Want to Pray More? Start By Doing Your Laundry

By Santiago Rodriguez, S.J.

thinkstockphotos.com

I promised you a very different follow up to my entry on why young adults don’t pray. You probably imagined a list with amazing tips to pray more. But the more I thought about it, and the more I talked to friends, I realized this is the entry I needed to write for today.

Reading is my beautiful escape and comfort. I read to know that I am not alone. I read to live a thousand lives all at once. It is a great pleasure to devour a book – to be transported to other worlds, to explore all the secrets of a story, to be intoxicated with the ardor to change the world. A good book is both portable magic and a marvelous companion, for it amuses me and attends to the cares of my soul. But, for me, there is nothing easy about reading a book. I find myself reading all sorts of magazine articles and online essays, but giving my full and undivided attention to a book is a different matter.

A New Approach to the Missions?

By Artur Suski, S.J.

On Monday of this week, I came upon a very inspiring article in the Toronto Star: “Good news from Canada's aboriginal communities” by Carol Goar. It is about a very ambitious project wherein the mission is to supply laptops to aboriginal children. It has been quite successful. “Since its founding in 2010, it has distributed 3,800 of the tough little computers,” writes Goar. But that’s not all; they’re not just on a mission to give out laptops to kids.

Eric McLuhan on The New Culture - Part II

By John D. O’Brien, S.J.

(cloudfront.net)

Last year I had the pleasure of meeting Eric McLuhan, son of the Canadian media theorist Marshall McLuhan, and a communications scholar in his own right. Eric and I later corresponded on a few questions concerning the new digital technology that is becoming pervasive today. In the course of this exchange, he told me about a talk delivered to a group of university rectors at the Lateran University in 2009, in which he discussed certain pressures that students face today. Dr. McLuhan’s points from his unpublished 2009 talk continue from Part I as follows.

Part II

5. The aesthetic of these circumstances derives from manipulations of being. Each new medium brings with it a new mode of group being, a new WE … Each new medium collects older ones as “features” even as it becomes included in others as a feature — a process that will continue until all have become features of each other. Their future is features. Gadgetry. Narcissism for the self-less.

What did Eric McLuhan mean by this statement? It seems to echo, in part, two classic points from Marshall, that 1) electronic media will restore “tribal man”, and 2) that each new medium contains its predecessor. Manuscripts contained the previous “oral accounts”, just as radio “contained” the newspaper story, and television “contained” the radio report, while the Internet contains all previous media as a pole around which they gather and converge. Since the dominant medium in a society determines the nature of our social being, the Internet will eventually consume us or become an endless reflection of ourselves, which is essentially the same thing.

The Next Pope and the Number of the Beast

By John D. O’Brien, S.J.

Amid the fervent speculation over the identity of the next Pope has been an undercurrent of conjecture over whether the Church is about to elect its last Pope, the pontiff who will preside over the apocalyptic era, perhaps the final consummation predicted by Christ.

The dominant fuel is provided by the Prophecies of St. Malachy, the 12th century Archbishop of Armagh, who reportedly had visions of all the popes from 1143 until “the end of the world”. He left a series of cryptic Latin phrases which supposedly describe each one. Pope Benedict XVI is the second-last on the list; his successor, therefore, will be the final pope. He will be called “Peter the Roman”, of whom the prophecy says:

In the final persecution of the Holy Roman Church, there will sit Petrus Romanus, who will pasture his sheep in many tribulations, and when these things are finished, the city of seven hills [i.e. Rome] will be destroyed, and the dreadful judge will judge his people. The End.

The Forest Ranger

By Artur Suski, S.J.

Credit: http://sistemaecodeco.com

Many of us have undoubtedly been fascinated by characters of our favourite fantasy books who roam the vast forests of forgotten and distant realms. There is something in their adventures that captures our imagination, drawing us into our own fantasies. And why not? We have become too comfortable in our big concrete-and-steel mountains that we call “civilized cities”! The majority of us have very few opportunities to take a walk in the forest; by “forest”, I don’t mean the small piece of land in the middle of the city with a couple of trees. So, when was the last time you went for a good walk in a forest?

A Short History of Salvation

By Greg Kennedy, S.J.

Pharaoh had a ton of stuff:
Soldiers, chariots and slaves;
But when he messed with the Israelites
No possession could he save.
Everything got stuck in mud
As he tried crossing through the Red Sea.
But he would’ve made it safe and sound
If he drove a SUV.

Moses was a grey, old man;
His arms weren’t all that strong.
He needed Hur and Aaron
To hold them up for long.
But when he staggered down the mountain
How much better he would have had it,
If instead of two, huge, rocky slabs
God had given him a Kindle Tablet.

“Samuel! Samuel!”, God said one night.
Samuel answered, “Here I am.”
Poor Eli couldn’t get a wink of sleep
Till he hit upon this plan.
“Boy, next time you hear the voice
To it these words you tell:
Your call is very important to us.
But please text me on my cell.”

Young David was a quiet lad,
Not much a fan of sports.
He could spend whole days alone
In other worlds absorbed.
But when he deftly killed Goliath
It was a dead sure sign,
That all those hours on the X-Box
Weren’t a waste of time.