Madeleine L’Engle (1918-2007)

One of my all-time favorite authors passed away today and I’m struck by how sad I am, even knowing that she had a long, full, creative life. Madeleine L’Engle is known primarily for her children’s novels, particularly the Newberry Award winning A Wrinkle in Time. The first one I ever read was its sequel, A [...]

Read Full Post »

Biblical Heroines

Yesterday’s reading was the akedah (the binding of Isaac), and I have some thoughts on it, but they’re not in order yet. In the meantime, here’s a Beliefnet quiz. I wasn’t a bit surprised at my results. (HT to Brittany).
Quiz: Which Bible Heroine Are You?

You scored 52, on a scale of 0 to 100. [...]

Read Full Post »

A positive attitude

I’ve been playing elsewhere at St. Blog’s this week, but it is the Feast of St. Anthony today and having worked under his patronage for the last 14+ years, I can’t neglect the Scriptures for the day. Maybe it’s because I’ve been immersed in comedy lately, but both Paul’s letter to the Corinthians about the [...]

Read Full Post »

Tobit’s Wife (the rest of the story)

Continuing from the previous post, where we began taking an imaginative look at the Book of Tobit through the eyes of his wife Anna.
Once Tobit decided that it would be better for him to die, there was no shaking him from his depression. He lectured Tobiah day and night about the need to be virtuous, [...]

Read Full Post »

Tobit’s Wife Looks Back

Several years ago when I was studying Scripture at the Athenaeum with Fr. Tim Schehr, one of the assignments was to look at the book of Tobit through the eyes of his wife. I had a great time with it and thought that I’d share it here. It’s longer than I realized, so I’ll [...]

Read Full Post »

At what personal cost?

Today in the weekday lectionary cycle we begin the book of Tobit, one of my favorite books in the Catholic Old Testament. As I was reading through today’s selection, one of the things that I noticed was that the opening scene takes place on the Jewish feast of Shavuot or Weeks. Shavuot was a harvest [...]

Read Full Post »

Why do chameleons change color?

We look to the stories and mythology of our culture for answers to the big questions about life: How did we get here? Why are we here? What do we learn from the stories of our past? How do we shape the stories of our future? For Jews and Christians, the Bible is the [...]

Read Full Post »

Synod on the Word of God

It’s the rare Friday evening that I curl up with a Vatican document, but I suspect I’ll be doing just that today. The Vatican released the Lineamenta for the upcoming world synod of bishops today. They missed the feast of St. Mark by two days. That would have been a nice touch. More when [...]

Read Full Post »

‘Not by bread alone’

 
A while back, Xerox had a TV commercial for their copiers that showed a medieval monk with a commission for several copies of The Bible and he goes into the basement and starts up the Xerox copier. Its humor, of course, lay in the choronological disjuntion of 20th-century technology available to monks in the Middle [...]

Read Full Post »