Jonathan Ryan's Blog, page 29
December 13, 2017
Approaching Mystery: Rebecca Bratten Weiss’s “The Oil Never Runs Out”
When I was nineteen, I returned from a summer of working on an organic wheat farm in Kansas, to find that my parents had been ejected from the community where we’d lived for nine years, and taken up residence in a trailer on a compound where a shifty-eyed man was claiming to see apparitions of […]
December 12, 2017
The Shadow Side of Advent
Yesterday—the Saturday before the first Sunday of Advent—I read a poem by Nikki Giovanni, and it helped me make sense of my experience in worship this morning, reminded me why during Advent, when so many are already knee deep in tinsel and cheer, the physical sensations of sadness tingle across my chest and down my […]
December 11, 2017
Write the Vision: Colorblind
In our next installment of “Write the Vision” – Sick Pilgrim’s series featuring writers of faith unpacking their vision of God’s justice – writer Shannon Evans unpacks the evolution of her vision of racial justice. Shannon writes with fierce love and compassion for the widow and orphan, the least and the lost. Today she shares […]
December 7, 2017
Your 2017 Catholic-ish Gift Guide
Sick Pilgrim goes Christmas shopping for the Catholic-conflicted and Catholic-attracted in your life. Jessica Mesman Griffith recommends: Kingdom of Women by Rosalie Morales Kearns Sick Pilgrim’s 2017 Book of the Year is Kingdom of Women, which imagines an alternate reality in which the Roman Catholic Church finally makes women priests–and a man slaughters the first class at their ordination. (A […]
Dark Devotional: Desert Breath
Where does spirit come from? From God ultimately, of course, but I mean, in the world where it works on us. Where does it come from? The Gospel reading seems to make it pretty plain that it comes from the desert: As it is written in Isaiah the prophet: Behold, I am sending my messenger […]
December 5, 2017
Approaching Mystery: Joanna Penn Cooper Stares into a Puddle
“Think, dear sir, of the world you carry within you, and call this thinking what you will; whether it be remembering your own childhood or yearning toward your future—only be attentive to that which rises up in you and set it above everything that you observe about you.” –Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young […]
December 3, 2017
Write the Vision: God’s Kingdom Come
One of the things Sick Pilgrim has done, and does well, is to open space for those who for whatever reason, do not fit or have been hurt by the Church. Despite Christ’s exhortations to the contrary, there are invisible people in all of our churches. There are invisible people in every community, and these […]
December 1, 2017
Dark Devotional: Strange Mercy
The first reading for the First Sunday of Advent (Is 63: 16b-17, 19b; 64:2-7) begins benignly enough: You, Lord, are our father, our redeemer you are named forever. The line evokes a comforting certainty—I may not understand much else that’s happening right now (in my nation, my diocese, my extended family, etc.), but I know […]
November 29, 2017
Approaching Mystery: Jessica Mesman Griffith Peers at St. Agnes
As we approach the solstice, I am thinking about the truth and beauty found in darkness. (Read Jeanette Winterson’s beautiful take on this time of year here.) This week’s post comes from Sick Pilgrim publisher Jessica Mesman Griffith. Starting this Friday, Griffith will be teaching an online course with poet and novelist Rebecca Bratten Weiss, […]
Approaching Mystery: Jessica Mesman Griffith Peers at a St. Agnes
As we approach the solstice, I am thinking about the truth and beauty found in darkness. (Read Jeanette Winterson’s beautiful take on this time of year here.) This week’s post comes from Sick Pilgrim publisher Jessica Mesman Griffith. Starting this Friday, Griffith will be teaching an online course with poet and novelist Rebecca Bratten Weiss, […]
