Tag: nocut
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The Most Jesus-y Thing My Church Does
Our church held it’s annual festival last weekend. Now, I grew up in a respectable Southern Protestant household, so this was foreign to my childhood. If we wanted to ride marginally safe spinny rides, our only outlet was the county fair. On its face, the festival is a pure sellout to the devil, raising money…
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The difficult grace of the passive voice
My wife is truly a saint in the making, and not only because she puts up with me. She has an unquenchable thirst for God – prioritizing prayer and study. She’s great at something I am horrible at – praying for others in her life, not only when they ask for it but just as part…
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What a hairless Mexican dog taught me about mercy
My first lesson in this Jubilee Year of Mercy came from a hairless Mexican dog and her owners over the New Year’s weekend. Chica, the dog in question, is owned by friends of ours. Over Thanksgiving, we house- and dog-sat for them, and my daughter, always passionate about dogs, bonded with Chica and her brother…
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What happened?
I didn’t set out to be that guy. Today, in a work meeting about implementing a new campaign, in a discussion of using social media, a colleague who is also a Facebook friend and Twitter follower talked about my social media presence saying “you post about…your faith, and stuff.” I could tell he was looking for…
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What does mercy look like to…
What does mercy look like to me? Every time I’m confronted with my own failings, which is a lot, it’s remembering that God loves me more. It’s also every small kindness I receive and every chance to offer one to others. What does mercy look like to my family? It’s every person who lets on…
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What do we do with mercy?
Today, Pope Francis inaugurated the Jubilee Year of Mercy to help us bring to the forefront the role of divine mercy in our life and to “rediscover the infinite mercy of the Father who welcomes everyone and goes out personally to encounter each of them.” Mercy is the place where God’s perfect love meets our…
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The limits of secularism
The head of ACLU in my state wrote a column in the local paper outlining four issues where the encroachment of theology into the public square risked tearing down the wall of church and state. While his use of words like “shameful” and “zealots” betrays, well, that this is written from a non-detached perspective, it’s…
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Writing straight with our crooked lines: #Synod15, family, and the hot issues.
For the next three or so weeks, the focus of the Church is off of Pope Francis and on the bishops gathered for the ordinary synod on the family. If this sounds like deja vù, it’s because last year bishops gathered for an extraordinary synod on the same topic (ordinary synods happen every three years;…
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BREAKING: Pope Francis not a “cafeteria Catholic” either.
Remember when I said that whether you considered yourself a conservative Catholic or a liberal Catholic or a (any other adjective) Catholic, eventually the gospel would make you choose whether you were more loyal to the descriptor or the Catholic part? Suppose you are Pope Francis, and you believe in the entirety of the Catholic…
Reading Francis 