Oblate Formation 
Posts concerning Oblate and Novice formation. These include articles which are also applicable to most Christians, whether Oblate or not. Additional articles on instruction of various parts of the Rule can be found under that category.
Service is a Reward
Service is a reward, not a punishment. This idea is foreign to people. . . . We think that faithful work should be rewarded by a vacation for the rest of our lives. But God offers us something very different: more work, more opportunities, increased responsibilities, along with greater abilities, resources, wisdom, and empowerment. We… Read More ›
On Not Running with the Crowd
In the Gospels the word “crowd” is nearly always used pejoratively, so much so that nearly every time the word is used you could preface it with the adjective “mindless”. Crowds don’t have a mind. They are fired and driven by whatever energy, hype, fad, ideology, or hysteria is current. In the Gospels this energy… Read More ›
“Steady” and “static” are not synonyms
Division of opinion, too often the fault line of human relationships, is, when we embrace it openly, what invigorates thinking and stirs new thought. It is the ground of new beginnings, the beginning of new insight, the foundation of new respect for the other. If anything sharpens the dull edge of a relationship it is… Read More ›
God’s greatest rival
“If you have no money, be polite!” I heard someone say. It says a lot about money; it says that money is that which makes it possible for you to be rude to people. Money means a lot of different things; it is much more than it appears to be. It is God’s greatest rival:… Read More ›
All Saints: “A Family United by Profound Bonds of Spiritual Solidarity”
Today, we are celebrating the Solemnity of All Saints, allowing us to experience the joy of being part of the large family of God’s friends or, as St Paul writes, to “share the lot of the saints in light” (Col 1: 12). The Liturgy re-proposes the expression, full of wonder, of the Apostle John: “See… Read More ›
Can you Live on $2 a day?
Today more than a billion people in the world live and die in desperate poverty. They attempt to survive on less than a dollar per day. Close to two billion others live on less than two dollars per day. That’s half the world struggling to find food, water, and shelter with the same amount of… Read More ›
How are we spending our time and resources?
When we pool our resources in our churches, what are our priorities? Each year in the United States, we spend more than $10 billion on church buildings. In America alone, the amount of real estate owned by institutional churches is worth over $230 billion. We have money and possessions, and we are building temples everywhere…. Read More ›
Discovering the mystery of God
The Sufi tell stories that say all I think I’ll ever know about finding God. The first story is a disarming and compelling one. It is also, I think, a troublesome one, a fascinating one, a chastening one: “Help us to find God,” the seeker begged the Elder. “No one can help you there,” the… Read More ›
Want to help Middle East Christians?
Reach out to U.S. Muslims by John L Allen Jr on Oct. 17, 2010 Rome. Created by mandate of Pope Pius XI in 1926, the Catholic Near East Welfare Association is probably the most important vehicle in the United States for supporting the Christians of the Middle East, as well as Eastern Catholic churches in Northern… Read More ›
Maturity in Relationships and Prayer
Several years ago, a friend shared this story with me: Raised a Roman Catholic and essentially faithful in going to church and in trying to live an honest moral life, he found himself, in his mid-forties, plagued by doubts, unable to pray, and unable (when he was honest with himself) to even believe in the… Read More ›