Last week on the day when the Vatican released the results of its investigation of the nbsp Leadership Conference of Women Religious which represents 80 percent of women rsquo s religious orders in this country I received emails from several Catholic sisters All described themselves as saddened

Here rsquo s how his first biographer Thomas of Celano records the encounter of St Francis of Assisi with the crucifix now famous but then hanging forlorn in the crumbling Umbrian church of San Damiano He write that Francis was walking one day by the church of San Damiano which was abandoned

Every one of the canonical Gospels insists on starting its story with the identification of Jesus as divine nbsp It is Matthew by linking Isaiah with the child conceived through the Holy Spirit who uses the word Immanuel of him nbsp imm with anu us el God nbsp As Matthew draws the r

How to read to preach on these familiar stories related to each other at the thematic level as the Lectionary is wont to do The synoptic gospels draw heavily on the Elijah Elisha stories sometimes to characterize John the Baptist and Jesus and more often Jesus and his disciples It appears in th

At first glance these first and Gospel readings seem well-matched even easy David and Simon have mis-stepped seriously in terms of what they supposed sincerely or not was acceptable behavior specifically here in the treatment of women Each is admonished strongly by a powerful prophet-like spe

Today rsquo s first reading details a moment in the early days of the young church in a way both vivid and stylized Those reading the daily lectionary will have an even sharper sense of the unfolding of events from Acts of the Apostles The material is action-packed easy to appreciate Among its f

Acts of the Apostles is our only canonical version of the early growth of the Jesus-believing community cf the Gospels where we have four accounts and so it is immensely formative in the tradition of what we assume happened That we count on the reliability of these events does not preclude our

Here and unusually in all three readings we can find a common crucial focus How Jesus mdash or the Isaian servant or any of us mdash will meet and engage suffering whether it is imposed by others directly or comes more remotely from human ill-will nbsp Also of course we are challenged to th

I am in the midst of teaching a seminar that considers among other things the perceived and often undeniable violence involved in Christian interpretation of the Hebrew Bible And I recently attended the feast of Purim at a conservative synagogue mdash quite a different experience from hearing a

The manifestations of what God is doing for creation in Jesus continue apace suggesting that there are even more facets for exploration than we have seen to date liturgically rich though the past weeks have been The template today is complex the Isaian servant closely resembling Moses declares