Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 50 – Afterword

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 50 of our weekly series on the soul. We’re looking back at the series that began as a post for November, then became a series for the month, and finally ran weekly for several months. In this post I’ll highlight some of the ones that I think are most important in understanding what the Church teaches about the soul, and what some of the finest minds have thought about the soul, from the Biblical writers and others onward into our own day. 

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 48 – Christmas and Purgatory

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 48 of our weekly series on the soul. Just two more posts after this one in the series. November was the month devoted to the Holy Souls, but that’s not the only time we need to pray for them. I just discovered an article written in 2003 by an author I respect more and more: Christmas Seen As Best Time To Pray For Release Of The Holy Souls In Purgatory. After all, it’s the season of hope and for giving gifts. What better gift is there than the gift of release from Purgatory into Heaven? And all we have to do is pray for them. (Notes and links are at the end of this post.)

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 47 – Listening

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 47 of our weekly series on the soul. Just three more to go after tonight until we hit 50 posts in the series: one of those falls on Christmas Eve and another falls on New Year’s Eve. ([Yikes! I better start thinking about what to do for those right away.) We’ll be ending the series as we’ll be ending the year. I did not plan that and only just now realized it. Interesting. In the new year I’m going to work on some other stuff I’ve been thinking about. I may also begin posting once a week on the blog so I can work on the ebook project. We’ll see. As usual, there will be links and notes at the end of this post. Here goes, for tonight, as you can probably already tell, a bit of a ramble.

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 46 – Gratitude

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 46 of our weekly series on the soul: a brief personal reflection on gratitude, or the lack thereof. I don’t know about you, but I feel like my soul is starving. I haven’t been able to see my friends or family. I mean, I haven’t been able to be with them. I’ve been busy with this and that and I haven’t had time for music. I don’t mean I haven’t had time to listen to music, I’ve done plenty of that. But I haven’t had time to sit down with a MIDI keyboard or guitar and play. Something always comes up that needs my attention and my time and I never get around to doing what I used to spend hours and hours doing every day: PLAY. You would think that a retired disabled person with no kids or job would have nothing but time on her hands and could play the guitar or anything she wants to, all day every day, but it hasn’t turned out that way.

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 41 – Doctor of the Soul

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 41 of our weekly series on the soul. I couldn’t let today go by without a special something for the saint whose name I had chosen but, sadly, never got to give as my confirmation name (that part was skipped over for some reason): Saint Teresa of Avila, or, more properly, Saint Teresa de Jesus. Even more properly: Santa Madre Teresa de Jesus. (I’ve actually practiced saying that for years and if I could roll my r’s, I think it would sound pretty convincing, but I cain’t, so it dudden.) So I’ll post the next part of Body, Soul, and the Life Everlasting next week and share these three talks about Saint Teresa, Doctor of the Church and of the Soul, with you tonight. (I think we’ll have to explore some of St. Teresa’s writings at some point, don’t you?)

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 38 – In a Time of Turmoil

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 38 of our weekly series on the soul. It’s not absolutely necessary to read all of the previous posts in the series, though it’s a good idea to get around to reading the first five (annotated Table of Contents). Tonight I’m sharing info about two books and one dissertation, and also sharing some videos on the soul, and growing in a time of turmoil.

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 35 – What the Soul Knows After Death

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 35 of our weekly series on the soul. Our text is The Unseen World: An Exposition Of Catholic Theology in its Relation to Modern Spiritism by A. H. M. Cardinal Lépicier, and we’re currently reading chapter 2, section 2: The Knowledge of the Departed Human Soul. We’re talking about the Catholic teaching on these things and not about soul sleep (a belief of some of our separated brethren) and not about raising the spirits of the dead (which would be necromancy and was condemned by the Church from earliest times, as it is in the Bible). We are talking about how the human soul lives on even after the body dies. One day the soul and the body will be reunited at the resurrection, and, specifically in this post, about the soul and its knowledge after separation from the body, after the death of the body. Notes and links will be at the end of this post.

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Weekly Series On the Soul, Part 31 – Spirits

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 31 of our weekly series on the soul. Can you believe it? Part 31 of a series that was only intended for the month of November 2019, yet here we are. I reckon I’ll keep going with it for as long as I can find something that interests me about it. I hope it interests somebody else out there, too. As usual you’ll find notes and links at the end of the post.

Attention! We interrupt this post to bring you an important story. Like me, you may have heard about the Jesuit priests who were spared when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima at the end of WWII. But did you know about the Fatima and Transfiguration connections? I did not. You can read about it in this post by Myra Adams and watch the videos below for more.

The Transfiguration - by Ludovico Carracci
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Re-Reading the New Age, Part 3: Education, Bailey-Style

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 3 of the Re-Reading the New Age series. I’m tweaking the schedule a bit. As I mentioned in the first post in this series, I do want to write about other things (and you probably want to read about other things, too) and that will take time. So I thought about it and juggled things around a bit and came up with this.

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 30 – Worlds Unseen

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 30 of our weekly series on the soul. I think I’ve found the next text for our series. I stumbled across a book this week while searching for Catholic books on the soul. As I was reading it I began to think I’d read it before but I was reasonably certain I had not. Then I realized that the author’s name was familiar. I wondered if he quoted Dom Wiesinger at some point since the text seemed so familiar. But a search returned no results. Then I looked at the index in Wiesinger and there it was: Lépicier, five times. Lépicier is A. H. M. Cardinal Lépicier and he published The Unseen World: An Exposition Of Catholic Theology in its Relation to Modern Spiritism in 1906, Wiesinger, in 1957. So I was partly correct, it was familiar, I just had it backward as to who quoted who. I didn’t expect to find any of the ones Wiesinger quotes so this is a happy find, for me, anyway, bookworm that I am. Notes and links will be at the end of this post.

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Weekly Series on the Soul, Part 29 – Intercession

+JMJ+ Welcome to part 29 of our weekly series on the soul. Earlier today I was listening to a Catholic radio call-in show. The host was answering a question about the intercessory prayer of the saints, and some thoughts occurred to me. I made some notes quickly on my phone and decided to write about these tonight:

  • We who are in the Church are the Body of Christ.
  • We are commanded to pray for each other.
  • Our souls are immortal.
  • What does this mean for us as practicing Catholic Christians?
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Tried writing with my eyes closed

+JMJ+ A thousand apologies! I tried writing Thursday’s post with my eyes closed. Oddly enough it didn’t work. My mind said write and my body said sleep. Guess we see which one won. How embarrassing. And annoying. (May have something to do with the migraine that I’ve been fighting.) So I will continue writing the post but it won’t be posted until later, sometime on Friday. I’ll also lead the Live Rosary on Twitter at 7pm CDT, 8pm EDT, on Friday. I begin with some optional preliminary tweets at about 6:45pm, the Rosary itself begins on the same thread at 7:00pm, then some optional closing prayer tweets, ending the thread at about 7:30pm CDT. Check out some of the past threads using the links on the Twitter Devotions page. You have a standing invitation to join us every Tuesday and Friday.

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