A journal of byzantine digressionS
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The Promise and the Promised.
The Propers for the Thirteenth Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Respice Domine in testamentum tuum ABRAHAM IS THE FATHER, in faith, of all God’s people. God’s covenant with Abraham was to bless all people through his line. This promise is fulfilled in Christ. Traditional Dispensationalist theology sees a series of…
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Resist. But not what you think.
NEIL POSTMAN’S TECHNOPOLY has been a slow-go for me, although I think I’ve had it for about a year. It’s hard reading a fully-valid cultural critique of your industry (and your quarter-century career arc) that was written before your industry or the possibility of your career arc existed. To say Postman was a prophet is…
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Under a Loving Gaze
THE ANGELIC WARFARE Confraternity has its members promise to say a certain set of prayers every day. In addition to invoking the aid of Jesus and St Thomas Aquinas (the Confraternity’s patron), the members also pray 15 Hail Mary’s for specific intentions. Recently the intentions have evolved into 15 little prayers but it is the…
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How to Love like God
The Propers for the Twelfth Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Deus in adjutorium meum intende POPE BENEDICT XVI’s Jesus of Nazareth (Vol 1) has an amazing commentary on today’s Gospel. I’m fully indebted to His Holiness for the roots of the ideas. If anything is amiss here, it is my…
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IntegraLeft
CATHOLIC TWITTER HAS BEEN going over (rehashing?) what seems to be an old argument this week: To be honest, I don’t know. This argument is going on in a column on my Tweetdeck called “I’m learning” into which I throw everyone that’s arguing about politics so that I can learn more about a Catholic approach…
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I am what I am
The Propers for the Eleventh Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Deus in loco FOR TODAY’S MASS the Church has given us a reather powerful Collect, asking for what we dare not ask, begging forgiveness for what we dare not name. The recognition of our sinful failings manifested in our weakness…
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Mercy and Grace
The Propers for the Tenth Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Cum clamarem ad Dominum TODAY’S OPENING COLLECT is quite clear that God’s power is most evident in his Mercy. And then we ask for his mercy. What is God’s mercy? A note in my missal says that originally this prayer…
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Day 151: Parthenos
But I would have you without carefulness. He that is unmarried careth for the things that belong to the Lord, how he may please the Lord: But he that is married careth for the things that are of the world, how he may please his wife. – St Paul, I Corinthians 7:32-33 THESE THREE ESSAYS…
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Day 150: Self Gift
Picking up from yesterday’s post… BUT COVET EARNESTLY THE BETTER GIFTS: and yet shew I unto you a more excellent way (I Corinthians 12:31). With this promise of showing us a more excellent way, Saint Paul opens the passage in 1st Corinthians known as the Love Chapter. He goes on to explain all the ways…
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Day 149: Only A Tool
WHEN I WAS FIRST CONSIDERING the priesthood in the Episcopal Church (as a teenager) the most common response was around marriage. “Can they get married?” “But you’re able to get married, right?” “Well at least that kind of priest can still get married.” It did not take long before I realized that what they were…
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The Burning Bush
MOSES’ VISION OF THE BURNING BUSH is read as a typological prefigurement of the Incarnation. God enters the womb of the Most Holy Theotokos without damage or corruption just as the bush was burned yet was not consumed. This, along with reading through Pope Emeritus Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, and today’s feast of the Transfiguration,…
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Of idols and whips.
The Propers for the Ninth Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Ecce Deus, adjuvat me TODAY’S COLLECT BEGS GOD to help us in our asking: let us only ask for the things we should. Let us only ask of the things that please then. The rest of the minor propers, though,…
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Unrighteous Mammon
The Propers for the Eighth Sunday After PentecostPlease note: an entry in the People’s Missal Project Missa Suscepimus, Deus, misericodiam tuam THE COLLECT TODAY REMINDS us that we do not exist without God. God is the ground and source of our being, our very essence is tied to his continual will for our being. We are not…
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The Kingdom is Like a Trigger Warning
The Readings for the 16th SundayTempus per Annum – Wisdom 12:13, 16-19 – Romans 8:26-27 – Matthew 13:24-43 ALL OF THESE PARABLES in Matthew 13 begin “the Kingdom of God is like…”and they always leave me wondering, is the Kingdom like the whole image in the story or like the first symbol in the story…
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Of Masks, Statues, and Jehoshaphat
FRIDAY IN THE 15th WEEK, Tempus per Annum, the readings in the Daily Office all conspire as if someone had set up it on purpose. In the Office of Readings, David and the story of Jehoshaphat, in Morning Prayer, David again, Jeremiah and St Paul all come together in one great story. In the Office…
Orthoparadoxy 