The Discipline of Listening

Discernment involves listening with love and attention to our experiences, to each other, to the inner promptings of the Holy Spirit deep within ourselves ...

Bono on Spiritual Formation

Your nature is a hard thing to change; it takes time…. I have heard of people who have life-changing, miraculous turnarounds, people set free from ...

Christian Life: Getting a Feel for the Game

A common theme in modern Christianity has been that head knowledge is how one becomes more adept at following Christ: the more you know, the better you'll ...

Spiritual Enlightenment Through Profound Darkness

Can you imagine what it would be like to lose three generations of your family in one blinding moment? How would you survive? That happened in 1991 to ...

Importance of Church in Spiritual Formation

Spiritual formation is so often couched in more individualistic terms, that it's easy to forget the important role the church community plays in our ...

The Merton Prayer

In his book Thoughts in Solitude, Thomas Merton wrote fifteen lines that have become known as "the Merton Prayer":

My Lord God, I have no idea ...

Tony Snow on God's Plan

Tony Snow, former press secretary for President George W. Bush, has been battling cancer, off and on, since early 2005. When asked what spiritual lessons ...

Don't Chart God on a Grid

I like that scene in the movie Dead Poets Society in which Mr. Keating, an English instructor at an elite preparatory school, asks his students to rip ...

World Can't Steal the Ascension

Ascension Day is the perfect church holiday because the world can't steal it. The culture around us has quite ruined Christmas and Easter. Of course, ...

Jesus' Ascension Brings Sigh of Relief

To embrace the Ascension is to heave a sigh of relief, to give up the struggle to be God (and with it the inevitable despair at our constant failure), ...