eCatechist

Virtual ADVENTure Calendar 2021

The Virtual ADVENTure Calendar was developed by Stages on the Sound, a non-profit theatre company that provides arts programming to Catholic school student in New York City and beyond. In 2020, during the pandemic lockdowns, Stages was not able to produce their annual original Christmas play for grades 1-5 as live theatre was not possible. So, Stages actors, directors and creators set to work on a unique video project to create a daily episodic show that students could watch at school or at home with their families. The result was the Virtual ADVENTure Calendar. 

This year, the ADVENTure calendar is back and now available across the country and the world on your computer, laptop or phone. Each day, students learn about the traditions and symbols of Advent, sing songs of the season, learn crafts, hear from children around the world.

 

For more information and to order

 

 

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The Seeker and the Monk by Sophfronia Scott

In The Seeker and the Monk, Scott mines the extensive private journals of one of the most influential contemplative thinkers of the past for guidance on how to live in these fraught times.

As a Black woman who is not Catholic, Scott both learns from and pushes back against Merton, holding spirited, and intimate conversations on race, ambition, faith, activism, nature, prayer, friendship, and love. She asks: What is the connection between contemplation and action? Is there ever such a thing as a wrong answer to a spiritual question? How do we care about the brutality in the world while not becoming overwhelmed by it?

Amazon

 

Sophfronia Scott's Website

 

 

Reflections for the Year of St. Joseph

Joseph, God’s Trusted Instrument

As we read the infancy narratives, we may often wonder why God did not act in a more direct and clear way. Yet God acts through events and people. Joseph was chosen by God to guide the beginnings of the history of redemption. He was the true “miracle” by which God saves the child and his mother. God acted by trusting in Joseph’s creative courage. Arriving in Bethlehem and finding no lodging where Mary could give birth, Joseph took a stable and, as best he could, turned it into a welcoming home for the Son of God come into the world. Faced with imminent danger from Herod, who wanted to kill the child, Joseph was warned once again in a dream to protect the child, and rose in the middle of the night to prepare the flight into Egypt. A superficial reading of these stories can often give the impression that the world is at the mercy of the strong and mighty, but the “good news” of the Gospel consists in showing that, for all the arrogance and violence of worldly powers, God always finds a way to carry out his saving plan. 

—Pope Francis

Image: Go To Joseph by Michael O'Neill McGrath. World Library Publications.

Order from Embraced by God

The Life and Message of Sister Thea Bowman with Brother Mickey McGrath

Information/Register

Mary at 45: Luke's Model of Mature Wisdom by Steve Mueller

        

Mary by El Greco

 

         Our local paper recently ran a story about a church that was being demolished. In the process, the workers discovered a time capsule from 1882. They found a newspaper that carried a story about a woman that had died from overexposure in the harsh winter. She was described as an “elderly woman of forty-seven!”

         It is hard for us to imagine that just a hundred years ago the mid-forties was a full lifetime for most people. This got me to thinking about Mary the mother of Jesus, who would have been in her mid-forties at the time of His death.

         How often do we think of Mary as “elderly”? In our culture, where youth is at a premium and people seem willing to do anything rather than age, we usually focus on Mary the teen-age maiden who learns that she is to be a mother. But what about the rest of Mary’s life? In particular, since Jesus was about thirty years of age when he began his public ministry (Lk 3:23), how can the mature Mary at age forty-five be our example too?

         In order to reflect on this, we need to understand something about the cultural meaning of the age of forty-five for their world. Then, since Luke’s gospel highlights Mary more than the other gospels, we can reflect on Luke’s example of Mary at forty-five to discover how we might emulate her example of mature wisdom, connectedness and care.

 

Ignatius of Loyola: Finding God in All Things

From Jesuits in Britain

STEP from Notre Dame

Join thousands of Catholics who have deepened their understanding of the faith by completing online courses created by Notre Dame theology professors and other theologians. STEP online courses are well-suited for catechists, school teachers, lay ministers, deacons and other adult Catholics who seek distance learning that is intellectually-rigorous and faithful to the Catholic tradition.

Register for individual classes or sign up to earn a Certificate of Catholic Theology in five areas of study. Trained and knowledgeable facilitators lead the courses.

Online courses range between four and eight weeks long, with most being six weeks in length. Students read texts and watch video lessons before posting weekly assignments, sharing reflections in discussion forums and participating in real-time online discussions with classmates.

See the complete list of courses in English here- https://mcgrath.nd.edu/online-courses/step/courses/ and the complete list of courses in Spanish here- https://mcgrath.nd.edu/online-courses/camino/course-catalog/

Monastery Mornings by Michael Patrick O'Brien

A love letter to a community of Trappist monks who provided family when it was needed the most. 

This warmhearted memoir describes how a small, insecure boy with a vibrant imagination found an unlikely family in the company of monks at Holy Trinity Abbey, in the mountains of rural Latter-day Saint Utah. (From the Publisher)

“In July 1847, Mormon pioneers famously arrived in Utah. A century later in July 1947, some Catholic pioneers followed in their footsteps: Trappist monks bent on creating a contemplative monastery, Holy Trinity Abbey, in the unlikely soil of Mormon country. In this affectionate, winning memoir, Michael O’Brien captures the expansive spirit of late twentieth-century Catholicism in America and the loving warmth of the monks who befriended him.” —Jana Riess, author of Flunking Sainthood and The Next Mormons 

Paraclete Press