The Good Word

27th Sunday Today s Gospel highlights what a different world Jesus and the earliest Christians lived in by comparison with us today Jesus and Luke s community unquestionably believed in slavery In all the Gospels Jesus regularly draws on the image of a slave to make points about duty respect

I am blogging from Rome for the next four months I arrived with my family on September 21 in order to spend a semester teaching University of St Thomas St Paul Minnesota students at the Angelicum Is there an easier place to be a Catholic biblical scholar than in Rome the city of Peter and

The first and gospel readings need little explanation to be familiar to us Scholars though remind us that in both cases the sinful and scandalous situation is beyond while still including the personal Imperial aggression is expensive for the aggressed and so 8th century kings organized the econ

The pillars of the Jerusalem church are continuing their investigation of the teaching of Paul of Tarsus His statements on abandoning circumcision the irrelevance of the Jewish law for new Christians his practice of traveling with women co-workers and allowing men and women to pray together in p

Leading up to the publication of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Harry Potter fans speculated as to who might die since author J K Rowling had indicated that major characters would meet their demise in the final book The biggest question of all involved Harry himself Would Rowling dare to

I promised in my last post that I would address the issue of what to do with all the violence and battles of the Old Testament I find that spiritualizing the battles of the Old Testament is an inadequate way of dealing with this dark side of the Bible but because of the complexity of the issue

This Sunday is the twenty-fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time In his reflection Father Daniel Harrington writes about the subject of money and God in Luke s gospel The words money and spirituality are seldom found in the same sentence Yet Luke and other biblical writers give a good deal

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

This past Saturday night I was invited to take part in a show on WCCO radio in Minneapolis The topic for the hour was the recent revelation and publication of Mother Teresa s private correspondence concerning her long periods of spiritual darkness regarding the presence of God The host of the sh

Friday September 14 is the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross A person has to have faith so often a lot of it to think that the cross should be exalted the cross after all is apart from accompanying pains a grinding slow way could take a day of choking to death St Paul stands a