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Problem
In Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton writes: In our age everything has to be a “problem.” Ours is a time of anxiety because we have willed it to be so. Our anxiety is not imposed on us by force from outside. We impose it on our world and upon one another from within ourselves. Merton…
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The World Upside Down
The man who went into the cave was not the man who came out again; in that sense he was almost as different as if he were dead…He looked at the world as differently from other men as if he had come out of that dark hole walking on his hands. — GK Chesterton With…
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Few Words
Today, on the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception, as I read the Gospel and worked into some lectio divina, I was struck, not by a particular word or phrase, but by how few words Mary speaks in the dialogue with the angel Gabriel. Mary speaks three sentences to the angel’s eight. Mary speaks 30 words…
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Christmas: The encounter between our desire and God’s response
A quiet ache — a nostalgia for the infinite — resides deep in every human heart. We tend to forget about it. The noise and activity of our lives drowns it out. Our masks cover it up. Our attempts to control and curate every aspect of life dry it up. We pack our schedules to…
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Tattoo the Soul
I’m one of those rare millennials without a tattoo. Okay, maybe not. A quick Google search tells me that 41-47% of my generation is tatted. I’m in the majority. Still, tattoos ride on the bodies of something like 32% of Gen X and only 13% of Baby Boomers. So, there’s a huge uptick in ink…
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To the Desert
Why I left Substack Much of the little we know about the life of St. Benedict comes from The Dialogues of St. Gregory the Great. St. Benedict’s story begins with his departure from a decadent and decaying Rome and his pursuit of the Lord in the solitude of Subiaco. Pope Benedict XVI describes this time in…
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Seven Keys for Sustainable (Youth) Ministry
I have been asked to present about “sustainable” youth ministry to youth ministers in my archdiocese. I will present the following (or something like it). What is the goal of parish youth ministry? To make disciples (of every teen in the parish). It’s not “having pizza with teens,” “trying to make faith fun,” “giving kids…
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Crossing the Bar
Remembering my grandparents My high school literature teacher was obsessed with Tennyson, and for good reason. I remember explicating “Crossing the Bar,” and thinking about death, though it was too distant from my 14-year-old brain to get far. Years later, death became real to me as I held my grandfather’s hand while he breathed his…
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The Saint as a Window
On the Solemnity of All Saints The following is an excerpt from my book Surviving Catholic Ministry, pgs. 10-11. I often reflect on Joseph Ratzinger’s teaching about sainthood. By “sainthood,” Ratzinger means something like St. Paul’s reference to the Christians of the early church. For Paul, the word did not denote only those canonized, or…
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The Football Memoir of a Sub-mediocre "Hundred Pounder"
What the game taught me about virtue and life. I had no business playing football. My slender, ectomorphic frame couldn’t wait to offload any weight gained. I metabolized food almost as fast as I took it in. But, I did play football and looked like a coat rack with a helmet and shoulder pads. My…
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Brad Bursa 