Blog
June 26, 2022
There’s a story I’ve always liked of an old Egyptian monk, from about 1,400 years ago, living in what today is called Wadi al Natrun, southwest of the city of Alexandria. He stepped out of his cell one night and saw the devil himself handing out gardening implements to all the other monks—shovels, spades, a scythe […]
July 3, 2022
Paul said the time would come, a time when people would no longer “tolerate sound doctrine” but rather follow their own “desires” and “curiosity,” listening no longer to the truth but instead to “myths.”[1] Jesus too—he didn’t suggest his followers would be all that successful in their preaching either. The “world hates you,” he told his […]
July 10, 2022
I can’t say I feel all that fit to preach today, given how I failed this gospel just a few days ago.
July 11, 2022
Subiaco, Italy, 2015 It was the philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre who said, “We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.” We exist, rather unknowingly, he said, in a new dark age, and so he invoked a figure from the past, this saint whose beginning we’ve come to see.
July 23, 2022
Kathleen Norris, the spiritual writer, said it was a “force we ignore at our peril.”[1] She was talking about the spiritual affliction, the wicked thought, the sin called acedia—sometimes called sloth. Which happens to the best of us, many of us (which was Norris’ point).
August 7, 2022
Let’s review what we’ve heard these past few weeks. Let’s review what Jesus said.