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Searching for answers in the midst of the sexual abuse crisis in the church, many blamed the clerical culture. But what exactly is this clerical culture? We may know it when we see it, but how can we whether clergy or laypeople go about dismantling it and putting in place a new, healthy culture? George Wilson has spent decades working with organizations to help them discover, and often recover, their foundational calling. He is also a Jesuit priest engaged in the lives of congregations. In Clericalism: The Death of Priesthood he brings together both capacities and gives his sense of the challenges facing the church.As members of the church, Wilson maintains, we are all responsible for creating a clerical culture. And we are also responsible for that cultures transformation. Clericalism aids this transformation by helping us examine some underlying attitudes that create and preserve destructive relationships between ordained and laity. After looking at the crisis and establishing where we are now, this book challenges us with concrete suggestions for changing behaviors. We are lay and ordained, but all baptized into the royal priesthood of 1 Peter 2:9, all called to spread the Gospel and do the work of Gods love in the world. Ultimately, this is a hopeful book, looking for the restoration of a genuine priesthood, free of clericalism, in which we become truly united in Christ..

This collection of essays explores the rich and diverse intersections between the world of liturgy and the worlds of creation and the cosmos. The intersections highlighted here include biblical, historical, visual, and musical materials as well as contemporary theological and pastoral challenges for worship today. The essays gathered in this volume were first presented at the 2018 Yale Institute of Sacred Music Liturgy Conference and are here made available to a wider audience. These essays are responses to the unprecedented attention to ecological and cosmological concerns, which call for sustained engagement by scholars and practitioners of liturgy.

"Explores the trend in Roman Catholic teaching toward a commitment to active non-violence and how to become a truly catholic global peace church in which peacemaking is church-wide and parish-deep, Catholics should recognize that they have always properly been a diaspora people with an identity that transcends tribe and nation-state"--

Volume 1 Anselm's Letters as Prior and Abbot of Bec (1070-1092)

The dangerous tendency to reduce theological positions to political ones has always fueled divisions in the Church, and it plagues debates surrounding Pope Francis's teaching today. This collection of essays was born of a landmark international symposium designed to promote theological understanding by contextualizing the thought of Pope Francis--from his understanding of history to his theology of mission--within important theological conversations rarely heard in the US Catholic Church. Its contributors demonstrate decisively that Pope Francis's magisterium is the fruit of a profound and distinctive, yet deeply Catholic, intellectual engagement with the theological and ecclesial traditions of the Church.Contributors include: Austen Ivereigh, Archbishop Christophe Pierre, Rodrigo Guerra López, Bishop Robert Barron, Massimo Borghesi, Susan K. Wood, SCL, Rocco Buttiglione, Guzmán Carriquiry Lecour, Peter J. Casarella, Brian Y. Lee, Thomas L. Knoebel

Isaac of Stella was an English-born Cistercian who studied in the schools before entering monastic life and becoming abbot of Stella in 1147. His liturgical sermons inject a speculative philosophical inquisitiveness into imaginative meditations on scenes from Scripture. This present volume includes sermons 2755, along with three fragments. In these sermons, while treating biblical passages corresponding to the major feasts of the Christian calendar, Isaac tackles weighty dogmatic issues such as predestination, the problem of evil, and Christ's two natures.

The Book of Psalms has provided comfort, nourishment and challenge to many people over hundreds of years. With this retelling of psalms and other familiar Scripture texts Patricia Stevenson, RSJ, shares the essence of these great prayers in language of today. and makes them available to all who seek their help and comfort. The additional prayers are an invitation to witness in these ancient writings a voice that reminds us of the communion that unites the joys and sufferings of people everywhere.

The Maronite Church is one of twenty-two Eastern Catholic Churches in communion with the Pope of Rome. Her patriarch is in Lebanon. Forty-three bishops and approximately five million faithful make up her presence throughout the world.The story of Maron, a fifth-century hermit-priest, and the community gathered around him, later called the Maronites, tells another fascinating story of the monastic and missionary movements of the Church. Marons story takes place in the context of Syrian monasticism, which was a combination of both solitary and communal life, and is a narrative of Christians of the Middle East as they navigated the rough seas of political divisions and ecclesiastical controversies from the fourth to the ninth centuries.Abbot Paul Naaman, a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks, wisely places the study of the origins of the Maronite Church squarely in the midst of the history of the Church. His book, The Maronites: The Origins of an Antiochene Church, published during the sixteenth centenary of Marons death, offers plausible insights into her formation and early development, grounding the Maronite Church in her Catholic, Antiochian, Syriac, and monastic roots.Abbot Paul Naaman is a Maronite scholar and former Superior General of the Order of Lebanese Maronite Monks.

