506. The Occasional Virtue of Not Fasting

Or, to take a another angle on the subject,  this might be titled “The Sin of Fake Fasting”. Publicans and Pharisees In next Sunday’s Gospel reading (Luke 18:10-14), which I suspect you could almost recite by heart, we hear about a man who fasted diligently but was condemned by the Lord, and another man who […]

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505. The Return of the Groundhog

That’s a devious way of saying this is a re-run of my old Post, written seven years ago: The Groundhog Who Stole Candlemas When I look back at my former Posts, almost invariably I’m unhappy with them. I think I surely could have written that better. Except for this one. Forgive me, but I really […]

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504. The Church Fathers on “The Seven Deadly Sins” and their Results

These days when people are breaking the “Seven Deadly” publicly and unashamedly and even proudly, I thought this might be a relevant topic. Brief Introduction What is “sin”? In the New Testament, by far the most common word for sin is “amartia / ἁμαρτία”, an archery term which means being “off the mark” – the […]

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503. Our Great Temptations in the Desert

While there can be no doubt that the Church’s Lectionary was perfectly  chosen and arranged by the Fathers or whoever did it… … here’s another of the big mistakes they made. The story of Christ’s temptations in the wilderness is fundamental to our understanding of the Christian life. So when do we read it?  On […]

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