Hear O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. (Deut: 6:4-5) So begins the “Shema,” commonly known as the most important prayer in the Jewish faith. It identifies that God alone is the only God, and we should love Him with all that we are and do―but so many of our prayers seem to be meditating about God rather than praying to Him. [...]
Anyone who has spent much time visiting different Franciscan fraternities is aware that there are different ways of understanding how to live out our Franciscan life.
“Would you be willing to mentor a young man in prison who wants to be a Franciscan?” What a question! What a surprise! I’m always eager to share my life with anyone who is interested, but I never imagined being asked to share our Franciscan life with a prisoner on the other side of the United States. ...
Three years ago, I made a Visitation to Tau Cross Regional Fraternity. Something happened during that visit that made quite an impact, and I have remembered it ever since. Our ongoing formation topic that day was the OFS Rule. I was interested in what the Rule meant to those gathered, so I handed out blank postcards and asked everyone to write down three words – just three words – to describe the Rule. ...
There were so many good titles to choose for this article, but I felt compelled to choose this one. It came from Tom Ha, OFS, our Korean brother from Saint Elizabeth of Hungary Fraternity in Houston, Texas. This message has resonated with me so many times this past year. It is so true that Diversity is a Gift to us from God, and what we do with that Gift is especially important. ...
My ultimate goal is to help others better understand and embrace the different ethnic cultures within our fraternities. The following definitions are taken from that website article (see footnote). [...]
When I served as a youth director, each summer we participated in a week-long service program called “Young Neighbors in Action.” One year, our week was spent in an orphanage in Mexico. Among other chores, we were each asked to choose one child and befriend them, rather than spread ourselves among the large group. [...]
Pope Francis has been transforming the tone and approach of the Catholic Church towards Ecumenism by reaching out to non-Catholic denominations to reconcile past differences, opening the doors to dialogue and understanding, focusing on what we have in common and not differences, celebrating and reconciling “That they may all be one.” [...]
The number of Francis’s writings may, at first glance, appear limited. However, consider the era in which he lived, ...
So often over the past few years, when there is a national tragedy like a mass shooting, the default reaction is for prayer. Then the response comes back that prayer is not enough; ...