NEAR AND AT HAND
Jesus was a great storyteller. But he just didn’t tell stories. He meant his stories to be parables, teaching tools through which he could enable his followers to understand a deeper truth. His parables were intended to cause the listener to think about them and reflect on what he meant in telling them. One can hear the same parable numerous times, and each time gain a different insight into its’ meaning.
READ MORE
|
-
At some point beyond the current chaos, our children and grandchildren will be able to read the accumulated record and they will have to contend with the fact that we not only witnessed but were complicit in a national era of cruelty.
-
Our voices are a gift from God. Often, we may think we cannot directly address the struggles of the poor, the voiceless, and others in need. But we can always use our voices to speak out on their behalf and our efforts might help move our world one step closer to God’s vision of a world where justice prevails.
-
The retired New York cardinal invoked Jesus and the Statue of Liberty in a video this week. Within hours, replies branded him a traitor-priest out of the nativist right’s favorite novel. When even Timothy Dolan has become a target, the administration is running out of Catholics willing to bless its war on the stranger.
-
Scroll through enough debates online and a pattern becomes hard to miss. Whatever the starting point, the conversation tends to collapse into questions about sexual ethics. Everything else — justice, poverty, inequality, power — quietly slips out of view.
-
Contemporary discourse on Catholic identity appears incommensurable, largely because of an intransigent reliance on a singular model that dictates what Catholic identity must mean and how it is presented. To rely on a single model as the standard for Catholic identity is to content oneself with a half truth.
-
When the church has little time for women’s presence, when the church takes little notice of women’s questions, when the church holds little respect for women’s insights, when the church devotes itself to preaching the gospel of equality for women but preserves a male theology and a male system, staying in the church demands a purpose far beyond ourselves.
-
One of the most creative strategies to engage the religiously disaffected is the Nuns and Nones movement, a national organization that includes several hundred Catholic sisters and younger nones. The theology underlying these efforts by Catholic sisters is one of accompaniment, not proselytization.
-
Why are so many people leaving their churches? There is no one answer to that question. People are complex. Faith is complex. The issues are complex. Looking at the question, it can be helpful to distinguish among a number of groups. The Nones, the Dones, the Spiritual-but-not-Religious, the Indifferent, the Angry, and the Marginalized.
 |
