peace
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What would Francis do? So as I mentioned before, Francis of Assisi is mostly known as a nature lover. Lots of statues in gardens. Lots of statues holding up birdbaths. Stories of him preaching to birds. Stories of him saving earthworms from the road. Stories of him negotiating peace between a wolf and a city.…
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“Most of the quotes attributed to famous people are wrong.” — Abraham Lincoln You probably know the Prayer of St. Francis – you make have heard the hymn version, “Make Me a Channel of Your Peace”, which has been arranged many times (my favorite is in the Broadway musical Come From Away). I’ll post the…
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My parents were traditional Midwestern Protestants who had several close friends who were Catholics, but who understood Catholicism as a separate faith from theirs. (This seems to reflect the way Catholics thought of Protestants before the Second Vatican Council, to be fair.) I never heard it directly from them, but through back channels I picked…
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This was a dumb idea, God. Advent, the 4-week liturgical season that leads up to Christmas, is the beginning of the Church’s new year, so it’s a good time to reflect and repent and reform, or at least to start working up momentum to your New Year’s Resolutions. I had just finished re-reading one of…
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So here’s something we have in common with 13th century Italy. Then as now, young men were steeped in a culture that glorified violence as the path to significance. If you wanted to *be somebody*, as a guy back then, you wanted to be a knight, a warrior. Francis was no exception as a youth.…
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“If we have no peace, it is because we have forgotten that we belong to each other.” – St. Teresa of Calcutta If? The “forgetting that we belong to each other” smacks you in the face at so many turns these days. Our politics is based on a tribalism that “otherizes”, intentionally and consistently casting…
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One of my favorite parts of Evangelii Gaudium is Francis’ study of peace and unity. As we celebrate Pope Saint John XXIII, whose best-known encyclical is Pacem in Terris (Peace on Earth), and whose best-known anything was convening the Second Vatican Council, which paved the way for any number of steps toward Christian and interreligious…
Reading Francis 