Soon after World War II, the 1951 U.N. Refugee Convention, a legally binding multilateral treaty, defined who is a refugee, what rights they have, and established the obligations of nations in their regard. In the broader field of migration, however, apart from a convention on migrant workers, until now there has been no comparable international agreement regarding migrants in general.
A topic like Luther’s vocation does not capture the attention of his biographers. It is taken for granted. Everyone talks about it, but only in a generic way. In truth, the facts are not so apparent. Luther entered the monastery when he was 21 years old, after a storm. On July 2, 1505, while returning to Erfurt from Mansfeld where he was visiting some relatives, he was caught in a storm near Stotternheim, a few kilometers from home.
It’s no secret that today we’re witnessing a massive decline in church attendance and, seemingly, a parallel loss of interest in religion. The former mindset, within which we worried, sometimes obsessively, about sin, church-going, and heaven and hell no longer holds sway for millions of people.
“A bishop who became the Gospel”: this is the expression that Monsignor Agostino Superbo, the postulator of the cause of beatification, uses to define Don Antonio Bello, paraphrasing the latter’s own definition of a bishop. In fact, at the beginning of his episcopal ministry, Don Tonino said: “I would like to be a bishop who becomes his people, a bishop elevated to the dignity of the people.”
What does the Bible say about “power”? The subject is current and of great interest, but not at all simple. Anyone searching for the word “power” in the Old Testament would be disappointed: it does not exist in Hebrew. Is that because Sacred Scripture does not provide any cause for reflection about power? Far from it.
According to Isaac the Syrian, a famous 7th Century bishop and theologian, a person who’s genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up, so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm that person.
The internet, while it offers enormous possibilities on many levels – information, data, speed of contact, time saved and relationships improved – also renews long-established problems of the offline world (solitude, pornography, violence, theft, viruses) but on a qualitatively different scale. Like any new development, digital technology cannot solve a problem without creating new ones.
Jesus says that if we follow him, the cross, pain, will find us.That message is chronically misunderstood. Maybe we would understand it better if Jesus had worded it this way: The more sensitive you become, the more pain will seep into your life. We catch the connection then. Sensitive person suffer more deeply, just as they also drink in more deeply the joys and beauties of life.
We live in a culture that idealizes youth and marginalizes the old. And, as James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know; I’m aging. For most of my life, I’ve been able to think of myself as young.
Imagine this: A man, entirely careless of all moral and spiritual affairs, lives his life in utter selfishness, pleasure his only pursuit. He lives the high life, never prays, never goes to church, has numerous sexual affairs, and has no concern for anyone but himself...
What does the Bible say about “power”? The subject is current and of great interest, but not at all simple. Anyone searching for the word “power” in the Old Testament would be disappointed: it does not exist in Hebrew. Is that because Sacred Scripture does not provide any cause for reflection about power? Far from it.
As you leave the Beatitudes community in southern France, you drive through vast woods where you encounter brothers and sisters on bicycles in long white robes - their monastic habit – and you get the feeling that you have stayed much longer, probably because there is such immediate conviviality and fraternity here.
What does it mean to “be born again, to “be born from above”? If you’re an Evangelical or Baptist, you’ve probably already answered that for yourself. However, if you’re a Roman Catholic or a mainline Protestant then the phrase probably isn’t a normal part of your spiritual vocabulary and, indeed, might connote for you a biblical fundamentalism which confuses you.
The problem in the world and in the churches, Jim Wallis suggests, is that, perennially, conservatives get it wrong and liberals (over-reacting to conservatives) then don’t get it at all. Nowhere is this truer, I believe, than in how we discern the finger of God in the events of our lives.
Simone Weil once commented that it’s not enough today to be merely a saint; rather “we must have the saintliness demanded by the present moment.” She’s surely right on that second premise; we need saints whose virtues speak to the times.
Peru’s people had a very different energy, a special quality. I know I’m generalising, but so what? Nations do produce stereotypes, and the majority actually do conform. I mean, if Mario Vargas Llosa can get away with saying, just last week, that “Britain... still seems to me to be the most civilised and democratic country in the world” then I can surely generalise enthusiastically about his homeland.
Might the current crisis in the Church be a moment of renewal? A sociologist of religion argues that the best hope for a revitalised Church might lie in dialogue with a ‘post-secular’ world. Perhaps this moment just might be an opportunity for the Church – laity and leaders – to dig deep into the Catholic tradition and to search there for resources that could help it to forge new relevance.
Growing up as a Roman Catholic, like the rest of my generation, I was taught a prayer called, The Act of Contrition. Every Catholic back then had to memorize it and say it during or after going to confession. The prayer started this way: Oh, my God, I am truly sorry for having offended thee and I detest all of my sins because I dread the loss of heaven and the pains of hell. …
The question of intercommunion within our churches today is a big one, an important one, and a painful one. I’m old enough to remember another time, actually to remember two other times.
News headlines in the UK are often focused on the number of foreign citizens moving to the UK from abroad, with those going the other way getting less attention. Emigration figures show that although the number of British citizens moving abroad has slowed slightly, there were still 121,000 people choosing to up-sticks in the year to September 2018.
