We are told that in Egypt there are brothers who offer up frequent prayers, but that these are very short, like arrows loosed off in rapid succession, for fear that the vigilant, alert attention, so necessary for one who prays, should be weakened or blunted if too long an interval is left between them.
Is our rapidly disintegrating consensus really such a bad thing? It all depends on the meaning we assign to uniformity. If we view agreement on things as an indicator of health, and disagreement as a sign of pathology, then the loss of consensus we are facing is very frightening indeed.
The chains that bind us from claiming the abundant life that God has made known in Jesus are inside our souls and are self-imposed. Because we will not accept who we are, will not serve and enjoy our Maker as the person he has created us to be, we choose captivity over freedom.
When the Puritans had lived in England, it was clear who they were: they were not the established Church of England. They held up the Bible as the pure word of God and preached faith as the central requirement in the human relationship with God. They saw no need for bishops and Prayer Books.
There can be no question of Anskar’s saintliness, according to the standard of any age of Christendom. His missionary zeal and courage, his uncomplaining patience, his generosity, his spirit of foundation, whether at home or abroad, his austere self-discipline and his diligence in the work of his calling were all striking features of his character. He struggled hard and successfully against two faults,
On February 3, 1943, a German U-boat torpedoed the American transport ship Dorchester, sinking it off the coast of Greenland. Among the nearly 1,000 American soldiers aboard the Dorchester were four chaplains whose selfless acts of courage have left a distinguished legacy, a legacy that we hope to honor and remember in this resolution.
The religious and liturgical events that provided the setting for this song were the traditional Jewish ceremonies that followed a baby’s birth. Though they aren’t clearly defined by Luke, who was not a Jew himself, three key Jewish ceremonies were taking place in the life of Mary, Joseph, and Jesus.
Celtic saints are tenaciously native and local. They have, from the beginning, been a natural part of life, associated above all with the place in which they lived out their vocation. The waters of the holy well after all are the very selfsame waters that they were in the lifetime of the saint.
The teacher who is seen only in the classroom, and nowhere else, is a teacher and nothing more; but let him go with his boys to recreation and he becomes a brother. If one is seen only preaching from the pulpit,
I have heard of an experiment in meditation. For a certain number of days, some years ago, a group of people made a circle around the city of Washington and meditated continually. Gathered unknown to itself within this circle of loving kindness, Washington changed. The statistics for that period in the city showed a remarkable and unprecedented decrease in violence and crime.