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The Dream of Fewness
Inside a little book entitled, THE THOMAS MERTON POEMS, J.S. Porter writes this piece: There’s too much of everything books, stars, flowers. How can one flower be precious in a
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Living in a Moral Diaspora
In an autobiographical novel entitled, My First Loves, Ivan Klima, a Czech writer, talks about a pain he endured as a young man. Growing up without religious training and living
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The Eucharist as Touch
A few years ago Brenda Peterson wrote book of essays entitled, Nature and Other Mothers. Her first entry is wonderfully named, In Praise of Skin. In it, she tells how
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Polishing our Stones
There are times when we can only live by hope, when what confronts us is so overwhelming, so huge, so utterly beyond our strength, that it’s simply hopeless, or a
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Kathleen Norris – An Augustine for our Time
We need saints today and we need a variety of them. They don’t all look the same, as we commonly suppose. Some saints do have the gaunt, ascetical look, that
https://ronrolheiser.com/kathleen-norris-an-augustine-for-our-time/
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Amazing Grace
It was William Auden, I think, who wrote that when grace enters a room everyone begins to dance. Would this were so! More often the opposite happens, grace enters a
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Faults of the Parents in the Children
A couple of years ago, I was at the home of some friends for a dinner. During the meal, their kids, all quite young, had been rather loud, cranky, self-absorbed,
https://ronrolheiser.com/faults-of-the-parents-in-the-children/
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Missionaries to Secularity
This past summer, the religious community I belong to, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, sponsored a symposium, “Missionaries to Secularity”, at St. Paul University, Ottawa. We’re a missionary order who
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The Language of Soul
Kathleen Norris’ recent book, AMAZING GRACE, is subtitled, “A Vocabulary of Faith”. What’s implied here is that Christian faith, timeless in content, needs to struggle to articulate itself meaningfully today.
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The Tale of Two Flights
A couple of summers ago I booked an airline ticket from Seattle to London, a nine-hour flight. I fly enough to know that, to get a good seat in the