“St. Thomas Aquinas says that all of the works of God recorded in the Old Testament and everything that pertains to Christ in the New Testament are contained in the Psalter in the form of praise,” wrote the theologian Lawrence S. Cunningham in this 1997 article on praying with the Psalms.
Lawrence S. Cunningham
Posted inBooks
Fearless Friar
The story of an extraordinary encounter at the height of the Fifth Crusade
Posted inBooks
An Alternative Theology
Aviad Kleinberg a professor of history at Tel Aviv University belongs to that not inconsiderable number of contemporary historians who have taken seriously the cult of the saints in the history of Christianity That interest in the saints has been especially energized by Peter Brown rsquo s The Cu
Posted inArts & Culture, Culture
Reading in the Season of Lent
One could do worse than devote some time during Lent to ‘lectio divina’ and reading the Scriptures prayerfully.
Posted inFrom Our Archives
Martyrs Named and Nameless
In his first encyclical, Deus Caritas Est, Pope Benedict XVI remarked that the essential functions of the church are three, for which he gives the Greek terms: leitourgia (worship), marturia/kerygma (witness/proclamation), and diakonia (service). He uses the word marturia (witness) in the original s
Posted inCulture
The Passing of a Giant
At the insistent urging of a motel clerk near the Minneapolis airport a few years ago, I took the motel shuttle to that temple of American consumerism, The Mall of America, even though, as I told the lady at the front desk, I am not a mall kind of a guy. After a few bewildering minutes of strolling
Posted inFaith, Features
Who was St. John of the Cross?
There are so many mistaken notions about St. John of the Cross (1542-91) that we might do well to clarify some of them.
Posted inArts & Culture, Books
The Ground of Our Being
In 1918 the German religion scholar Friedrich Heiler published his great phenomenological study of prayer which for all its merits and sympathy for prayer was flawed by his rigid separation of prayer from ritual gesture folk custom and icon Heiler rsquo s restrictive methodology did not come
Posted inBooks
Whose Reform’?
Invariably reviewers of writings by the Rev Andrew Greeley feel obliged to mention how much he writes which is a lot Few bother to note how certain basic themes run like threads through his work particularly when Greeley reflects on the mountain of data he has produced over a very long career a
Posted inFaith
United in Happiness
It always disappoints me a bit when the celebrant at Mass chooses Eucharistic Prayer 1 (the Roman Canon) and skips the invocation of the saints, that resonant list of early martyrs recited before and after the institution narrative. The omission is all the more disappointing since one of those lists