After eleven years as Secretary for the Social Apostolate at the Jesuit Curia in Rome, I worked on AIDS in Africa from 2002 to 2010 as the founding coordinator of the African Jesuit AIDS Network, based in Nairobi....
Now you are continuing on to read its first sentence. Before you go any further, stop and ask yourself what are the chances that you will read every sentence of this blog article, right through to the end, without checking your email, looking at Facebook, texting a friend, following a hyperlink, or interrupting in any other similar way. If you are like me and are honest with yourself, the chances are small! How many online articles do we merely skim, glance at, or half-heartedly scroll through, desultorily highlighting random snippets of text?...
Tuesdays are poetry days on igNation. "news of the death of a child" by Monty Williams, SJ is this week's poem....
In May 2014, igNation launched a series exploring the Jesuit identity as it is expressed in works of fiction: "Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Fiction". This was followed by the series "Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Biography". In these two series we hear what others think about what it means to be a Jesuit – in fiction and in biography. This new series – "Keyword: Jesuit, Genre: Autobiography" – will explore what it means to be a Jesuit today – as told in their own words by Canadian Jesuits. The articles – written for igNation –are as different in expression and format as the men who wrote them. Today's posting is by Philip Shano, SJ...
One of the conditions for praying is a conviction of our dependence on God. If people are not praying, it could be a sign that they feel quite self-satisfied, self-confident, self-assured. For those who fit this life style, "self" seems to be quite sufficient....
If the only Jesuit you ever met was the subject of a biography in a library collection, what would this individual tell you about Jesuit life?In this series, IgNation blogger Kevin Burns, who is not a Jesuit, takes a look at some of the works that come up in a large urban public library he entered the search term "Jesuit" and filtered it through the genre of "Biography". The books that popped up include some familiar names and some not so familiar but still very real Jesuits....
Haven't you at times told God something that didn't match up with your heart? How about reciting a prayer to simply appease your guilt or instigate your piety? I've been there – done that – time and time again. But prayer is not supposed to be a bed of roses. Thankfully, the Good Lord can be very blunt with me and he is constantly disabusing me of my spiritual opulence. Lately, Christ has been back at it again. This time, he drove me to some mountains in Brazil to invite me to ruminate on the power of prayer. This meditation has taken flesh in some questions: How does prayer affect us? How does it transform our hearts and our lives? What happens to us as we draw near to the living Lord to speak to him of the movements of our hearts? How does God mold us as we discern his presence in our lives? How does prayer change the pray-er?...
This poetry Tuesday, Greg Kennedy, SJ, write about transformation in nature in "Monarch Inside"....
Every now and then a development come along which shakes up our smugness. The discovery of the Americas did this to sixteenth century Europe and, eventually, so did the discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo. So did geologist Charles Lyell in the 1830's who argued that earth was much older than the Seventeenth Century Bishop Ussher's scripture-based determination that the earth's creation had occurred on Sunday October 23, 4004.B.C. And let's not get started on Charles Darwin!...
Many Canadian Jesuits began their religious life on 15th August, but nowadays the anniversary is usually marked on 31st July. This year the solemn Mass of St Ignatius Loyola was celebrated at St Isaac Jogues Parish, Pickering, and on behalf of the class of 1964, Fr Michael Czerny S.J. preached the homily after readings about Elijah meeting God at Horeb (1 Kings 19:4-9a, 11-15a), Knowing Christ and pressing towards the goal (Philippians 3:8-14), and Tips for following Christ (Luke 9:57-62)....
