Dear All, When I mentioned the Constitution’s self-set priority of a more perfect union, it triggered a nagging idea that took several days to find words.
Dear All, An oath is a solemn undertaking before God to carry out whatever matter is covered by the oath ... that is the meaning of the ‘so help me God’ phrase.
Dear All, If you think for a moment that I am going to wade into the sea of ink that has been spilt over the storming of the nation’s Capitol this week … you’re right.
Dear Event Attendee: You are being contacted because you may have attended a Christmas Eve Service at Christ our Savior Church in Manchester, VT on 12/24/2020. The Vermont Department of Health has learned that at least one person with Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) attended this event while infectious. The Vermont Department of Health is closely monitoring the situation and Christ our Savior Church is assisting in our efforts to prevent further spread of the virus. You will be contacted directly by the Vermont Department of Health if you have tested positive for COVID-19.
Dear All, Just as I thought that I could slam the door shut on 2020 … I got a powerful reminder that the calendar is just about the worst possible tool for predicting anything except for the date of tomorrow.
Almost all of my favorite religious music is either music for Passiontide or for Christmas. As I thought about this fact (I do sometimes think about myself) I realized that each season reveals a different face of the one love that God has for us; his love of the innocent in Passiontide and his love of the powerless at Christmas.
Dear All, The moral teaching of the Catholic Church in the realm of societal affairs is of one piece with the Church’s teaching in the realm of personal morality.
Dear All, The fact of creation and the fact of the Triune life of God certainly have their effects on the life of the Church. But there is another that is just as important, even as it is harder to discern and describe: The Church does not believe in ‘trickle-down’ anything – economy, power, wisdom or anything else.
Dear All, With one foot planted firmly in the very eternity of God and a shrewd eye turned to the various cultures that are the matrix of her temporal existence, the Catholic Church, in a very clear way, practices that double commandment to ‘love God and the neighbor’.
Dear All, Catholicism is not the ‘religion of choice’ for one political or economic claque or another. Long before the United States of America or the Enlightenment or the Renaissance or the Holy Roman Empire, Catholicism was alive and thriving and living a life of its own in the midst of communities and cultures that were somewhere between tolerant of its presence or openly hostile to it.
Dear All, I have noticed something over the last few months that really concerns me. I can pretty well tell whether a person votes ‘red’ or ‘blue’ by his or her comments about the Pope. As if Catholicism and the Papacy were all of a piece with the electioneering business in the US. To be fair, this same correlation has been noticed in Europe, as well.
Dear All, Another factor in preserving the unity of the Church is a constant conversation that goes on amongst all the members. I know that that sounds untrue.
I did a lot of heavy lifting last week about the foundation of the Church’s unity in the unity of the Trinity. Today, I want to talk about the multiplicity/pluralism in the Trinity – the three-ness -- as the foundation of a remarkable diversity in the Church.
I took the high road to assert that love is the root of the Church’s permanence in history. By that I did not mean eroticism or mushy sentimentalism or fuzzy ‘empathy’.
Dear All, If I led you to think that I was done dealing with ‘reductions’, I must apologize. There is one that is typically American and a really ‘hot potato’ in an election year, but it must be addressed: the reduction of every public issue to a political issue.
Dear All, As you will have gathered, the reductionist style of thinking cannot help being a rabbit hole leading to absurdity. The world is altogether too complex and too fluid for a ‘one size fits all’ approach. So, you must be ready to understand that I have no intention of proposing a reductionist approach; so this will not be simple.
Dear All, If I led you to think that I was done dealing with ‘reductions’, I must apologize. There is one that is typically American and a really ‘hot potato’ in an election year, but it must be addressed: the reduction of every public issue to a political issue.