If people of faith are going to sustain Christian commitment in a world swirling with endless possibilities for re-invention they need to have had an authentic experience of God, writes Fr Michael Kirwan SJ The prominent Jesuit theologian Karl Rahner made an astonishing claim about how he saw the future of the Church and of…
Charlie Chaplin is one of the few silent film stars likely to be known well even by people who have never seen a silent film. The American comic, whose character ‘The Tramp’ was iconic in the silent era, unsurprisingly makes the Vatican list of 45 significant films. The film they chose is the last film…
In 360AD Athanasius of Alexandria – one of the great Doctors of the Church – published a biography simply titled Life of Anthony. In it, he told the story of an illiterate and holy man who out of devotion to God went out into the desert to put into practice Christ’s words to the rich…
Maria Morrow The word “fear” has such a negative connotation to us. We fear our kids getting hurt. We fear spiders. We fear failure. We fear a tragic and untimely death. In other words, we fear the things that we don’t like or want. And sometimes our fears stand in the way of our goals…
In a homily, Karl Rahner once commented that in the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel, Jesus makes a rather stunning statement. He says, “blessed are you who are now weeping, for you shall laugh”. Rahner suggests that Jesus is teaching that our final state of happiness in heaven will not just lift us out of our…
The voice of John the Baptist is now silenced behind prison walls. It is time for Jesus to begin his mission. He leaves his home and work in Nazareth and settles initially in Capernaum, a lakeside town not too far away. There he begins his preaching with a short but challenging message. “Repent, for the…
One of the most ancient problems in philosophy is the question of ‘the one and the many’, whether reality is ultimately a unity or a plurality and how these interrelate. We might ask the same question regarding the plurality of religious faiths, Churches, and forms of worship in our world. Is there some inherent oneness…
This Sunday’s Gospel (John 1:29-34) begins with John the Baptist pointing towards Jesus and saying, “Look, there is the Lamb of God that takes away the sin of the world”. His words are repeated at Mass in order to alert us to the awesome privilege of welcoming the Lord in the Eucharist. “Behold the Lamb…
It’s commonly argued in today’s world that science and faith are in conflict. Some ardently go so far as to suggest that science and the discoveries about the natural world that it’s made possible to invalidate faith, making religion a superstitious thing of the past. The idea at the core of this argument is that…
Lindsey Weishar In the past few years, the term visio divina has gained traction in the Catholic lexicon. Like lectio divina, which is a way to pray with Scripture, visio divina translates to “divine seeing” and is a way to pray with art or other visual media alongside Scripture. I first encountered visio divina in…
Ruadhán Jones
Fr Ronald Rolheiser