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| St. Joseph with the Infant Jesus, Guido Reni via WikiPaintings |
We celebrate two feast days for Joseph: March 19 for Joseph the Husband of Mary and May 1 for Joseph the Worker.
There is much we wish we could know about Joseph -- where and when he was born, how he spent his days, when and how he died. But Scripture has left us with the most important knowledge: who he was -- "a righteous man" (Matthew 1:18).
I love St. Joseph. He was the quiet man of action. Those are my kind of guys.
Jon Batiste says he doesn't need either a kazoo or a tambourine in the movie, thank you very much.
We discuss the Pixar movie Soul in episode 330 of A Good Story is Hard to Find podcast. After all, it's darned hard to find a kid's movie featuring old fashioned astral transmigration displacement. That's gotta be talked about!
I like that reminder that blaming God for everything we don't like means that we don't understand God or his creation."Just because you don't like the way things are," said Jean Valjean, "that's no reason to be unfair to God."
Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
I am continually surprised by how this guy nails it ... from 100 years ago.The modern world is not evil; in some ways the modern world is far too good. It is full of wild and wasted virtues. When a religious scheme is shattered (as Christianity was shattered at the Reformation), it is not merely the vices that are let loose. The vices are, indeed, let loose, and they wander and do damage. But the virtues are let loose also; and the virtues wander more wildly, and the virtues do more terrible damage. The modern world is full of the old Christian virtues gone mad. The virtues have gone mad because they have been isolated from each other and are wandering alone. Thus some scientists care for truth; and their truth is pitiless. Thus some humanitarians only care for pity; and their pity (I am sorry to say) is often untruthful.
G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy
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| Portrait of Michelangelo by Daniele da Volterra |
Already, by the time that Anselm died in 1109, Latin Christendom had been set upon a course so distinctive that what today we term "the West" is less its heir than its continuation. Certainly, to dream of a world transformed by a reformation, or an enlightenment, or a revolution is nothing exclusively modern. Rather, it is to dream as medieval visionaries dreamed: to dream in the manner of a Christian.I was given this several years ago and am just now getting around to it. I had been reading a philosophy series where I enjoyed the author's even handedness when it came to various religions. Then he got to the exploration of the New World, slavery, and colonialism and cracks began to show in his veneer — specifically about issues our modern world has ruled upon, without giving proper context to how it would have been viewed. It kind of broke my heart a little to hear how half-heartedly that context was being given.
[...]
This book explores what it was that made Christianity so subversive and disruptive; how completely it came to saturate the mindset of Latin Christendom; and why, in a West that is often doubtful of religion's claims, so many of its instincts remain—for good and ill— thoroughly Christian.
It is — to coin a phrase — the greatest story ever told.Tom Holland, Dominion: The Making of the Western Mind
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| Lorenzo Ghiberti on the Paradise Gate ot the Baptisterio (Florence) self portrait |
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| Mark the Evangelist by Il Pordenone |
We can get a lot of information about Saint Mark simply by reading the gospels and the Acts of the Apostles.
The thing I'm most interested in is that the gospel he wrote actually comes from having been St. Peter's interpreter and going on the road with him. The people asked him to record St. Peter's teachings. No wonder there are such vivid details in it. This is as close as you can get to being straight from the horse's mouth.
.. we find Mark in Rome, this time helping Peter, who refers to him as my son Mark, thereby testifying to a long-standing close relationship. At that time Mark was acting as interpreter for the Prince of the Apostles, and this provided him with a privileged vantage-point which we see reflected in the Gospel he wrote a few years later. Although Saint Mark doesn't provide us with a record of the Master's great discourses, he makes up for it by giving us a particularly vivid description of the events of Jesus' life with his disciples. In his accounts we find ourselves once more in those little towns on the shores of the Sea of Galilee; we can sense the hubbub of the crowds of that follow Jesus, we can almost converse iwth the inhabitants of those places and can contemplate Christ's wonderful deeds and the spontaneous reactions of the Twelve. In a word, we find ourselves witnessing the events of the gospel as if we were actually there in the throng. Though his vivid descriptions the Evangelist manages to imprint on our souls something of the irresistible yet reassuring fascination that Jesus exercised on people, and which the Apostles themselves experienced in their life with the Master. Saint Mark in effect gives us a faithful account of Saint Peter's most intimate recollections of his Master: with the passage of the years his memories had not grown dim, but became ever more profound and perceptive, more penetrating and more fond. It can be said that Mark's message is the living mirror of Saint Peter's preaching.Saint Jerome tells us that Mark, the disciple and interpreter of Peter, wrote down his gospel at the request of the brethren living in Rome, according to what he had heard Peter preach. And Peter himself, having heard it, approved it with his authority to be read in the Church. This was without doubt Mark's principal mission in life — to transmit Peter's teachings faithfully.
In Conversation with God, Francis Fernandez,
Special Feasts: January - June
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| An opened Torah scroll |
To the Jews the most sacred thing in the world was the Torah, the Law. The core of the law is the Ten Commandments, but the Law was taken to mean the first five books of the Old Testament, the Pentateuch, as they are called. To the Jews this Law was completely divine. It had, so they believed been given direct by God to Moses. It was absolutely holy and absolutely binding. They said, "He who says that the Torah is not from God has not part in the future world." "He who says that Moses wrote even one verse of his own knowledge is a denier and despiser of the word of God."All excerpts in this post are from: The Gospel of Mark (The Daily Bible Series, rev. ed.) by William Barclay
If the Torah is so divine two things emerge. First, it must be the supreme rule of faith and life; and second, it must contain everything necessary to guide and to direct life. If that be so the Torah demands two things. First, it must obviously be given the most careful and meticulous study. Second, the Torah is expressed in great, wide principles; but, if it contains direction and guidance for all life, what is in it implicitly must be brought out. The great laws must become rules and regulations -- so their argument ran.
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| Alphonse Mucha, Self Portrait via WikiPaintings |
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| Vincent van Gogh, The Painter on the Road to Tarascon, 1888, reportedly destroyed during World War II |
Paul wrote that "God put forward [Christ] as a sacrifice of atonement" 9Rom 3:25), but the atonement or expiation is not directed to God; it s not meant to satisfy or placate God. Instead, it is directed to sin, that in its being satisfied it will be eliminated. "it can be said that it is God himself, not man, who expiates sin. … The image is more like that or removing a corrosive stain or neutralizing a lethal virus than that of anger that is placated by punishment" (James Dunn, The Theology of Paul the Apostle).Raniero Cantalamessa, The Power of the Cross
I love this image! I've never had the problem of worrying about an "angry God" but this is the perfect clarification for those who do.
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