+JMJ+ You are invited to join me Monday, Aug. 15, on Twitter at 8pm ET/7pm CT, to pray the Glorious Mysteries of the Rosary in honor of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary. I tweeted a thread about it, too, containing links to some videos by Scott Hahn, Steve Ray, and Brant Pitre, about Catholic teachings on the Blessed Virgin and her Assumption. I hope you’ll join me.
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+JMJ+ It’s Father’s Day in the Year of St. Joseph, now that’s blessed timing right there. And in honor of fathers and Fathers and that special father of the Holy Family and patron of the Universal Church, here’s a video (below) by Scott Hahn reflecting on Father’s Day. Happy Father’s Day, y’all!
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Today, well, now tonight, is the feast of the Annunciation. (Posts in the Story of Salvation series will begin again soon. Next Thursday is Holy Thursday and I’m thinking about doing a post for that or for Holy Week or Good Friday. Not sure yet.) Tonight I’m sharing some of the beautiful artwork inspired by the Biblical account of the Annunciation. This does not even scratch the surface of the treasures of sacred art that artists have created down through the centuries. Oh, and if you haven’t seen them yet, there are galleries for each Mystery in the Rosary Project. See especially the gallery for the First Joyful Mystery, the Annunciation.
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+JMJ+ Greetings! Today is the Solemnity of St. Joseph. I’m preparing the Rosary thread for tonight but I wanted to share these things with you on this day devoted to this very important Saint. I’ve included videos from Scott Hahn and Mike Aquilina. I hope you enjoy them.
Continue reading “Solemnity of St Joseph, March 19”+JMJ+ Welcome to part 8 of the continuing series, the Story of Salvation. This week we’ll look at the story of Abram and his great-great-great-great-great-grandfather, Shem. We won’t get all the way through with their story this week, but we’ll get as far as we can. Notes and links will be at the end of the post.
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+JMJ+ Welcome to The Story of Salvation, Part 7. We’re going to look at patterns in this episode, the way the patterns repeat through the Bible and in Noah’s story. (I think this series is going to take more than ten posts, but we’ll see.) You’ll find notes and links below at the end of this post.
According to Scott Hahn, in Our Father’s Plan, there are four basic themes in the Bible:
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+JMJ+ Welcome to The Story of Salvation, Part 6: Blessings and Curses. Boils down to this: one can live according to the covenant and keep it and reap the blessings, or live in a way that violates the covenant (covenants can’t actually be broken it but can be violated it) and so trigger the curses. Think of it this way: If I keep my hand off the stove when it’s on, I don’t burn my hand and I can cook my food. But if I put my hand on a hot eye of the stove, I’ll get burned. That’s a simplistic and very imperfect analogy but my point is that it’s not God being vindictive. He gave us a world and said, Live this way and you’ll be blessed, live this other way and you’ll bring all manner of deep, deep trouble upon yourself. And mankind has been awfully bad at following these simple instructions for thousands of years, proving to us that sin damages the one who sins and ripples outward to damage everyone and everything else, too. No sin is private.
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Go Deeper in the Mass This Lent as the St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology presents Parousia: The Bible and the Mass. All episodes streaming free during Lent. Hey, here’s a thought: give up some of your free time (I know, what’s free time?) and spend it watching this series which I expect to be excellent because everything they’ve done so far has been. While writing this, I stopped to watch a few minutes of the first video. And, yes, it is excellent, production values and content. Oh, yeah, this is definitely going to be a great thing to do for Lent. As usual there are notes and links are the end of this post.
Continue reading “New St Paul Center Series for Lent”+JMJ+ Welcome to part 5 of the continuing series, the Story of Salvation. I found something to share with you, well, two somethings. It’s two talks by Scott Hahn (author of A Father Who Keeps His Promises, the main text, along with the Bible, that I’ve been using for this series, though I plan to use some other ones, too). And he managed to get almost everything about the story of salvation (well, a lot of it, anyway) into the first talk which lasts a little over an hour, and when he finished, I was not ready for him to stop. So I watched another one. I’m linking them here so you can watch them both, too.
Continue reading “The Story of Salvation – Part 5”Continue reading “The Story of Salvation – Part 3”An interlude:
For God so loved the world that He created man to share His Love because God IS Love. And Love desires to give of itself, burns with the longing to Love another. So God made the universe to be a beautiful temple and made a sanctuary of a garden and created man to live in the garden to keep it and to have friendship with Him in it. And God Who is Love knew that man needed love, and that loving another of his own kind would give him joy and help him learn and grow to love the One Who is Love. So God made woman, and the man and the woman did love each other, and God saw that it was good.
But an ancient evil crept into the garden. He did not want love, could not understand love, had turned away from love long before God created man. And seeing that God loved them, he held it against the man and the woman. And so he waited and plotted to catch the woman when she would be most unaware, because he was subtle and she was innocent and knew not of evil. But she would soon learn.
+JMJ+ Welcome to the second post in our new Thursday series, The Story of Salvation. I’d like to begin with a prayer. I’ll pray the Come, Holy Spirit prayer. Pray with me if you like, use the same prayer or one of your choice. When you’re ready, meet me back here.
Continue reading “The Story of Salvation – Part 2”+JMJ+ Welcome to the introduction of a new Thursday series where we will explore the Story of Salvation. I’ve been wanting to write about the Bible and salvation history for some time now but have only mentioned it here and there in the past. When I was a kid (either in the 7th or 8th grade or maybe a freshman in high school) and a Methodist, I read the Bible straight through. I’d gotten one at church and, bookworm that I was (and am), I set myself the goal of reading it from cover to cover. And I did. I didn’t understand most of what I read, but I kept at it. Parts of it were beautiful and I’ve maintained my love of the Psalms to this day.
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Catholic Heart and Mind 