Prayer as audacious battle with God
. Paul’s description of prayer as striving on behalf of someone else has always intrigued me; the verb form he uses, agonizomenos, implies a fight, engagement in a contest where victory or defeat is at stake.
Traditionis custodes and faithful opportunities
The Extraordinary Form of the Mass can offer a beautiful combination of silence and reverent song that conveys a strong sense of divine mystery, especially in such a frenetic and noisy culture as our own.
Edith Stein — philosopher, convert, martyr, saint
The extraordinary but relatively unknown philosopher and martyr also known by her religious name of Theresa Benedicta of the Cross.
A Word to Enkindle: The path of life in Psalm 16
The first Christian Bible study was held Easter Sunday on the road to Emmaus. Cleopas and his anonymous traveling companion are wallowing in despair about the death of Jesus, to such an extent that they are fleeing Jerusalem moments after hearing reports that the tomb was empty. Jesus, unrecognized on the road, joins the conversation and steers it toward a specific goal: teaching his downtrodden disciples, then as now, how to read the Bible.
A Word to Enkindle: Psychology and Care of the Soul
I am not a psychologist in the modern technical sense of the term. I have no training in matters dealing with the brain or nervous system, and I possess only a rudimentary knowledge of human biochemistry. But I do love uncovering the etymologies of words, and therefore I can say that I aim to be a psychologist in the original sense of the Greek word psyche: the animating principle of the whole person, which we translate as “soul.” Saint Gregory the Great emphatically declares, in his influential “Pastoral Rule,” that the proper nurturing, challenging, and encouraging of souls is the great duty of priests, since “the care of souls is the art of arts.”