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Good Friday
Good Friday was bad long before it was good, at least from outward appearances. God was being crucified by all that can go bad in the world: pride, jealousy, distrust,
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Doing Violence in God’s Name
Blaise Pascal once wrote: “Men never do evil so completely and cheerfully as when they do it from a religious conviction.” How true! This has been going on since the
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Our Shadow and Our Self-Understanding
What is meant when certain schools of psychology today warn us about our “shadow”? What’s our shadow? In essence, it’s this: We have within us powerful, fiery energies that, for
https://ronrolheiser.com/our-shadow-and-our-self-understanding/
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Nothing is Ever Really Ours
Everything is gift. That’s a principle that ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every commandment. Everything is gift. Nothing can be ultimately claimed as our own. Genuine moral and
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The Flavor of God’s Energy
All things considered, I believe that I grew up with a relatively healthy concept of God. The God of my youth, the God that I was catechized into, was not
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Of Virtue and Sin
There’s an axiom which says: Nothing feels better than virtue. There’s a deep truth here, but it has an underside. When we do good things we feel good about ourselves. Virtue
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Of Winners and Losers
Our society tends to divide us up into winners and losers. Sadly, we don’t often reflect on how this affects our relationships with each other, nor on what it means
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Welcoming the Stranger
In the Hebrew Scriptures, that part of the bible we call the Old Testament, we find a strong religious challenge to always welcome the stranger, the foreigner. This was emphasized for two
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Embittered Moralizing
One of the dangers inherent in trying to live out a life of Christian fidelity is that we are prone to become embittered moralizers, older brothers of the prodigal son,
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God’s Power as Powerlessness
The French novelist and essayist, Leon Bloy, once made this comment about God’s power in our world: “God seems to have condemned himself until the end of time not to