Category: religion
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Another lousy drawing
Since I wasn’t able to make it to Our Lady of the Wayside church this morning, I instead did a drawing taken from the painting, Madonna Della Strada. The original painting was in a church dating back to the fifth century, although the painting itself only dates back to the 13th or 14th century. The…
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Once again I pretend to be an artist
Since there’s no church for me to visit for any of today’s saints, I decided I’d do the art thing and draw one of the saints. Looking through my Penguin Dictionary of the Saints, I found Saint Desiderius of Vienne who had a really rough time of things: he was rebuked by the pope for…
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Arguably my biggest Catholic nerd endeavor ever
For some time, I’ve thought that it would be cool to get a list of all the Catholic churches in the Archdiocese of Chicago and each day visit a church whose patron’s feast was that day. Finally, I got around to downloading a list, making a spreadsheet and finding the feast days for the saints.…
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A visit with my younger self: 15 June 1988
A bit of context on these journal entries, I suppose. This was the summer between my sophomore and junior year of college. I had a job working at the University of Illinois at Chicago computer center. I forget what I was doing that year, although if I remember correctly, I was working in the Medical…
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Mass in small-town Pennsylvania
I’m always a little trepidatious about attending Mass when I get outside of my liberal Chicago suburb. I opted against going while in the Wisconsin Dells when, checking for Mass times on the local parish’s website, I came across a posting from the pastor arguing that Pope Francis wasn’t really Catholic. But I also don’t…
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Thoughts on the slow-moving Church
Back in the 90s, my response to people saying that we needed to have married priests and women priests in the Catholic Church to respond to the priest shortage was to say that I didn’t think that was what the Holy Spirit was calling the Church to do (which is not to say that these…
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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…
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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…
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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…