Patrick J. Willson

Aug 10, 2023 | christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Brad East |Martha Tatarnic |Dawn Araujo Hawkins

The Anima Christi is said to have been a favorite prayer of St. Ignatius of Loyola. In it, Jesus is asked to “call” and “bid me come” when the hour of death draws near. In a contemporary reworking of the prayer, David Fleming makes a more expansive supplication: “On each of my dyings shed your light and your love.”I prefer Fleming’s version. Of course I hope that I will know Christ’s intimate presence on my deathbed. But in the life I live now, I hunger for so much more.

Aug 9, 2023 | christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Brad East |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman

As our last meetingof an inter-congregational experiment in dialogue was drawing to a close, I felt pleased. The atmosphere was warm and congenial. We’d talked about important subjects and about our most deeply held values in a way that seemed promising for further conversation.

Aug 8, 2023 | christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East

As a young man, at age 26, Paul Simon shared a vision of what it would be like to be old in his song “Old Friends” (with Art Garfunkel): “Can you imagine us / Years from today / Sharing a park bench quietly? / How terribly strange / To be seventy.”Not all visions from youth come true, of course. When Simon was 70, he was not sitting on a park bench quietly. Far from it. He was touring the world, performing songs he had written over a remarkable career spanning over five decades.

Aug 7, 2023 | christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East

In my “sunday’s coming” email for this week, I thought about what Jacob could have done differently to be a better parent. While being a good parent doesn’t guarantee that siblings won’t feel how they feel or make their own choices, being a parent who manipulates emotions and relationships between children definitely doesn’t lead to anything productive or healing. But I’m also taken with the latter segment of this text and the path to Joseph’s enslavement.

Aug 7, 2023 | christiancentury.org | Patrick J. Willson |Martha Tatarnic |Jessica Mesman |Brad East

On July 17, Russia withdrew from a UN-negotiated deal that would allow Ukraine, the world’s fifth-largest producer of grain, to continue to ship grain out of its Black Sea ports. Russia made it clear that it would consider any Ukrainian ship on the Black Sea fair game for missile strikes, and it started bombing Ukrainian grain infrastructure in Odesa and the Danube river port, including silos full of grain. The result is the threat of food shortages, especially in Africa.