Allow me to clarify: in nearly twenty years of working for the Church—at the parish and diocesan levels and in an apostolate that has international reach—I have never seen a parish (or diocesan) pastoral plan produce the wide-spread transformative fruit its authors hoped for. I am not talking about capital
Picture it: you are a normal priest, or you try to be, and you are a little less normal than usual because it is the week before Christmas: special liturgies, special confession times, family togetherness (yikes)! And then, your phone buzzes—and it buzzes again—and it buzzes again. Everybody is sending
Church history is persistently a contentious affair, especially when it comes to debates about doctrine. From the Gnostics to the Modernists, these disputes get a lot of coverage in various histories of the Church. While our times have their own doctrinal disputes, we are faced with a pastoral crisis more
Elizabeth A. Eaton, presiding bishop of the ELCA, has issued a pastoral letter on National Pearl Harbor Remembrance Day. “Eighty years ago, on a beautiful Sunday morning, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, was tragically transformed from an island paradise into a bloody battlefield,” the letter read, in part. “After the Japanese bombed