I Have a New Boss
The Society of Jesus has a new General Superior, Fr Adolfo Nicolás, Spanish-born but for many years living in Japan.
3 comments January 19th, 2008
Posts filed under 'Thoughts'
Thinking Faith
Peter Scally, SJ and Jesuit Media Initiatives have just unveiled another venture. After pray-as-you-go comes ThinkingFaith — the online journal of the British Jesuits — a mix of articles, book and film reviews.
It’s been online for just 3 hours right now — give it a look.
2 comments January 18th, 2008
WordPress 2.3 Plugins Fixed
Well I hope so…
I did some work on my 5 post plugins, uploaded them to my site (to check they still worked under WP < 2.3), upgraded to WP 2.3, and, fingers crossed, everything seems functional.
I will modify the docs, package the plugins, and post them for download in the next few minutes. Please check them out and give me any feedback.
Add comment September 27th, 2007
Posts Plugins Problems in WP 2.3
Sorry to all the people letting me know that the new WordPress breaks Similar Posts and (maybe) my other plugins. I’ve been out of touch due to my CFS problems but I will do my best to post some updates in the next day or two to fix the issues.
Add comment September 26th, 2007
Homeboy
A friend sent me a newspaper cutting today–from the The Observer a few weeks back–about the work of Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ in LA with gang members. When I was in California I used to visit Greg’s community and he always impressed the hell out of me.
Father Greg Boyle keeps a grim count of the young gang members he has buried. Number 151 was Jonathan Hurtado, 18 - fresh out of jail. Now the kindly, bearded Jesuit mourns him. ‘The day he got out I found him a job. He never missed a day. He was doing really well,’ Boyle says.
But Hurtado made a mistake: he went back to his old neighbourhood in east Los Angeles. While sitting in a park, Hurtado was approached by a man on a bike who said to him: ‘Hey, homie, what’s up?’ He then shot Hurtado four times. ‘You can’t come back. Not even for a visit,’ says Boyle, who has worked for two decades against LA’s gang culture.
As well as the links above I’ve also included a clip featuring Greg from a Jesuit vocations video from a few years back.
The clip is the middle of three if you want to see the rest.
1 comment April 13th, 2007
Someday…
In my prayer today I found myself remembering the song The Way You Look Tonight as it was performed in the film Peter’s Friends. It always moves me.
2 comments April 10th, 2007
Ordinary Beauty
I’ve just read (thanks to Matt) a superb piece of journalism from the Washington Post about a little experiment: put one of the world’s best violinists, with one of the world’s best violins, playing some of the world’s best violin music in a subway station and watch what happens.
The article is fascinating. The accompanying recording is marvellous. And, in gratitude, I’ve been staring out of my window watching spring unfurl.
Add comment April 10th, 2007
WordPress Plugins
Coming soon … updates to the posts plugins. Quite a few changes have built up over the last few weeks that I haven’t had time to properly release. I hope I can make sure that the changes cover the whole set of plugins — that should teach me to keep better records rather than rushing out little fixes in response to feature requests.
Add comment April 9th, 2007
Enough! the Resurrection
Happy Easter!
With its dramatic transition from darkness to light and fire the Easter Vigil rather betrays by compression the grace of resurrection. In our living of it the joy of the resurrection often has to creep up on us. Ignatius says that the Risen Christ ‘comes in the office of consoler’ and that implies we meet him and find his consolation and share his joy only if we are in the honesty of our need to be consoled.
The Easter Sunday gospels are truer to life–they always focus on the emptiness of the empty tomb. Our Easter begins with an absence. A blank page waiting to be written upon.
Add comment April 8th, 2007
Holy Saturday: Nature and Grace
Von Balthasar’s insistence, which I wrote of yesterday, that the Paschal Mystery not be made natural reveals something of his approach to the perennial issue of the interrelationship of nature and grace. He has an absolute conviction of the chasm between the two, between infinite and finite, between Creator and creature, that is only bridged from the other side when God, by grace and gift, makes the move to which we can respond.
How differently von Balthasar’s contemporary Karl Rahner approaches the subject. For Rahner nature is only ever a ‘limit concept’. As we experience the world ‘nature’ is always ‘graced’ and the two can only be spoken about separately on the understanding that they can never be prised apart. It leads Rahner in a somewhat different direction to von Balthasar:
2 comments April 7th, 2007