This post on the Lord's Prayer comes from one of the earliest treatises on the Our Father, written around AD 240 by Cyprian of Carthage. It discusses one of the three pillars of Lenten penance, namely, the importance and power of prayer....
Leo the Great on the famous passage from Matthew 16 in which Jesus gives Cephas the new name of Peter, meaning rock, along with the keys to the kingdom of heaven. It is read each year on the Feast of the Chair of...
Saint Asterius of Amasea, a bishop and Early Church Father, on the gospel parable of the Good Shepherd who leaves the 99 to go in search of the one lost sheep....
Religion is not supposed to be the opposite of spirituality. But sometimes religion becomes a cold routine, even a business. The Lord's cleansing of the Temple spells the end of business as usual. Our religion must be a matter of living faith, zeal and fidelity...
We begin the forty days of Lent with the memory of a previous 40 days when sin was cleansed from the face of the earth through a flood which spared only 8 people - Noah & his companions on the ark. This gives us a...
As we approach Easter, the Church switches our focus from our Lenten sacrifices to a much more important sacrifice. It was motivated by a love stronger than death, a choice for fruitfulness over comfort and safety. Unless a grain of wheat fall to the ground...
If God is a Father who loves the world so much, how can he possibly send people to hell? Jesus plainly gives us the answer to this question in perhaps the most famous worlds in the Bible....
Augustine, commenting on Galatians, hits many themes: grace, merit, freedom, and imitation of Christ. Paul, laboring with the Church which is a mother, experiences birth-pangs until Christ is formed in the children of God....
Ambrose comments on Paul's Letter to the Galatians and its statement that we are heirs of God, coheirs with Christ, co-heirs who are saved in hope.[dropcaps type='normal' font_size='100' color='' background_color='' border_color='']T[/dropcaps]he person who puts to death by the Spirit the deeds of our sinful nature...
The original meaning of Lent in the early Church and how Jesus' dialogue with the Samaritan woman at the well can help us add another dimension to our understanding and experience of the Lenten Season. In the early days of the Church, Lent was...