We often think about sin as extravagance. The sinner is the one who drinks too much, gambles too much, who desires pleasure too much. On the 11th Sunday of Ordinary Time, we consider the stinginess of the sinner. The sinner who loves not enough.
During the Jubilee Year, we have often heard the word ‘mercy.’ Every time I hear it, I think about its Latin equivalent: misericordia. The literal sense of this word is the movement of the heart toward pity. The misery of the heart that causes us to reach out in love.
The Book of Revelation does not contain a series of esoteric predictions about the end of the world. Rather, Revelation presents a world in which the final union of God and humanity is taking place in the presence of the slain Lamb. This ultimate union is described as a wedding: “I . . . saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God prepared as a bride adorned for her husb...
When I was little, I had to beg my mom to allow me to wear basketball shorts and jerseys outside of the house. In second grade, I couldn’t understand why the other girls made fun of me for having a best friend who was a boy. When it came time to choose after-school activities, I devoted all my time to basketball practices while most of my friends enrolled in jazz and tap dance. Even in middle scho...
Are Africans, as Desmond Tutu once opined, “much more on the wavelength of the Bible than the Occidental ever was”?[1] Should one listen to African exegetes more closely since, as Philip Jenkins has argued, their experience of inhabiting the world of the Bible represents the vanguard of a growing shift of Christianity towards the global South?[2] These are questions worth pondering. I think there ...
The temptation of Easter for the regular churchgoer is to forget that the resurrected Jesus remains the crucified Lord. On the Third Sunday of Easter, we find ourselves confronted with Christ’s wounds of love bathed in resurrected light.
With a title like Bible Basics for Catholics: A New Picture of Salvation History, this is not the kind of book that broadcasts learned self-esteem at the coffee house. Better order that flat white to go. No, reading this book amounts to an admission of humility that, as Bergsma writes on the opening page, “You ought to know the Bible better than you do, and you probably feel vaguely guilty that yo...
