Advent 2011

Advent

Join Bishop Beckwith in an online Advent book discussion

During Advent, Bishop Beckwith will be blogging daily about his reflections on the book Ordinary Resurrections: Children in the Years of Hope by Jonathan Kozol. He invites you to participate by reading along in the book and the blog and posting your comments. (See an excerpt of the blog below.)

Subscribe to daily Advent email meditations

You can subscribe to receive daily Advent email meditations from the Christian Formation Commission using the purple box at left. (If you've subscribed to their previous Advent or Lenten email meditations, there's no need to resubscribe.) There's also an archive of past meditations.

The Bishop's Online Advent Book Discussion

God so loved the world...

Posted by Mark Beckwith on December 24, 2011
God so loved the world...

Years ago I heard a paraphrase of John 3:16. If it didn't come directly from Teilhard de Chardin, a Jesuit paleontologist writing in the 1950s, it emerged from one of his disciples.

God so loved the world that He planted the Christ seed so deep in nature that over time it evolved into the person of Jesus of Nazareth, who thus quickened the Christ seed in others.

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They all learn to survive

Posted by Mark Beckwith on December 23, 2011
They all learn to survive

Somewhere along the line I discovered something that is common to all children: they learn how to survive. Jonathan Kozol describes the lives of several children who live in the South Bronx, and the ordinary resurrections which arise out of the love of their families and the extraordinary community of St. Ann's Episcopal Church in the South Bronx. Kozol describes many near-misses of death or tragedy for many of these kids, but their survival skills get them through.

In many ways the Christmas story is as much a story of survival as it is about birth.

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A Celtic Rune of Hospitality

Posted by Mark Beckwith on December 22, 2011
A Celtic Rune of Hospitality

A rune is a written character that was used in northern European cultures before the use of Latin and Latin letters took over. This Celtic Rune predates our alphabet, but doesn’t predate the Christian witness.

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