thought exercise on The Saints

One time a little boy and his father got to tour Europe. During their journey, they visited a magnificent cathedral, where the boy found himself captivated by the vibrant stained glass windows. He cou...

The saints of the church flicker like candles along a dark corridor. They are not 1400-watt LED floodlights to blind you with their brilliance; those are the celebrities. A celebrity is a flashbulb st...

There's an intriguing story about Oliver Cromwell, who, while serving as Lord Protector of England, faced a tricky cash flow issue. When he found himself short on precious metal for coins, he sent...

There are many ways to be a saint, and at times our fidelity may look like betrayal. We may have to become “saints of darkness.” We may have to be saints whose light seems to go out as we wander in th...

It turns out the Christian story is a good story in which to learn to fail. As the ethicist Samuel Wells has written, some stories feature heroes and some stories feature saints and the difference bet...

Two thousand years ago, Christians were often hunted down and killed. Amid this darkness, the church began a radical practice. When a brother or sister was martyred for faith in Jesus, the Christian c...

Dwight Lyman, better known as D.L. Moody was a renowned evangelist, publisher, and preacher during the late 19th century. On one occasion, he was invited to guest preach at a local church. Soon after ...

In this short excerpt, Father Roderick Strange speaks to those who want to write off the church. It is written primarily to a Roman Catholic audience, but it relates quite well to Protestants as well:...

If you’re anything like me, when you hear the word saint, you probably think of anybody but yourself. We picture stained glass windows depicting Peter, Paul, or Mary. We think of modern-day heroes lik...

For the most part, when we think of saints or heroes of the faith, we think of people who are altogether different than we are. They seem to embody a quality of communion with God that is impossible f...

We read of the temptations of Jesus, but we never hear of a confession of sin on his part. He never asked for forgiveness, though he told his followers to do so. This lack of any sense of moral failur...

Pilgrimage is centered around one thing—progression. God does not call us to be static saints, even if we cannot move physically. We are constantly on the move spiritually, evolving in our understandi...

I heard about a pastor who was asked by a man in the community to do his brother’s funeral. Neither of the men had been churchgoers or showed any religious inclinations. The man offered to give $25,00...

One of the most powerful expressions of humble, servant-like caring for others is found in C.S. Lewis’ The Great Divorce , in the character of Sarah Smith of Golders Green. Her quiet life of love tra...

Ronald Rolheiser recounted an old Jewish folk tale. A young man, aspiring to be holy, approached his rabbi and said, “Rabbi, I think I have achieved sanctity. I fast from sunrise to sundown, work hard...

Martin of Tours was a 4th century Frankish soldier who, after a personal encounter with Jesus, left the Roman army and became a hermetic monk and later a bishop. Dozens of stories of his life have cir...

There is a story of a public sinner who was excommunicated and forbidden from entering the church, He took his woes to God. "They won't let me in, Lord, because I am a sinner." "W...

Saint Stephen’s Day, also known as the Feast of Saint Stephen or Boxing Day, is observed on December 26. You may have actually heard of St. Stephen’s Day through a popular Christmas carol “Good King W...

Cross-bearing is the long lesson of our mortal life. It is a part of God’s salvation, called sanctification. It is a lesson set before us every moment of every day.” “If life were an art lesson…we cou...

Good liturgy, whether formal or informal, ought never to be simply a corporate emoting session, however “Christian,” but a fresh and awed attempt to inhabit the great unceasing liturgy that is going o...

Building an antifragile faith takes time. It can’t be rushed. Consider this: It takes (on average) around twelve to eighteen months ​to construct a new single-family home in America. This process incl...

In Jonathan Kozol’s book, Amazing Grace , he tells of the struggles and sufferings of people in a community in the Bronx, New York. He is amazed at the courage and resilience he found there. He then ...

A group of researchers sought to study the nuances of self-control. They conducted a study with a few dozen kindergarten students and gave them a painfully boring, repetitive task designed to test how...

Every person in Scripture lived out a personal story incarnated by an even greater story about God, life, and the world. That story came from the politics, theology, and culture ingrained in their mem...

At the last Judgment Christ will say to us, "Come, you also! Come, drunkards! Come, weaklings! Come, children of shame!" And He will say to us: "Vile beings, you who are in the image of...

The Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, in his book The Home We Build Together , points out to the reader that in scripture the description of the creation of the universe in Genesis is given a mere thirty-fou...

The Greek word for the gathered church offers some insight into how the apostles saw their gatherings. Though the language offered a variety of options for words to describe the gathering church, the ...

Another Bible translation says that Mary said, “My soul magnifies the Lord” (NKJV, emphasis added). What did she mean by magnifies? When you look at something through a magnifying glass, it looks much...

“Christianity promises to make man free,” Anglican priest William R. Inge writes; “it never promises to make them independent.” Freedom and independence are polar opposites. The former leads to wellne...

The novel Martin Chuzzlewit , written by Charles Dickens, is one of his least successful works, though Dickens himself commented to a friend that he believed it was his greatest work up to its pu...