According to Isaac the Syrian, a famous 7th Century bishop and theologian, a person who’s genuinely humble gives off a certain scent that other people will sense and that even animals will pick up, so that wild animals, including snakes, will fall under its spell and never harm that person.
The internet, while it offers enormous possibilities on many levels – information, data, speed of contact, time saved and relationships improved – also renews long-established problems of the offline world (solitude, pornography, violence, theft, viruses) but on a qualitatively different scale. Like any new development, digital technology cannot solve a problem without creating new ones.
Jesus says that if we follow him, the cross, pain, will find us.That message is chronically misunderstood. Maybe we would understand it better if Jesus had worded it this way: The more sensitive you become, the more pain will seep into your life. We catch the connection then. Sensitive person suffer more deeply, just as they also drink in more deeply the joys and beauties of life.
We live in a culture that idealizes youth and marginalizes the old. And, as James Hillman says, the old don’t let go easily either of the throne or the drive that took them there. I know; I’m aging. For most of my life, I’ve been able to think of myself as young.
Imagine this: A man, entirely careless of all moral and spiritual affairs, lives his life in utter selfishness, pleasure his only pursuit. He lives the high life, never prays, never goes to church, has numerous sexual affairs, and has no concern for anyone but himself...
Former president of Ireland, Dr Mary McAleese, has said she was “surprised and thrilled” by the Catholic Faculty of Theology of Tübingen University’s decision to award her the 2019 Alfons Auer Ethics Prize.
People "who are always passing by but never enter the church" in a fully communal way of sharing and caring engage in a sort of "spiritual tourism that makes them believe they are Christians but instead are only tourists of catacombs," the pope said Aug. 21 during his weekly general audience.
Cardinal Oscar Andrès Rodriguez Maradiaga of Tegucigalpa has urged Honduras to "get out of the mud of corruption, evil, injustice and crime to discover the truth in justice, dialogue and love." According to Transparency International, an anti-corruption organization, Honduras was, in 2018, the 29th most corrupt country in the world out of 180.
The pope also talked about the dangers of surging nationalism and isolationist sentiments, saying, "I am worried because you hear speeches that resemble those by Hitler in 1934. 'Us first, We... We ....'" Such thinking, he said, "is frightening."
THE CONNECTION between landscape and spirituality is long established. A thousand years ago, Celtic monks used to cross a treacherous strait of water to see out their days on Bardsey Island off the Llyn Peninsula in north-west Wales because it was, for them, a “thin” place between this world and the next. As a result, it is still known to this day as the island of 20,000 saints.