What is my […]
Tag: Jesus
Teachers are important for a good school year
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The new school year invites us to reflect upon teachers’ importance.
Though they sometimes fall short like other humans, good teachers influence our youth who are the hope of the future. Through their classes pass future lawyers, doctors, reporters, writers, farmers, secretaries, engineers, and other shapers of tomorrow’s world.
Good teachers know and love their subject and their students. Coaches, chaperones, parents, counselors, and others who contribute to the school also teach youth. They often are role models.
We may have memories of teachers who made a difference. Some taught elementary school; others taught junior high, and still others taught high school or college. They often differed, but they had one trait in common. They cared about us, shared the subject that they loved, and helped us to grow. We should remember to thank them.
Honor our Jewish roots
To the editor: […]
The importance of the Ascension
Dear Friends,
This past Sunday we celebrated the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord. As a brother-bishop jokes, we celebrate this glorious mystery exactly according to the Acts of the Apostles . . . 44 days after Easter . . .
The joy of evangelizing
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An emergency tends to focus one’s mind and energies and to clarify one’s priorities.
If a dangerous fire breaks out in a home, the inhabitants thereof will lay aside their quarrels, postpone their other activities, and together get to the task of putting out the flames. If a nation is invaded by an aggressor, politicians will quickly forget their internal squabbling and put off their legislative programs in order to work together for the shared purpose of repulsing the enemy.
What Easter means
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In first century Judaism, there were many views concerning what happened to people after they died.
Following a very venerable tradition, some said that death was the end, that the dead simply returned to the dust of the earth from which they came.
Others maintained that the righteous dead would rise at the close of the age. Still others thought that the souls of the just went to live with God after the demise of their bodies. There were even some who believed in a kind of reincarnation.
Accounts of Jesus’ resurrection
What is particularly fascinating about the accounts of Jesus’ resurrection is that none of these familiar frameworks of understanding is invoked.
Why Jesus is God: Debunking skeptics
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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.
Seeing Easter through children’s eyes
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Seeing Easter through children’s eyes can open windows of wonder and love that we busy adults sometimes keep closed.
A mother experienced this when she overheard Danny, her five-year-old son, talk with his friend Jeremy whose father recently died.
“Where did your dad go when he died?” asked Danny.
“My mom said that he went to Heaven,” replied Jeremy.
“What’s Heaven?” asked Danny.
Can we watch an hour? Help preserve the holy places
It always makes me sad to read the Scripture passages telling how the apostles fell asleep in the Garden of Gethsemane just before Jesus’ arrest — not only once, but three times!
Jesus says to them, “Could you not watch one hour with me” (Mt. 26:40)? It doesn’t seem like much to ask of his disciples — who had traveled with him and were the primary teachers of his message — to stay awake by his side. However, the apostles were human. Jesus recognized their humanity when he added, “The spirit indeed is willing, but the flesh is weak.”
Unfortunately many of us aren’t always being vigilant about what is happening around us, especially when it comes to things that are impacting our faith and our Church.
The ‘zealot’ versus the real Jesus
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When I saw that Reza Aslan’s portrait of Jesus, Zealot: The Life and Times of Jesus of Nazareth, had risen to number one on the New York Times bestseller list, I must confess, I was both disappointed and puzzled.
For the reductionistic and debunking approach that Aslan employs has been tried by dozens of commentators for at least the past 300 years, and the debunkers have been themselves debunked over and over again by serious scholars of the historical Jesus.
Aslan’s portrayal of the ‘zealot’
The Jesus that Aslan wants to present is the “zealot,” the Jewish insurrectionist intent upon challenging the Temple establishment in Jerusalem and the Roman military power that dominated Israel.
His principle justification for this reading is that religiously motivated revolutionaries were indeed thick on the ground in the Palestine of Jesus’ time; that Jesus claimed to be ushering in a new Kingdom of God; and that he ended up dying the death typically meted out to rabble-rousers who posed a threat to Roman authority.