Reflections for Novices

"Valerie Schultz shares what she learned and the grace she received during fourteen years working inside an American prison"--

"A personal journal seeing language as a vital medium through which the divine is made present to us and which serves to reflect the truth and occasionally mask it. This book also includes an essay that looks at certain features common to myth, fairy tale, lore, and Scripture"--

"A collection of reflections offering hope and encouragement in the face of the sadness and suffering of our world selected from the author's "Daily Reflections with Fr. Don Talafous" posts written for the blog Pray Tell"--

"A resource for reflection and prayer using poetry from several writers"--

"A new paraphrase of the Psalms that reflects the experience of addiction and living in recovery"--

"Describes five distinctive types of Christian spiritual wisdom, illustrated by classical examples: The Way of Discipline, The Contemplative-Mystical Way, The Way of Practical Action, The Way of Beauty, and The Prophetic Way"--

Great small-group facilitators are not born with their abilities; they develop them. This book will help facilitators in their task of enabling members to participate fully in their group. The content and exercises of each chapter present practical information and methods to help facilitators deepen their knowledge of their role and hone their skills in group facilitation.The first eight chapters cover various aspects of facilitation: the role of the facilitator; getting started; communication basics - expressive skills and listening skills; integrating our diversity; tuning into group life; and group transitions. Each chapter begins with warm-up exercises consisting of questions and assignments designed to help readers draw from their own experience as they work with the written material presented in each chapter.The rest of the book outlines eight flexibly formatted, ninety-minute workshop (or individual) sessions corresponding to the eight topics introduced previously. Includes exercises for practicing and assessing skills acquired in each session.

Volume 2

The publication of Laudato Si'a papal encyclical on a defining issue of our timeswas a moment of great importance for Catholics and for the world. Now Fr. Joshtrom Kureethadam, one of the church's top experts on the document, provides a thoughtful, passionate, and highly accessible commentary on its key ideas and themes. Faithfully attentive to the outline of the six chapters of the encyclical, Fr. Joshtrom has also insightfully arranged the book according to the See-Judge-Act methodology that is increasingly used in spirituality, moral theology, and the social sciences.If Pope Francis is right when he insists that the solution to our environmental problems cannot be found only in technocratic approaches by governments and institutions, but by a wide and thoughtful embrace by all of us of our common responsibility, then Fr. Joshtrom's book is precisely what we need at this time.

In this book, Charles Murphy explores the still unfolding rediscovery of Emily Dickinson (18301886), our foremost American poet, as a mystic of profound depth and ambition. She declined publication of almost all of her hundreds of poems during her lifetime, describing them as a record of her wrestling with God, who, in the Puritan religious tradition she received, she found cold and remote. Murphy places Dickinsons writings within the Christian mystical tradition exemplified by St. Teresa of Avila and identifies her poems as expressions of what he terms theologically as believing unbelief.' Dickinsons experiences of love and her confrontation with human mortality drove her poetic insightsand led to her discovery of God in the beauty and mystery of the natural world.

Essays on the Liturgical Readings Between Easter and Pentecost

During her short life as a Cistercian nun in the Italian monastery of Grottaferrata, Blessed Maria Gabriella Sagheddu wrote detailed letters about her life there to her family in Sardinia and to her former parish priest. These letters are collected here, along with notes and letters by and to her abbess, Mother Pia Gullini, OCSO, and M. Pia's notes and recollections about Bl. Gabriella. Also included are letters to M. Pia from Father Benedict Ley, a monk of the English Anglican abbey of Nashdom, regarding the hope for Christian unity.

The Monastic Way for Today

Thomas Merton recognized the value and possibility of contemplative dialogue between monastics and contemplatives of other religious traditions and hoped that, through such dialogue, monastics would strive for 'inter-monastic communion' and a bonding of the broader 'spiritual family.' He held out hope that this bond would demonstrate the fundamental unity of humanity to a world that was becoming ever more materialistic and divided.Among other themes and topics, this book explores Thomas Merton's role as a pioneer of Buddhist-Christian dialogue and monastic interreligious dialogue. It delves into the process of Merton's self-transformation through contemplative experiences, explores his encounter with Zen and Tibetan Buddhists and his pioneering engagements in Buddhist-Christian dialogue, and presents and responds to the criticisms of those who raise questions about Merton's understanding of Buddhism.Fr. Jaechan Anselmo Park, OSB, articulates and analyzes the influences of Buddhist theory and practice on Thomas Merton's contemplative spirituality and shows how Merton's legacy has influenced and continues to inspire interreligious and inter-monastic dialogue, particularly in an Asian monastic context.

RCIA teams often struggle with getting catechumens and candidates to participate regularly in the church's liturgy. Those who do often feel bored or confused, or they see it as a nice tradition or an inconvenient obligation rather than the heart of our Catholic faith. So we fill the gap with more catechesis that explains the liturgy to seekers, and we pray they will have a better personal experience on Sunday. Yet neither causes them to love the liturgy as we do.InDivine Blessing: Liturgical Formation in the RCIA,Timothy P. O'Malley shows us how we can break out of a classroom model about liturgy and instead invite seekers to be formed by the Risen Christ through the liturgy. This book will give you a process for preparing your catechumens and candidates to learn the liturgy's symbolic language of self-giving love that will sustain them with divine blessing and train them to be Christ's disciples in the world.