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Once there was a family, parents with four adult children, who ran a business. The parents loved all four of their children immensely, and the children all loved their parents. But the kids couldn’t stand each other. The two older siblings were always fighting about how the business should be run; they had completely opposite
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Sufficient for a day… I’ve noticed that the theme of a lot of current health trends is to stay in the moment. The key to strength training, I’m told, is to be intentional about each moment of each rep of weights; rather than seeing how many times you can lift something or how heavy a
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Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope. Pope Francis, speaking to young people in Paraguay, 2015 In sports, you usually don’t win if you’re playing not to lose. In life, you
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Here’s what jumped out at me from the readings from yesterday’s Mass: encountering God is a lot more like a football game than a book group. One of the things that I struggle with is the degree to which many Christians talk about their faith in dispassionate, philosophical terms. In Catholicism, there’s a tendency to
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Maybe the Church should shut up about sex for a while. Enough, already. Not because of hypocrisy, though there are deep layers of that. Not because sex isn’t important. Not because the Church has nothing worth saying about it. Not because I disagree with what it has to say. I think the Church should shut
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Love is a whisper, necessary even when it is insufficient. A couple of threads converged this week in a way that is unusual enough that I wanted to share them. Early this week, a good friend and committed advocate for justice sent me a quote from Sister Helen Prejean, the advocate for abolishing the death
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It’s really easy to see the weeds and way too hard to buy the pearl. So the schedule of readings for the last couple weeks, as well as this Sunday, are a string of parables from Matthew 13, and the themes that come up for me as I sit with them are ones I feel
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God is not so hard to find. I sometimes hear four different homilies on a Sunday, in addition to a couple of written reflections. Thanks to technology, in addition to the routinely excellent homilies at my home parish, I listen to podcasts featuring compelling American preachers with varying styles – one focuses on young people;
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What would St. Francis say? A friend recently sent a “Reverse Prayer of St. Francis: Make Me a Channel of Disturbance”. It’s a good prayer. As is the “Peace Prayer of St. Francis,” to which it is a counterpoint. St. Francis didn’t pray either of these prayers, it’s worth saying at the outset. The “Make
Reading Francis 