Tag: Christian

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Bishop Robert Barron

What makes the Church grow?

Just recently on the website maintained by the episcopal conference of Germany, there appeared an editorial concerning Pope Francis’ apostolic visit to Africa.

As many have pointed out, the piece was breathtaking in its arrogance and cultural condescension. The author’s take on the surprisingly rapid pace of Christianity’s growth on the “dark continent” (his words)? Well, the level of education in Africa is so low that the people accept easy answers to complex questions.

His assessment of the explosion in vocations across Africa? Well, the poor things don’t have many other avenues of social advancement; so they naturally gravitate toward the priesthood.

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Fr. Robert Barron

A very Christian ‘Cinderella’

Kenneth Branagh’s Cinderella is the most surprising Hollywood movie of the year so far.

The director manages to tells the familiar fairy tale without irony, hyper-feminist sub-plots, Marxist insinuations, deconstructionist cynicism, or arch condescension. In so doing, he actually allows the spiritual, indeed specifically Christian, character of the tale to emerge.

It probably strikes a contemporary audience as odd that Cinderella might be a Christian allegory, but keep in mind that most of the fairy stories and children’s tales compiled by the Brothers Grimm and later adapted by Walt Disney found their roots in the Christian culture of late medieval and early modern Europe.

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Sr. Margie Lavonis

Be compassionate

Cutting Edge by Sr. Margie Lavonis column logo

We have a loving and compassionate God, and Jesus calls us to practice these virtues in our lives. This is our mission as Christians.

When I was growing up, we learned the Corporal and Spiritual Works of Mercy. They are tools for living a good Christian life, showing us how to be compassionate.

Corporal Works of Mercy

Jesus tells us about the Corporal Works of Mercy in Chapter 25 of the Gospel of Matthew. He challenges us to feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, visit the imprisoned, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, and bury the dead. We will be judged by how we do these things.

At first glance, we might think that we are rarely presented with opportunities to exercise many of these good works. But, if we look a little closer, we might be surprised at how often we are presented with ways to do some of them.

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Fr. Robert Barron

A message written in blood

Recently, the attention of the world was riveted to a deserted beach in northern Libya, where a group of 21 Coptic Christians were brutally beheaded by masked operatives of the ISIS movement.

In the wake of the executions, ISIS released a gruesome video entitled A Message in Blood to the Nation of the Cross. I suppose that for the ISIS murderers, the reference to “the Nation of the Cross” had little sense beyond a generic designation for Christianity.

Sadly for most Christians, too, the cross has become little more than a harmless symbol. I would like to take the awful event on that Libyan beach, as well as the ISIS message, as an occasion to reflect on the still startling distinctiveness of the cross.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Christianity not primarily about ethics

Many atheists and agnostics today argue that it is possible for non-believers in God to be morally upright.

They resent the implication that the denial of God will lead inevitably to ethical relativism or nihilism. They are quick to point out examples of non-religious people who are models of kindness, compassion, justice, etc.

Non-believers praiseworthy?

A recent article proposed that non-believers are, on average, more morally praiseworthy than religious people. God knows (pun intended) that during the last 20 years we’ve seen plenty of evidence of the godly behaving badly.

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George Weigel

Wanted: A synod of affirmation

Pope Francis has called a special session of the Synod of Bishops, which will meet from October 5 to 19 and prepare the agenda for the ordinary session of the synod that is scheduled for the fall of 2015; both sessions will focus on the family.

In my view, the synod should focus on two related themes: marriage culture is in crisis throughout the world; the answer to that crisis is the Christian view of marriage as a covenant between man and woman in a communion of love, fidelity, and fruitfulness.

To focus the conversation elsewhere is to ignore a hard fact and a great opportunity.

Collapse of marriage culture

The collapse of marriage culture throughout the world is indisputable. More and more marriages end in divorce, even as increasing numbers of couples simply ignore marriage, cohabit, and procreate.

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Fr. Robert Barron

Hercules, N.T. Wright, and the modern meta-narrative

On the first day of my recent vacation, I perused N.T. Wright’s latest book, a collection of essays on contemporary issues in light of the Bible.

A point that Wright makes in a number of the articles is that modernity and Christianity propose fundamentally different meta-narratives in regard to the meaning and trajectory of history.

The emergence of modernity

Modernity — at least in its Western form– is predicated on the assumption that history came to its climax in the mid- to late-18th century, with the definitive victory of empirical science in the epistemological arena and liberal democracy in the political arena.

Basic to this telling of the story is that modernity emerged victorious after a long twilight struggle against the forces of obscurantism and tyranny. The matrix for these negative states of affairs was none other than the Christian religion, which enforced a blind dogmatism on the one hand and an oppressive political arrangement on the other.

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Sr. Ruth Battaglia, CSA

The Pascal Mystery: Death evolving into life

Sr. Ruth Battaglia, CSA

After successful treatment for breast cancer 16 years ago, it returned with a vengeance — 15 small brain tumors and a lung tumor. This time it was stage four cancer.

The diagnosis stunned everyone. The news of Patty Kelbel’s condition spread quickly, especially among the Christian Experience Weekend (CEW) community. CEW is an intense retreat experience, directed mostly by laity, that has been a joint venture between the parishes of St. Ann in Stoughton and Holy Mother of Consolation (HMC) in Oregon for a number of years.

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Kevin Wondrash

Why Jesus is God: Debunking skeptics

It’s Easter time, and that means that the mainstream media and publishing houses can be counted upon to issue debunking attacks on orthodox Christianity.

The best-publicized of these is Bart Ehrman’s book, How Jesus Became God. Once a devout Bible-believing evangelical Christian, trained at Wheaton College, the alma mater of Billy Graham, Ehrman “saw the light” and became an agnostic scholar and is on a mission to undermine the fundamental assumptions of Christianity.

Jesus just an ‘itinerant preacher’

In this most recent tome, Ehrman lays out what is actually a very old thesis, going back at least to the 18th century and repeated ad nauseam in skeptical circles ever since, namely, that Jesus was a simple itinerant preacher who never claimed to be divine and whose “resurrection” was in fact an invention of his disciples who experienced hallucinations of their master after his death.

Ehrman, like so many of his skeptical colleagues across the centuries, presents this thesis as though he has made a brilliant discovery. But basically, it’s the same old story.

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