America Magazine - The Good Word

Sunday Afternoons in Narnia

Terrance W. Klein

Because my interest in priesthood began in junior high, I attended the strangest and most wonderful of high schools, a boarding school run by Capuchin Franciscan friars in Hays, Kansas, Thomas More Prep. What was strange? Two years before I arrived it had been two separate schools, both run by the friars, a minor seminary and a military academy. Besides being all male, the only other attribute such schools would share was a thoroughly relentless horarium, a daily schedule. I suppose that’s true of any boarding school. Behind every Hogwarts there’s a onerous horarium.

A bell rang every morning at seven. By seven-fifteen, we were downstairs in chapel for morning prayer.

Come Out of Him

Terrance W. Klein

The First Mass took place in a small, Eastern Kansas farming community, its citizens equally divided between Catholics and Mennonites. I was there as the vocation director for the Diocese of Dodge City, which Fr. Jim, the newly ordained, had joined while working in the western part of the state. A very small dinner followed the Mass. Most of its participants, both Catholic and Mennonite, came from farm families.

It was a coffee and tea event, though at the end of the meal a sister of the newly ordained offered a toast. She then asked her Father and Mother if they wanted to say something. Jim’s father smiled but nodded his head, no. At first Jim’s mother also demu

Oklahoma Love Letters

Terrance W. Klein

Grandma Klein took milk in her coffee. My parents drank theirs black. I remember fetching milk for her from our fridge and her saying, “I like a little coffee in my milk.” That was the afternoon that I asked her how she had met my grandpa.

I was in junior high school. My grandfather had been dead for so many years. I had very little memory of him. Only his work clothes, sitting on his lap, his habit of always wanting a little sweet at the end of any meal.

Grandma Klein, on the other hand, had been the great comfort of my childhood. I remember sitting in her lap as she rocked me on her Kansas porch, my parents having left us in her care while they attende

Dean Brackley and the Casa de la Solidaridad

Tim Reidy

The Casa de la Solidaridad (www.scu.edu/casa) is a semester-long, Santa Clara University-sponsored study abroad program in El Salvador. The following is an edited version of a reflection given by Katie Dorner, of Gonzaga University, at the farewell Mass for the fall semester. The “praxis sites” she refers to are the field placements for the students in the program; many people from those communities attended the Mass. In her talk, Dorner refers to Dean Brackley, S.J., co-founder of the Casa program. He was one of the six Jesuits who moved to El Salvador to help replace the six who were murdered in 1989. Brackley died of p

Fellowship Fouled But Enfolded

Terrance W. Klein

Ironically, one can learn a lot about what it means to be human from the teaching of St. Thomas Aquinas on angels. Consider, for example, a contrast the angelic doctor draws between angels and humans. Every human being is an individual member of what Aristotle called the human species, but St. Thomas taught that every angel is his own species (Cf. Summa Theologica I, 50-64).

That may seem the most esoteric of speculations, but consider the implication. Every angel completely fulfils what it means to be an angel. That’s why, although — as scripture attests and Thomas concurs — there is a vast multitude of angels, no two share a species. Put another way, one angel

Am Now Quite Certain

Terrance W. Klein

The Kansas State Capitol Building is the prettiest in the nation, especially when the petunias are in bloom. Most Kansas school children visit it; my class was no exception. The French Renaissance architecture of the exterior is memorable, but the John Steuart Curry murals within, depicting Kansas history, are unforgettable, especially one — often reproduced — entitled “Tragic Prelude.”

Two groups of Kansans face each other, rifles mutually aimed, beneath U.S. and Confederate flags. In the background are tornado winds and flames

Spiritual Reading for Liturgical Cycle B

John Coleman, S.J.

I was given, as a gift, a copy of Michael Casey's Fully Human, Fully Divine (Ligouri Press, 2004) by someone whom I meet with, regularly, in spiritual direction. He claimed he found the book a remarkable resource for his own prayer and reflection. Casey, a Trappist monk in Tarrawara, Australia, is, indeed, a gifted writer. But, a decidedly added plus for me in this book, especially at the end of 2011 and the beginning of 2012, is the way it delves systematically into the gospel of Mark which forms our continuous gospel reading for this coming year as we go through liturgical cycle B.

