Holy Saturday: silence and triumph Over six weeks ago, we began what felt like an endurance test of penances: a Great Fast, intense prayer, spiritual reading, and almsgiving. The strangeness of time, the suddenness with which it’s over, startles. It makes us pause in wonder and awe at today’s silence: Holy Saturday. After their one […]
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Faces of the human heart This image magnifies two faces of the human heart in Lucas Cranach’s painting, Christ and the Adulteress, found in Bishop Erik Varden’s piece, 5 Sunday of Lent. Front and center we see one face with a terrible, smug smile and a large sharp rock at the ready in his right
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Hell: Is it real? Of all the theological errors commonly held today, the most popular is surely the denial of the doctrine of hell. Even among the more devout, such as those who go to daily Mass, the teaching that God would send or consign anyone to hell is routinely dismissed. If it exists at
Libido Domanandi and The Transfiguration of Christ Last Sunday, the first Sunday in Lent, the liturgical churches advised us to accompany Jesus’s forty day desert fast and temptations. This Sunday’s seemingly abrupt switch to the Transfiguration of Jesus may be puzzling. But as I ponder the reason for the Transfiguration of Jesus on the second
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Mitigating the Tyranny of Time “When were you the happiest?” “High school.” My husband, a therapist, declares his patients invariably answered his question , “What’s the happiest time in your life?” with those two words. For over twenty years, he counseled former combat veterans. That’s a lot of people whose happiest years were decades earler.
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Cain and Abel: It’s all about mediocrity Monday’s reading for the Christian liturgy is a Genesis passage most Jews and Christians recall with ease. Abel’s dead, the Lord comes looking for him and asks Cain where Abel is. Cain’s reply? “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Remember the song, he ain’t heavy, he’s my brother? Even back in
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Rediscovering the greatest human strength: willpower In their book, Willpower: Redisovering the Greatest Human Strength, authors Roy Baumeister and John Tierney claim that success, however defined, materially, financially or psychologically, relates to self-control. They confess their original belief that the religious teachings about character, morality and will, were restrictive and punitive. But when their own
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The object of a New Year The object of a New Year is not that we should have a new year. It is that we should have a new soul and a new nose; new feet, a new backbone, new ears, and new eyes. Unless a particular man made New Year resolutions, he would make
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New Year’s resolve: increase in humility. Huh? “New Year’s resolve: increase in humility.” What does that even mean? Indeed. It was just that suggestion during an Episcopalian priest’s homily that made me walk away from God at the tender age of seventeen. I can recall clearly my thoughts as I left the church for the
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Time belongs to God Time. It’s kind of like breath, or air, or water. We consume them as we do all commodities, thinking we have all we need, all the time in the world. Until suddenly, we don’t. Probably because of serious illness as a small child, I think about my death frequently. Hence my
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Lin Wilder has a doctorate in Public Health from the UT Houston with a background in cardiopulmonary physiology, medical ethics, and hospital administration
Book Author: LIN WILDER
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