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Heard something new in an old gospel passage this week. This Sunday’s gospel is Mark’s version of Jesus’ encounter with the rich young man. You probably know it: rich guy asks Jesus how to get to heaven, Jesus rattles off the Ten Commandments, to which the guy says “Check. Check. Check. Now what?” Jesus says…
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Who are the heroes, and who are the villains? Who are the seekers, and who are the sought? What does peace require? We’re entering the home stretch of Luke – literally, as Jesus enters Jerusalem and cleans up the temple in Luke 19 – and there are some big questions to answer. Heroes and villains…
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“You remembered my name!” One of the small touches that makes Ted Lasso so special is the way lines of dialogue get repurposed throughout the show. The creators of the series do this with bit players, too – a seemingly inconsequential character appears for a moment, recedes completely, and then nine or ten episodes later…
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Since the late 90s, I really haven’t watched traditional fiction TV series. But back in the era of “Must See TV”, shows like ER always had these crazy season finales that would be spectacular in the scope of their drama. People would die, people would move on, people would disappear, and you would be left…
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Since there’s been a lot of hullabaloo lately about the Eucharist, I picked up a book that my friend Fr. Ed Shea gave us a few years ago by Ronald Rolheiser called Our One Great Act of Fidelity. I’ve done book studies of other Rolheiser books and in fact have another of his next up…
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Where is your heart? What staves off worry for you? So Luke 12-13 is another section of “park and bark”, where Jesus is in front of a crowd rattling off a string of short teachings and parables and responding to Q&A from the crowd. And, honestly, a lot of what he says is pretty hard…
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I’ve been thinking a lot about indulgences the last few days, because a friend asked me to. I’m always a little amazed that anyone actually reads these posts, and was really touched that this friend would think to ask me if I’d ever written anything about a topic she encountered in her Church. I totally…
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There’s an inelegant term in Broadway parlance for what you do with the actor-singer who can’t dance: park and bark. While the dancers move gracefully around the stage, directors find ways to get the non-dancers from one place to another and then let them stay there to do their thing – singing and acting. (Having…
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Mike Lewis, on his excellent blog Where Peter Is, had a thoughtful and provocative essay on the tensions in today’s US Catholic Church titled “What can we offer to the world?”That question has nagged at me and in the process taken me in a different direction than Lewis heads in his essay. Lewis follows the…
