Earlier this week, a jury
recommended that Steven Hayes--convicted of the brutal murder of Jennifer
Hawke-Petit and her daughters Hayley and Michaela Petit--be put to death.
We labor under the illusion that if the clock stopped between creation and Fall or between Fall and redemption, they would make sense on their own. But nothing could be more misleading.
I don't know what I'm going to do without Context: Martin E. Marty on Religion and Culture. Earlier this year Marty and the Claretians, who have published Context 12 times a year, announced that it was closing down. I've been in a mild depression ever since.
There isn't a tidy way to write about forgiveness. It's the whole gospel, for sure. But you've got to deal with the sin that preceded it and the damage that won't go away no matter how much reconciliation follows it. You've got to deal with the stop-start nature of relationships, the silence and paralysis of pain and shame, and the fact that we fail at least as much as we succeed.
Guroian thinks that theology is more analogous to music than it is to architecture. The themes in this work, from creation to the resurrection, do not build upon each other like architecture, but rather are like motifs that provide a variation on a theme. To Westerners' ears these themes will sound as though written in a strange key.
The Central African Republic is being torn apart by strife between Muslims and Christians. A Catholic church in one small town has taken in about 650 Muslims who are seeking sanctuary from Christian marauders. Father Xavier Fagba, the priest at the church, knows that some Muslims hiding in his church attacked Christian families in the past year. The priest is determined to keep providing sanctuary because “the Muslims discovered in our church that the God we worship is the same as their God. And that’s the vision the whole of this country needs to have,” the priest said (BBC, February 13).
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