The word sacrifice means several things. In a religious or cultic sense, it may mean “the offering of animal, plant, or human life or of some material possession to a deity, as in propitiation or homage” But in everyday usage it may mean the giving up of something that is considered valuable by one person for something of higher value or for a good that may benefit someone else.
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Mary is never named in the Gospel of John. In the only scenes featuring her, the beloved disciple refers to her simply as “the mother of Jesus.” Those two episodes act as bookends to John’s presentation of Jesus’ ministry, and highlight the role of Mary as mother both of the Church and of every individual Christian.
Our world needs Christian faith. A book that proved this to me regarding the medical field is Losing Our Dignity: How Secularized Medicine is Undermining Fundamental Human Equality by Charles C. Camosy.
Many of us want to grow in holiness and draw closer to God. Our perception of our personal holiness or closeness to God often revolves around how many prayers we say, how many spiritual books we read, how often we attend church, how often we receive the sacraments of the Eucharist and Penance, or whether we are good parents or good people. Yes, these are excellent steps toward holiness and closeness to God, and I encourage and recommend that we all practice them.
The Polish poet Czeslaw Milosz, winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1980, declared in a book of prose that “the Scriptures constitute the common good of believers, agnostics, and atheists.” For Milosz, whose life was scarred by the Nazi and Communist takeovers of his native land, the moral authority and literary beauty of the Bible was a refuge against the lethal and banal propaganda spewed forth from those godless governments and armies, even though he could not bring himself to believe in God.
By Father Ignacio Olvera Special to The Texas Catholic What happens when a priest walks into a bar? With the…
This Lent I’m studying the “wilderness” or “desert” in Scripture, and especially in the journey of Israel from Egypt to the Promised Land. The dangerous wild is a powerful image for the spiritual life, and it plays a large part in the lives of figures like Jacob, Moses, David, Elijah, John the Baptist and Jesus. What about in yours?
A curious pattern of exile is evident in the endings of several Old Testament books. After God promises Abram the land of Canaan, the patriarch must immediately flee to Egypt because of a famine (Genesis 12); his descendants, the sons of Jacob, repeat the expedition for the same reason (Genesis 42-47).
I want you to know how much I believe in and love Lent, and I want you to know how much I wish that no one would say “I don’t believe in Lent.”
One of the shibboleths of our times is the word diversity. Our use of the word can easily signal our social, political and philosophical sympathies. It is ubiquitous in our culture, advertising and corporate life, and it is frequently portrayed as a moral value, one of the few claimed by our ostensibly secular society.