Extreme wealth and ‘wealth extremism’ are threatening democracy and global stability. That’s the judgment of over half of the respondents to a random survey of the world’s millionaires and billionaires. The Patriotic Millionaires group conducted the survey, and Press Reader carried the story. Commenting for the article, Marlene Engelhorn said, “The superrich are buying themselves more wealth and more power while the rest of the world is living in economic fear.” She is the heiress of billionaires and of a... Read more

Tomorrow the 40 days of Lent will end. These six weeks call to our minds Jesus’ 40 days in the desert and the Israelites’ 40 years of wandering to the Promised Land. Tomorrow also begins the Church’s shortest season, the Easter Triduum, and her longest Mass. Three days, Holy Thursday night through Good Friday to Saturday night’s Easter Vigil. We go to church three times, but it’s all one Liturgy. The Easter Triduum is the summit of the Church’s year,... Read more

A Maryknoll friend of mine and Orbis Press did us a service with a condensed version of several of Pope Francis’s published writings. In under 200 pages you can get the gist of ten major works of Francis’s papacy. The book is Fr. James Kroeger’s Walking with Pope Francis: The Official Documents in Ordinary Language The works that Fr. Jim walks through, in Latin and English titles, are: Lumen Fidei, The Light of Faith Evangelii Gaudium, The Joy of the... Read more

October 4 is the Feast of St. Francis of Assisi, patron of ecologists. On that day this month Pope Francis went back to a major theme of his acclaimed 2015 environmental encyclical Laudato Si: On theCare for Our Common Home. In an apostolic exhortation, Laudate Deum (Praise God), the pope spoke to Catholics and the world about climate change, an issue of great concern to him. Francis is not alone among Church leaders in that concern. Previous popes, dating back... Read more

It’s common to read the New Testament for spiritual enlightenment and moral persuasion. One can also lower one’s sights and wonder about the political arena in which Jesus lived, worked, and suffered. That’s not as common, and when we do think that way, we tend to keep the two, Jesus and politics, apart from each other: “Render to Caesar Caesar’s due, and to God” … something else. Warren Carter rejects that separation and thinks a lot about politics in the... Read more

I have written about New Testament texts and the historical Jesus in the context of life in early first-century Palestine. (See here, here, and here for examples and links to more posts.) So I felt fortunate to discover a Bible scholar doing similar work in a broader context. Warren Carter studies New Testament writings in relation to the dominating Roman Empire. This post introduces the prolific author Warren Carter and his work. A following post will examine one work in... Read more