Month: October 2016

The corporality of the practice of the sacraments, precisely as language-laden, communal acts of symbolic mediation, is what makes their celebration so essential to knowing and living the Christ proclaimed in Scripture. Participation in sacramental liturgy, as an ecclesial body given over to both the Word in Scripture and symbolic gestures that inscribe that divine… Continue reading Participation in Sacramental Liturgy

The church's symbolic order of Scripture, sacrament, and ethics makes of the human pattern of knowledge, gratitude, and ethics a sacrament - an embodied revelation - of the reign of God, the salvation of human beings. What keeps this way of life explicitly Christian is ongoing balance between these three constitutive poles of the practice… Continue reading Scripture, Sacrament, and Ethics

An evangelizing community is always concerned with fruit, because the Lord wants her to be fruitful. It cares for the grain and does not grow impatient at the weeds. The sower, when he sees weeds sprouting among the grain does not grumble or overreact. He or she finds a way to let the word take… Continue reading Forget The Weeds

[There is a theological and liturgical presupposition] clustered around the understanding of "tradition." As the world moved into the twenty-first century, the Roman Curia limited liturgical tradition to the continuing use of ancient Latin texts. Yet liturgical tradition also consists of the dynamics by which texts, genres, and rites came into existence, their reception within their original… Continue reading Understanding of Tradition

The 2001 promulgation of the document on translation, Liturgiam authenticam (LA), accompanied by the rejection and abandonment of the 1998 English translation of the Roman Missal and the forced reconstitution of the International Commission on English in the Liturgy (ICEL) signalled a retreat from allowing the concerns of contemporary English-speaking worshippers to influence liturgical texts. This… Continue reading The Retreat From Justice

Although it is impossible for man to bestow blessing on God in the sense in which human beings may be blessed, yet by this proclamation the speaker acknowledges that what has befallen him is not mere chance but the result of the activity of God and so ascribes to [God] the praise and glory for… Continue reading The Blessing of God