God is good. Tonight Erika writes: Today is the feast of St. Bernadette of Lourdes. When all medical knowledge was exhausted and the prognosis “may need psychiatric treatment for months”, my 8-year-old daughter woke up, ate a complete breakfast, walked on her own, then two hours later ran into her father’s arms crying, “Daddy! I […]
Archive | April, 2014
Voyage to Alpha Centauri
This is yet another book that Dom received as a review copy. I thought it was a perfect read for Lent. This is Michael O’Brien’s first science fiction novel. Not surprisingly it is theological science fiction: angels and demons, sinners and saints, science and faith. I like Michael O’Brien’s fiction. I’ve read all of his […]
Please Pray (Updated)
Please pray for Miriam, the eldest daughter of my friend, The Philosopher Mom. She’s ten and undergoing her own Way of the Cross this Lent, suffering very much and still with no diagnosis. And pray for her family and especially her parents. Thank you very much. Update Sunday night: “Miriam was just admitted to the […]
Daily Living/Learning Notes
I really liked the daily records I kept last week, but don’t know that I want to make them a daily blog post. That takes more time each day than I want to devote to it. So this week I’m going to try to just make one weekly post with each day’s notes in a […]
An Unprecedented Realism
The real novelty of the New Testament lies not so much in new ideas as in the figure of Christ himself, who gives flesh and blood to those concepts—an unprecedented realism. In the Old Testament, the novelty of the Bible did not consist merely in abstract notions but in God’s unpredictable and in some sense […]
The Measure of Human Love
First, eros is somehow rooted in man’s very nature; Adam is a seeker, who “abandons his mother and father” in order to find woman; only together do the two represent complete humanity and become “one flesh”. The second aspect is equally important. From the standpoint of creation, eros directs man towards marriage, to a bond […]
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell: Daily Dose of Poetry and Art
Ikon: The Harrowing of Hell by Denise Levertov (1923–1997) Down through the tomb’s inward arch He has shouldered out into Limbo to gather them, dazed, from dreamless slumber: the merciful dead, the prophets, the innocents just His own age and those unnumbered others waiting here unaware, in an endless void He is ending now, stooping […]
Mysticism, Monasticism, and the New Evangelization
Pope Benedict’s encyclical Deus Caritas Est opens with this thought: We have come to believe in God’s love: in these words the Christian can express the fundamental decision of his life. Being Christan is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives […]
God’s Passionate Love for His People Turns God against Himself
“The Prophets, particularly Hosea and Ezekiel, described God’s passion for his people using boldly erotic images. God’s relationship with Israel is described using the metaphors of betrothal and marriage; idolatry is thus adultery and prostitution. Here we find a specific reference—as we have seen—to the fertility cults and their abuse of eros, but also a […]
Divine Office, Done Badly (Repost)
[I found this post in my archives and really needed the reminder. I thought I’d repost for everyone else who needs the reminder in this final stretch of Lent.] Recently Daria of the Coffee and Canticles blog had a lovely post titled Worth Doing Badly in which she responds to a promoter of the Liturgy […]