peace
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Who can tell you, successfully, that you’re living life wrong? I’ve been thinking about this question in relation to the Gospel story of the “rich young ruler” found in Mark 10, as well as in relation to our current cultural divisions in America. The Gospel story, in short, is this: a rich young man comes…
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Castle, caravan, or cookout? Some people see the Church, and the Country, as a castle. A fortress with fortifications constructed to protect the good from the evil. The good people from the evil people. The good values, society, norms, history from the decadent. The Truth from Lies. The Pure from spoil. Usually, it seems, the…
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His name was Roger. I worked in residence life for three years of undergrad and four years of graduate school, and I will tell you that what I learned helping run dorms has been more useful than anything I learned in classes those seven years. (Except my Radio-TV Speech class; I actually use the skills…
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I spent more than 17 hours on the phone over a three-week span between Thanksgiving and Christmas with a company’s representatives. (So, how were your holidays?) The first call was 3 ½ hours on hold followed by a 30-minute conversation to make the purchase I intended. Due to a series of errors made by the…
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“Preach the Gospel at all times. Use words when necessary,” is another quote attributed to Francis of Assisi that he almost certainly didn’t say. Francis used words aplenty to preach the Gospel; in fact, he used all the clubs in the bag, all the tools in the toolbox, all the metaphors in the idiom to…
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So I cheated. A little. I identified “worship” as a key Franciscan theme, though I think you could make a better case for “prayer”. But I didn’t want a framework with 3 Ps (with poverty and peace), 2 Cs (creation and community) and a random W (witness). So here we are. But using “worship” as…
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G.O.A.T. stands for Greatest Of All Time. Sports fanatics like to argue about who deserves this honorific in different categories, like greatest player or team or comeback or mascot. Usually, it’s just a way to pass time during commercial breaks or blowouts. For kids, and frankly, for a lot of people, Christmas is clearly the…
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We’re at the week in Advent with the rose (don’t call it pink) candle, which is when the people in the Church talk about joy. Up until now, my Franciscan Advent examination of conscience has been pretty, well, dark and joyless. Rejecting St. Francis of Assisi’s radical examples on poverty, peacemaking, love of creation and…
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I love you all, but only to a point. Although the other dimensions of Francis’ life so far – poverty, peacemaking, creation – are starkly challenging yardsticks, his version of community is actually the hardest for me to write about. That’s because, with those others, the gap between his lived example and the world we…
Reading Francis 