Readers who attended schools where history was taught may remember learning about the so-called ‘dark ages’, the saeculum obscurum, those centuries between the fall of the Roman Empire and the rise of the Renaissance. In what was then a still embryonic Europe civil order had…
Category: Advancing the Kingdom
The leaven of the Gospel
Depending on whether one’s ‘spective’ is ‘pro’ or ‘retro’ sixty years can be either a long or short time. To borrow Oscar Hammerstein’s lyric: “I am of the latter brand”. It seems to me just yesterday when in the early 1960s two giants, both named…
Even the pagans do as much
The question has been addressed by scholars before. My intention is not to answer it but rather to propose its consideration as a Lenten exercise. What is the relationship between orthodoxy and orthopraxy and how present are they today? Does orthodoxy, ‘right belief’, require or…
An echo of the future
In St. John’s Gospel, Nathaniel asks Philip if any good can come out of Nazareth. Would his twenty-first century counterpart express the same sentiment about the Big Apple? If so, a contemporary Philip would likely reply with enthusiasm: “Come and see”. We are invited to…
Diverging mindsets
Ours is a world of proliferating “ologies”. ‘Aetiology’, ‘cognitology’, and ‘onomasiology’ are a few new ones for me. Recently two ‘ologies’ appeared linked in a sentence I read that now unsettles my memory: “Technology defines ontology”. The word ‘technology’ is well understood; not so with…
A Light on the Narragansett
Does anyone else wonder where surnames have gone? Today it seems that no one has, or at least uses, his last name. The practice of addressing a stranger by his first name – regardless of his age or ‘station in life’ (to use a superannuated…
The image of a grass eating bull
On that wondrous night two millennia ago what did it signify, that jubilant cry of the heavenly host when, announcing the birth of the Savior, they sang “Glory to God in highest”? What is glory? What has it to do with God? How does one…
The Reign of Error
Either because of or in spite of having so many children the man who raised my siblings and me rarely expressed annoyance. His two pet-peeves which I recall were the abuse of the first person pronoun in that grammatical aberration: “between you and I” and…
They disguised their circumcision
As the turbulent calendar year 2020 draws to a close many in our nation this Thanksgiving will be thinking twice about what blessings there are for which to be grateful. Rampant violence, the pandemic, lockdowns, economic duress, et ceteracertainly call into question our national wellbeing.…
“Awokening” or “Awakening”
Was there ever a time when there was no time? To contemplate this oxymoron – addressed by St. Augustine in his City of God – is to bring to mind our belief that in some mysterious way all of us are in God’s hands. Perhaps…