Category: background
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Passions, Habits, and the Life in Between
Take this as a giant maybe, a question to test, a hypothesis. In reflection tonight a few things struck me that, together, seem to encompass a lot of life. The first point was about passions. I was observing how someone close to me is driven by a passion, an inward drive to consume something past…
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Simpleton
I think the last time I blogged about anything, I banged out some lyrics to songs that had come up in my playlist, but I only referenced one song – Derek Minor’s Change The World (with guest Hollyn). Here’s the song with lyrics for the uninitiated. (I’m not typing it out.) It came up again tonight…
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All About Expectations
I kinda thought my next post wouldn’t be until Pope Francis published his encyclical on the environment, but I realized that there’s been a lot of attention about this week’s extraordinary synod of bishops on the topic of the family, and my non-Catholic, was-Catholic, and Catholic-but-busy friends were aware and not necessarily sure about it.…
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The Whole Pope Thing
It dawned on me during my Italian vacation that some of my readers may not understand how the whole “pope” thing is understood by Catholics. It’s pretty important, so let me spell it out. I think most people understand that the pope is the head of the Roman Catholic Church, but that’s not the whole…
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The Good Pope
Ever since Pope Francis’ election, I’ve been thinking that the mainstream has been missing the mark by saying that we’ve never had a pope like him before. John XXIII has always been one of my favorites, even though he died years before I was born and decades before I became a Catholic. I can’t do…
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What if?
You might have heard of Rick Warren’s The Purpose Driven life. Pastor Warren isn’t Catholic, but his five-fold description of what the Christian life is about mirrors almost exactly the five-fold roles of the Church that our local diocese (collection of Catholic Churches run by a bishop) used in a class I took a few…
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Who’s the Target?
One other thing I want to get out there early for all of my fellow Christians who aren’t Catholic is who Francis thinks we should be evangelizing. Some of you may have read the last post and thought it sounded pretty similar to Protestant evangelical Christians like Billy Graham, or Rick Warren, or David Platt,…
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Why not skip to the good part?
If you’re used to hearing about Pope Francis from news reports, and you’re more inclined to care about social, political or economic issues, you may be wondering whether to just skip to the parts that pertain to those issues. You can, of course. That’s what the secular media (and most of the Catholic media) did.…
Reading Francis 