Fully Human, Fully Divine finds much solace in Mark's so human Jesus (wh

Ends and Beginnings

John W. Martens

Since 2007 I have blogged at America Magazine’s “The Good Word” and have enjoyed the practice and habit of blogging immensely. “The Good Word” gave me the freedom to write on the topics and passages on which I saw fit and, significantly, gave me a built in audience, since America Magazine in print has been with us for over a century now. It is this readership which I will miss the most, since I enjoyed the comments, ideas, and good will which was generated at the site by readers. It made “The Good Word” a civilized site, which it remains, and which is sometimes too rare on the web, but which mirrors the purposes of the Bible, to transcend ephemera

A Garrison Keillor Christmas

Terrance W. Klein

Garrison Keillor’s A Christmas Blizzard lies within the tradition of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol: the metamorphosis is something of a miracle. Here’s how its protagonist, James Sparrow, a wealthy Chicago CEO, learns that he will be spending Christmas, a holiday he really doesn’t enjoy, in Looseleaf, North Dakota, rather than Hawaii. Unless you were hatched, without the benefit of family, the tone of the conversation will be familiar.

His phone rang.

Discipleship as Dwelling

Terrance W. Klein

As celebrity memoirs go, Diane Keaton’s Then Again is unique for three reasons. It’s reflective; it was actually written by her; and it gives voice to, not one but, two women, Diane and her mother Dorothy. Keaton explains how it is that we hear two voices in her biography. While Diane was appearing on Broadway in the musical Hair,

watching fellow tribe members shed their clothes onstage every night, Mom switched from letters to journals. It was 1969. She had gone from a twenty-four-year-old woman feeling the newness of two loves, to an adoring mother who reaped the so-called ‘rewards’ of being a homemaker

Making Monsters

Terrance W. Klein

In his new novel Lost Memory of Skin, Russell Banks wants to disturb us, and with a disturbing subject: sex offenders. No attempt is made to exculpate these men, but Russell does want his readers to do what many in society today refuse to do. He wants us to see these offenders as men—failed, sinful, even criminal human beings—but nevertheless men, not monsters.

At the end of the novel, its protagonist, a young man simply called the Kid returns to a causeway connecting a Florida barrier island with the coast. It’s where the Kid lives, in a small tent city underneath a causeway overpass, because he can’t legally dwell withi

Come in for Coffee and Cake

Terrance W. Klein

According to Time Magazine, “There was a hand-scrawled sign on the fence post of a cross-roads farm: come in for coffee and cake.” It was a Yuletide invitation. Doesn’t seem all that strange, until one learns that the Yule in question was seventy years ago this month and that the place was the Pacific coast of the United States, whose citizens feared they were about to be invaded.

The United States Pacific Fleet had been surprised and decimated at Pearl Harbor on December 7^th. The forces of the Imperial Japanese Navy had damaged all eight of the U.S.’s battleships; four had been sunk. 188 aircraft were destroyed, and

Ruth

Terrance W. Klein

Did I ever tell you about Ruth? She was a checker at the grocery store my father ran. One of my earliest childhood memories was Ruth seeing my toddler self, on the arm of my mother, pick up a Tootsie Roll to put in my pocket. She whispered something into my Mother’s ear. After my first “talkin’-to” in business ethics, Mom told me to produce the candy from my pocket and to give it to Ruth with the words, “I’m sorry.”

Ruth was always at the grocery store, five days, forty hours a week, at minimum wage, year after year. She needed the job. It was a small Kansas town, with few opportunities for the unskilled labor of a woman. Ruth lived on the

All Along the Watchtower

John W. Martens

Jesus said to his disciples:
"Be watchful! Be alert!
You do not know when the time will come.
It is like a man traveling abroad.
He leaves home and places his servants in charge,
each with his own work,
and orders the gatekeeper to be on the watch.
Watch, therefore;
you do not know when the Lord of the house is coming,
whether in the evening, or at midnight,
or at cockcrow, or in the morning.
May he not come suddenly and find you sleeping.
What I say to you, I say to all: 'Watch’” (Mark 13:33-37)

Practically, the advice to “be alert” or &

What If?

Terrance W. Klein

What if you could change history? That’s the provocative premiss of Stephen King’s newest offering, entitled, 11/22/63: A Novel. The date, of course, is that of the Kennedy assassination, a watershed moment in modern history. But what if there were a way to go back and prevent Lee Harvey Oswald in firing his rifle from the Texas Book Depository Building?

In King’s novel, Jake Epping, a high school English teacher, is confronted by Al Templeton, the owner of Al’s Fatburgers, a greasy spoon with a time-portal in its pantry, with the possibility of changing the past. According to what is known as the Butterfly theory, even a small change could have enormou