The other morning while running on a treadmill at the local gym, I was jarred out of my early morning daze by a line sung by Chanticler, a famous men’s a cappella group who were performing for the Today Show. The line that stirred me was one I, like many of you, have heard and sung a hundred times or more: “”¦Pleased as man with man to dwell, Jesus our Emmanuel”¦” This familiar phrase from […]
Ignatian spirituality owes a great debt to Aristotle. Not a surprise, really–Ignatius absorbed the theology of Thomas Aquinas, who imbibed the philosophy of Aristotle (by way of his teacher, Albert the Great, and in conversation with Muslim and Jewish philosophers, who had been using Aristotle for centuries). Here’s my thumbnail sketch; it’s on my mind because my freshman seminar is reading Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics. Everything we do is oriented toward some goal. We reach our […]
Today we welcome another blogger to dotMagis. He is Ed Peck. Ed is the founding executive director of the Ignatian Colleagues Program. He joins Maureen Waldron, Tim Muldoon, and me as regular dotMagis bloggers. Ed will publish his first post tomorrow. Ignatian Colleagues is joint venture of 24 Jesuit colleges and universities that trains administrators in a deeper understanding of Ignatian values and Jesuit history. Beyond his Jesuit mission and identity work, Ed is a […]
My friend and colleague Jim Campbell recently discovered a Jesuit calendar that’s a great resource for anyone interested in all things Jesuit. It was developed by Otto Sayre, SJ, a German Jesuit. The calendar pays special attention to the German history of the Society, but it covers the whole history of the Society, from Ignatius to the present.
Brother Guy Consolmango, SJ, whom we’ve featured here before, talks to Stephen Colbert about the theological implications of the possibility of life on other planets. The Colbert Report Mon – Thurs 11:30pm / 10:30c Gold, Frankincense and Mars – Guy Consolmagno www.colbertnation.com
I went to a funeral Monday morning; the mother of a friend. She was about 95 and left behind a grieving husband who will turn 99 next month. They had been married for 73 years. I sat in church and pondered that kind of love and commitment. Seventy-three years? For those of us who have been married a long time, there are days you wonder if you will make it seven years, then you wonder […]
December 3 is the feast of Saint Francis Xavier. Francis is the patron of foreign missions because of his evangelization in India, Indonesia, and Japan (he died off the coast of China, and the site is a pilgrimage destination for Chinese Catholics). Many Asian Catholics to this day recognize Francis as a patron; many priests take his name. Francis is perhaps the most striking example of what Ignatius’ disciple Jerónimo Nadal described as the place […]
I have been doing all the blogging at dotMagis since the site launched last April. To further our goal of making dotMagis an Ignatian community of many voices with many points of view, we recently invited several friends and colleagues to share their reflections with us. Tim Muldoon, from the Office of Ministry and Mission at Boston College and author of The Ignatian Workout has already joined in the dialogue with posts on “Spiritual Direction” […]
The Congregation for the Causes of Saints has announced that Mary Ward (1585-1645), the English woman who founded an order modeled directly after the Jesuits, will be declared Venerable. See the CathAsia news story here. See the bio of Mary at the website of the order she founded, the Institute of the Blessed Virgin Mary, here. Like Ignatius, Mary was suspected of heresy during her lifetime. Like the Jesuits, her order was at one time […]
This evening, Saturday, at Vespers, the Church begins its observance of Advent. He is coming! I marvel at the way the Church has, over its history, sought to mark sacred time. The philosopher Charles Taylor observed that there is something remarkable about how the Good Friday we observe this year is in some way closer to Christ’s crucifixion than, say, the midsummer day of last year; we enter into an imaginative place that brings the […]
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