30 September 2023Final Sunday in the Season of Creation Lectionary texts: Our lectionary readings today did not include the well-known account of Jesus washing his disciples’ feet in John 13. Rather, they illuminate that event. So let us recall: During his final meal with his disciples Jesus surprises them by assuming the role of the…
Category: Commentary
Washing All Our Relatives’ Feet:
Of Elves and Theologians
On December 3, 2021, the Theology Department at the University of St. Thomas gave me a belated retirement party — belated because of the COVID-19 pandemic. These were my remarks. As some of you know, my project this fall at the Collegeville Institute at St. John’s has been to start a book on Catholic social…
Where Have You Gone, Malcolm Gladwell?
An Open Letter
Bearings Online19 November 2020 Dear Malcolm Gladwell, It is too bad that the malcolmgladwellbookgenerator.com website doesn’t work anymore. I hope you enjoyed the gentle ribbing back in the day. Your well-crafted books— The Tipping Point, Blink—offered big ideas with catchy titles, and became so culturally ascendent as to earn the backhanded praise of parody. Me?…
Ars Profetica
a poem by Ivan J. Kauffman from his collection,The Ironshop & Chartres (1982) Declaimed.That is a word seldom used these days.Once popular it has fallen into disuse in our timeswhen anger and psychology have been all the rage. And now I must ask (timidly)is it so unfashionable as to be unspeakable that one might take…
We Are All Monks Now
Bearings OnlineApril 7, 2020 So here we are, mostly inside, self-isolated to help stop the Covid-19 pandemic, cloistered as it were. Even libertarians and other individualists realize they are social creatures. Catholics miss all the more the materiality — the smell of incense, the touch when passing the peace, the taste of bread and wine…
The Mystery in Ordinary Churches
Bearings OnlineNovember 5, 2019 If only they would restore a sense of mystery to the Mass, Catholics could put God first and the Church could find its way back to vibrancy. So goes the argument from Catholic traditionalists. And so far so good. But mystery has its own mysterious ways. Unless we discern mystery amid…
Putting Lent back into Christmas
Bearings Online6 December 2018 The commercialization of Christmas is old news. The war against Christmas is fake news. The wringing of hands is wrung out. Yet still the Christmas Muzak drones on: Santa’s reindeer has run over grandma again this year. The real tragedy, though, is that according to the premature Christmas carols we cannot…
Why Believe in God? To Live Inside a Poem
Bearings Online4 October 2018 There comes a time in almost any undergraduate theology class when professors like me must respond to the question: Why believe? This may come as a surprise to those who think theology professors pressure students to believe through catechesis and apologetics or, on the contrary, covertly aim to strip students of…
Things I’ve Learned from Fundamentalists
Bearings Online7 May 2018 A few of the things that fundamentalist preachers tried to teach me in my youth keep coming back to me. I wonder what it is about our current historical moment that is doing that. Hmm – what could it be? Like many earnest young Christians growing up within range of American…
What is “just peace”?
What is “just peace?” In recent decades, representatives of various church traditions have called on their churches to move away from, replace, or transcend the “just-war” framework for discerning responses to war and violence in some way, in favor of a “just peace” framework. Recently and prominently, such a call came from Catholics gathered in…
Works-Righteousness and the Politics of Virtue Signaling
Bearings Online 22 Febuary 2018 Last fall many commemorated Martin Luther’s sparking of the Protestant Reformation 500 years ago when, in his 95 Theses posted on October 31, 1517, he attacked “works-righteousness.” Luther confidently expected that rejecting “works-righteousness” in favor of grateful trust in God would actually free Christians to do more and truer good…
Exiles all: Going “all in” on immigration reform
Bearings Online 10 August 2017 You know the headlines: Globalization. Jobs lost, jobs gained. Immigrants. Muslims. Nationalist resurgence both in the United States and other countries. Calls to “build that wall.” Charges of xenophobia. Outsourcing that hurts “us” and sweatshops that hurt “them.” The internet, creating both links between people and echo chambers for the…
Just war? Enough already
Commonweal16 June 2017, pp. 9-14 A question for sports fans: What would you make of a coach who drills his team exclusively on last-minute desperation plays, while neglecting the basics? What would you make of players whose whole mindset was geared toward spectacular buzzer-beaters, but couldn’t play sound defense? In much the same manner, a…
Playing the long game
Bearings Online 5 May 2017 Long before President Barack Obama and hundreds of pundits popularized the notion of “playing the long game” in seeking societal change, a 1917 editorial in the Times Literary Supplement stated: “The long game is the Church’s game.” Having only seen this quote second hand, I do not know what exactly…
Pacifism in action [an interview with Gerald Schlabach]
U.S. CatholicFebruary 2017 Gerald Schlabach first started thinking about peace and violence in the mid-1980s. He and his wife worked for the Mennonite Central Committee in Nicaragua during a time of ongoing civil revolution. A member of the Mennonite church at the time, he was tasked with figuring out how the historically pacifist church should…
Abortion & social justice:
“prolife progressive” is not an oxymoron
Commonweal 6 January 2017 It should be easy to be a prolife progressive. If we could somehow start from scratch and map out political alliances and coalitions according to the logic of people’s stated values, social-justice advocacy would coalesce with the defense of the unborn at any number of points: a preference for working at…
Pope Francis’s peacebuilding pedagogy:
A commentary on his 2017 World Day of Peace message
It is not too soon to anticipate the challenge of “reception.” All signs suggest that Pope Francis’s 2017 World Day of Peace (WDP) message represents only an initial response to the appeal for clearer teaching on gospel nonviolence issued at the historic conference co-sponsored by Pax Christi International and the Pontifical Council on Justice and…
The virtue of staying put:
What the “Benedict option” forgets about Benedictines
Commonweal 16 September 2016 In recent years the term “Benedict Option” has been circulating in certain sectors of the U.S. Catholic Church. For a Benedictine oblate such as myself, this should be a welcome development. After all, the charism of Benedictine monasticism, with its emphasis on faithfulness to flesh-and-blood local communities formed in prayer, liturgy, discernment,…
Mennonite-Catholic relations — Joetta tells our story
My wife Joetta, pastor of Faith Mennonite Church, recently spoke at the Third Way congregation here in Saint Paul about Mennonite-Catholic relationships. She told our story in a way that speaks for both of us. Click here or on screenshot below to listen or watch.
What if we win?
Nonviolence and the challenge of governance
Advance paper for Pax Christi International / Pontifical Council for Justice and Peace conference, Rome, April 2016: “Nonviolence and Just Peace: Contributing to the Catholic Understanding of and Commitment to Nonviolence” Gerald W. Schlabach And what if you win? As I have observed or participated in various social movements over four decades – reformist and revolutionary,…