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Nature’s beauty can be easily missed. Louie Schwartzberg’s time-lapse photography, accompanied by words from a child and Benedictine monk Brother David Steindl-Rast, serves as a meditation on living a life of gratitude every day. Cultivating a response of gratefulness... Read More →

When the first level of the spiral of violence, the world (group selfishness), is not exposed for what it is, and the second level, the flesh, operates out of control (murder, stealing, rape, lying, adultery, and greed), then a third level of fully justified and even idealized... Read More →

The Rule and the life of the Friars Minor is to simply live the Gospel. — St. Francis of Assisi (1182–1226) One of the things I most appreciate about my Franciscan heritage is its alternative orthodoxy. The Franciscan tradition has applied this phrase to itself and its... Read More →

When I was doing my doctoral work in theology at Fordham University, I was introduced to the master of mystical theology, Denis the Areopagite, or Pseudo-Dionysius [who wrote in the late fifth to early sixth century]. I was immediately struck by the name “Denis”—the mysterious... Read More →

Advent [meaning “coming”], to the Church Fathers, was the right naming of the season when light and life are fading. They urged the faithful to set aside four weeks to fast, give, and pray—all ways to strip down, to let the bared soul recall what it knows beneath its fear of the... Read More →