Chris Chatteris, S.J.

In many ways South Africa is a laboratory of social change Most unexpectedly our little Catholic community has become an experiment in the minor religious department of that laboratory I refer of course to the new English texts of the Mass which have generated such surprising friction It appears

Because I m tired of being made to feel like an idiot was the reason a woman friend of Tablet correspondent Clifford Longley gave for no longer attending Mass One hears variations on this sentiment with such regularity among thoughtful Catholics that the temptation is to coin a further beatitud

The Lord be with you And also with you Not and with your spirit The rendering of Et cum spiritu tuo in a sense which included the whole person raised eyebrows back then when it first came out Had a fifth column of Anglo-Saxon anti-metaphysician logical positivists infiltra

The preaching of the good news is like one beggar telling another where to find food This is an arresting aphoristic definition of unknown origin likely to give pause to an aspiring Bossuet Such a definition well illustrates Mary Catherine Hilkert s fundamental point that Every preacher has a

It is hard for the congregation to take the homily more seriously than the preacher takes it Anon Speakers exhibit visual and verbal signs that prompt their listeners to make judgments about their right to communicate R Kennedy quoting King Power and Communication If we ap

Peter Sellick s beautiful article on this topic refers us approvingly to Archbishop Rowan Williams critique of the anthropocentric Renaissance view of the artist as a creative genius who imposes his will on his artistic material Williams proposes a return to the earlier more self-effacing v

Morris West in his memoirs reminds us of the words he puts into the mouth of Giordano Bruno in his play The Heretic Ever since the Greeks we have been drunk with language We have made a cage of words And shoved our God inside as boys confine A cricket or a locust to make him sing A private s

According to Buttrick in his magisterial work Homiletic Moves and Structures to fail to create images in preaching or any form of speaking is to risk making no real impact at all Ideas without depiction are apt to be abstract and oddly enough unconvincing he says On the other hand it i