The National Catholic Review

The Good Word

A blog on Scripture and preaching.

Friday, August 1, 2014

  • Aug 13 2014 - 5:42pm
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    When Michelangelo’s Pieta was first unveiled, wags found two errors.  The Virgin, holding her dead son, is larger than he is.  By three feet, if they both stood up.  The artist answered that this distortion was done in the service of beauty.  The body of a fully grown man would look ungainly in Mary’s lap.  The second criticism was the Madonna’s face.  It’s that of an adolescent, perhaps the Virgin who conceived but certainly not the Mother who received her dead son’s body.  Responding to...

  • Aug 6 2014 - 10:47am
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    Summers in Kansas, somewhere in the large state, storms come every night.  There are always watches and warnings of tornadoes.  Watches we ignore.  They only mean that conditions are right for a twister.  Warnings we hear.  One has been sighted.  Forewarned, we know we can ride out the weather, unless, that is, the tornado wants it otherwise.  Then there’s no appeal.  The tempest will have its say.  There are storms no soul can survive.

  • Aug 5 2014 - 1:42pm
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    In the first entry in the Bible Junkies Online Commentary on Galatians, I discussed introductory matters concerning the founding of the churches to the Galatians, the situation when Paul wrote to them, when the letter might have been written and the type of letters which Paul wrote, based on the common Greco-Roman letters of his day.