The Good Word

According to popular interpretation Barnabas means a person who consoles and encourages this name was given to a certain Joseph from Crete who some weeks each year served in the liturgical functions of the Jerusalem Temple We meet him first in the Acts of the Apostles where he is praised fo

Well is it for many or for all Even here on the Southern tip of Africa where the number of Catholic mother tongue English speakers is minuscule it s also a hot topic Our local Catholic paper has been running a muscular correspondence between prelates liturgists and pew-sitters H

This Sunday is the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ For Daniel Harrington s comments on the readings click here For Dianne Bergant s 2004 comments on the readings click here For John Donahue s 2001 comments on the readings click here Jim McDermott SJ

Blessed Ordinary Time when everything in the Divine Office is simple and simply in one place A time when we are relieved of that maddening fiddling and flipping back and forth which a confrere of mine calls an occasion of sin Blessed is this time when there are no liturgical extravaganzas to

Wading into the deep waters of Trinitarian reflection is always risky especially for folks like me who don t know how to swim The problem of course is not God s it is our inability to take it all in But the Feast of the Holy Trinity invites us consider how much God desires that we rec

One of the many proofs that God has a sense of humor and a wicked one is that Jesuit ordinations and first masses in the United States often fall on the weekend of Trinity Sunday In my experience for the newly ordained Jesuit the Trinity is the theological equivalent of Charlie Brown s friend

This passage might be seen as a theological call to arms for the scholar of Paul justification faith and grace Sound the trumpet draw the battle lines let the weary warriors of the 16th century come forth By now we all know or ought to that we are all justified by faith in Christ and so sta

A number of readers have asked for access to past Word columns So every week on The Good Word we will post America s Word column for the upcoming Sunday in addition to past columns for the same cycle of readings Here are Fr Dan Harrington s reflections on Trinity Sunday Dianne Bergan

The first time I preached on the Feast of the Most Trinity was on my first appointment as a deacon at the parish of Kings Cross Kings Cross is the red light district of Sydney I was the luckiest deacon in Sydney because my 70 year old Irish Jesuit parish priest Fr Donal Taylor never directly sa

Fire air earth and water considered in the classical world to be the four elements essential to the composition of the cosmos surface in the Pentecost reading We see the fire in the descirption of the tongues of flame carried in by the rushing air resting above the heads of those gathered in