Rule 
Articles and posts specifically teaching the Rule of St. Benedict. Articles divided into two categories: Benedictine Wisdom, the teaching of the Benedictine Fathers; and Instruction, teaching by more modern day Benedictine scholars.
God’s attitude toward sin is not blame but pity
My tendency in prayer is then to try to put my sin behind me. Acknowledging only that it was an interruption in our relationship, I want to forget it when I come before God. This is a mistake. It is like hiding one’s symptoms from a physician. To go to prayer aware of the shabbiness… Read More ›
Our sin is a happy fault
By falling we have the chance to plumb the mysteries of the divine mercy. Indeed our sin is a happy fault, as the deacon sings during the Easter vigil: 0 felix culpal But this is sin admitted, accepted and confessed, not sin hidden, denied and forced underground. God does not forgive grudgingly; showing mercy is… Read More ›
Speaking with Jesus about Jesus
Reading should serve prayer, should dispose the affections, should neither devour the hours nor gobble up the moments of prayer. When you read you are taught about Christ, but when you pray you join him in familiar colloquy. How much more enchanting is the grace of speaking with him than about him! Gilbert of Hoyland
Falling is a test
After this [God] allows us to fall harder and more grievously than ever we did before — as it seems to us. And then we think (because we are not all wise) that what we had begun has come to nothing. But it is not so. It is necessary for us to fall and it… Read More ›
Reality and Existence
The man who lives in division is not a person but on an “individual.” I have what you have not. I am what you are not. I have taken what you have failed to take and I have seized what you could never get. Therefore you suffer and I am happy, you are despised and… Read More ›
Search the Scriptures
Search the Scriptures. For you are not mistaken in thinking that you find life in them, you who seek nothing else in them but Christ, to whom the Scriptures bear witness. Blessed indeed are they who search his testimonies, seek them out with all their heart. Your testimonies are wonderful, Lord, therefore my soul has… Read More ›
Christianity a’la carte
If reason insists on shutting down every opening to the sacred, the result will be an eclipse of reason itself . . . The eclipse of the sacred has led to a do-it-yourself approach to the holy, to a kind of supermarket of religious faiths . . . Christianity a’la carte . . .By contrast,… Read More ›
Lighting the Lamp and Sweeping the House
The image would have lain stained and deformed, had not the woman of the Gospel lit her lamp — had not Wisdom appeared in the flesh, in other words — swept the house — of the vices — searched carefully for her lost coin — her image — which, its original luster gone, coated over… Read More ›
Alienation
If we want to understand alienation, we have to find where its deepest taproot goes and we have to realize that this root will always be there. Alienation is inseparable from culture, from civilization, and from life in society. It is not just a feature of “bad” cultures, “corrupt” civilizations, or urban society. It is… Read More ›
Protect the human person as the image of God
Every new responsibility entails risks. What counts is to have the right interactions. You have to make the most of the resources, talents, and qualities everyone brings to the team. . . Our constant goal in all of this must be to protect the human person as the image of God. Though fragile and under… Read More ›