illustrate so beautifully the essence of who God really is. I am referring to the feasts of Corpus Christi and the Sacred Heart of Jesus.
Given the intellectual flimsiness of their work, it’s best to look for cultural causes to explain the “New Atheists” popularity. And surely one factor here is the now-canonical notion in Western high culture that biblical religion is incompatible with modern natural science: an idea rooted in the notion that the “scientific method” is the only way to get at the truth. (William Shakespeare, call your office.)
Fourth in a series
REGULAR READERS of this column know I teach philosophy at St. John’s University, and much of what appears in this column is a mixture of philosophy and theology.
PHOTOGRAPHS CAN capture exceptional moments in an iconic way, making the original experience “present” emotionally as well as pictorially. The photo of U.S. Marines raising the American flag on Iwo Jima’s Mt. Suribachi “means a Marine Corps for the next 500 years,” Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal said in 1945. The image of John F. Kennedy Jr.’s boyish salute as his father’s casket left Washington’s St. Matthew’s Cathedral in 1963 helped cement the “Camelot” myth into its seemingly impregnable place in American public life. The “Earthscape” pictures shot by Apollo 8 astronauts at Christmas, 1968, continue to play a not-insignificant role in today’s environmental movement.
by Laura Kelly Fanucci
STRIPPING SOAKED sheets off a child’s bed for the third night in a row. Scrubbing vomit out of a carseat. Listening to a bedroom door slam with an angry “I hate you!”
THE EVENING OF Sept. 12, 2006, was, in a word, memorable. My wife and I were having dinner in Cracow with two of John Paul II’s oldest friends when my mobile phone rang and an agitated Italian journalist started hollering in my ear, “Have you zeen zees crazee speech zee Pope has given about zee Muslims? What do you zay about it?”
by Sister Ave Clark, O.P.
WHAT A BEAUTIFUL season Easter is – a time to sing joyously, Alleluia Alleluia! But I’ve been singing with some tears this Easter season for my dear friend Arthur.
