The Good Word

What happens when God truly does something new in our midst The readings nbsp for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time give us a glimpse of how the extraordinary manifests itself in day to day life and events though we might not think it extraordinary any longer We have lost the sense of wonder

Maps have border lines The earth itself does not Human life demands drawing boundaries but God rsquo s life knows none While we live we constantly claim what we consider to be our own and we define ourselves both by who we are mdash and who we are not If religion were entirely divinely w

On occasion I offer reviews of books which I believe have some popular appeal for a wider audience These reviews tend to be lengthier and more academic than regular posts Sarah Ruden rsquo s book Paul Among the People The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time New York Image Boo

God speaks in many ways but if you want to hear him you need to be prepared to listen nbsp In 1 Kings 19 12 following wind earthquake and fire ndash which is the name of a 70s band I believe ndash Elijah hears a ldquo sound of sheer silence rdquo NRSV or ldquo a tiny whispering sound

Biblical scholars especially but all of us in general are sometimes tempted to think of reading and interpreting the Bible as a solitary enterprise Scholars have no excuse for this egotism as they should recognize that they are constantly standing on the shoulders of others some giants and some

Historian David McCullough rsquo s newest offering The Greater Journey Americans in Paris includes a roadside stop between harbor and metropolis in Rouen to see its cathedral He writes The Americans had never beheld anything remotely comparable It was their first encounter with a Gothic ma

Army Staff Sgt Wyatt A Goldsmith 28 died Friday July 15 at Camp Bastion Hospital from injuries suffered during an attack in Afghanistan by insurgents firing rocket-propelled grenades A Medic he was attending to the wounds of an allied Afghan commando when he was wounded Wyatt was on his thi

In an article on thanksgiving the Australian Jesuit poet Peter Steele reminisces about how he discovered the American writer SJ Perelman While on holiday as a boy he picked up a copy of Perelman rsquo s Acres and Pains at a kerbside shop in Western Australia He describes the reading of it as thoug

Wisdom of Solomon was written in Greek sometime in the late first century BCE or early first century CE to encourage the Jewish community probably in Alexandria to be confident of their God s governance in a particularly difficult time Today s passage comes in the third part of this book Part I

The data for a new poll on the Bible is up on the Gallup website I am slightly confused by what the poll was attempting to measure as it seems to confuse literal interpretation of the Bible with belief in nbsp the Bible as the actual word of God Here is an excerpt from the accompanying descrip