Category: religion

  • It’s Lent

    Trigger warning: earnest religiosity ahead. Today is Ash Wednesday, the beginning of Lent. There are a lot of folks who seem to take this as a sort of performative event, kind of missing a key passage from today’s reading: “When you fast, do not look gloomy like the hypocrites. They neglect their appearance, so that they…

  • The Washing of the Feet

    To be honest, the reason   went to St Vincent Ferrer for Holy Thursday mass was because it’s across the street from our favorite local burger place and I have a long-standing tradition of going out for a burger and strawberry shake after Holy Thursday mass as a way of celebrating the end of Lent. But…

  • Occasionally a song surprises

    A couple weeks ago at mass, there was a song new to me, “Take from my Heart,” by Karen Schneider Kirner and John T. Kyler. The credits indicate that the lyrics are adapted from the “Act of Resignation” by Catherine McAuley. It managed to be the perfect blend of lyric and melody to really touch…

  • Dewey Decimal Project: 230.0732 The Collar

    An amazing book. It was captivating to read about these not-so-young men on the road to the priesthood. Englert, after a number of attempts, managed to find a Catholic seminary willing to let him spend a year following the students who attended. Where he ended up was a non-traditional seminary, one catering to “second career” would-be…

  • The Holy Spirit, the Pope and Homosexuality

    There’s been a great deal of jubilation and consternation regarding Pope Francis’s conciliatory remarks about homosexuality on the plane from Brazil to Rome. “Who am I to judge?” “Gays should be fully integrated into society.” The conservatives were quick to argue that there is no change in church doctrine reflected in these remarks, and they…

  • A thought on the state of the church

    Over the past year as we’ve been adapting to the new language of the liturgy, I’ve found myself thinking that this would have been a good point for me to have converted to Catholicism since the self-consciousness of not knowing the responses as well as those next to me in the pews would be ameliorated…

  • Why Christians should support equal rights for gays and lesbians

    The key justification for the widespread anti-gay stance of many Christians today is scriptural. It’s hard to get past the scriptural prohibitions on homosexuality, even if we were to discard the Old Testament texts as having been superseded by the new covenant, there are still the passages in the Pauline epistles. So given this, then…

  • Church exploring: St Giles

    This week, I went to the 5p mass at St Giles. The north end of Oak Park is by far the most suburban section of our village. It largely lacks multi-family housing and is far enough away from the two “L” lines that run through Oak Park that people are far enough away that the…

  • Church exploring

    I’ve decided to look around for a somewhat more satisfying faith community, so as one step in that direction, my wife and I went to mass at St Catherine of Sienna/St Lucy parish. The parish community is certainly more diverse than St Edmund’s, which is 95% white (at least). The St Catherine/St Lucy community is…