In this six-part series, Kevin Burns selects a book for each week of Lent. Each book speaks to one of the great traditions within Catholic culture. Each book also shows how its author integrates that tradition. Six different approaches to the same journey through the desert of Lent to the Easter promise of resurrection. Week Two: Judith Valente explores the Benedictine path....
Have you ever wondered about the source of the ashes that we receive on our foreheads on Ash Wednesday? Nowadays, most parishes probably order them from religious goods suppliers. But I'm sure there are still a few parishes and communities that produce them the old-fashioned way. When I was a Jesuit novice in Guelph, Ontario in the late 1970s, the community sacristan was an old Jesuit Brother named Brother Eugene McLaren....
To mark the beginning of Lent 2014, Greg Kennedy has written a poem for Shrove Tuesday....
On February 3, the Church commemorates St. Blaise, a fourth century physician and bishop in Armenia. We know about him mostly because he is the saint invoked in the famous blessing of throats that takes place in many parish communities on February 3. We know more about the widespread devotion to St. Blaise by Christians around the world than we know about the saint himself. There are conflicting versions of stories about his powers to heal....
All holidays bring family and friends together, and Christmas does so in a particularly strong way. The tradition of exchanging of gifts has much to do with it, but there is something additionally community-oriented about Christmas because it is about the birth of a child. The arrival of a baby into the world has brought people together at all times and in all cultures; how much more so does the birth of the Christ who is born as a brother to all....
Christmas is a time of promises - promises to be kept and promises fulfilled. . Throughout the season of Advent, the readings have been about God's promise down the ages to the Jewish people to send them a messiah who would be their king and saviour. Mary is called blessed because she believed that "the promise made her by the Lord would be fulfilled....
As part of the "Our Culture" section, , igNation will post poetry written by Jesuits and our collaborators. Poems from Gerard Manley Hopkins and St. Robert Southwell will appear as well as contemporary poems. Today's poem, by Greg Kennedy, SJ, looks at the birth of Christ "in an age of climate change."...
Christmas will soon be here. Every Christmas morning we hear the same Gospel story, the first 18 verses of the Gospel of John. Not fit for Hallmark Christmas cards, the words of John are strange to our ears. No mention of the baby Jesus, the poor stable, shepherds in the fields or stars in the skies. Mary and Joseph and the angel Gabriel are nowhere to be found. A Hallmark nightmare....
We all have our rituals for Christmas: Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, A Charlie Brown Christmas, or How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Since hearing it read as a child on the Max Ferguson Show on CBC Radio, my annual ritual is reading or listening to Dylan Thomas reading his story, A Child's Christmas in Wales. "One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six."...
In 2003, Peter-Anthony Togni was commissioned by Lydia Adams and the Elmer Iseler singers to create an arrangement for their Christmas recording on CBC Records: Puer natus in Bethlehem! (MVCD 1165). He chose to arrange the Gregorian chant "Corde natus", usually translated as "Of the Father's love begotten." In his final item in this Advent series, Kevin Burns speaks with Peter-Anthony Togni about his life and work as a composer and a musician, and about this composition in particular....
