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Advent, Christmas, Epiphany: Stories and Reflections on the Sunday Readings
Stories and Reflections on the Sunday Readings
The lectionary readings for the entire Christmas season come alive through the stories and reflections of popular author Megan McKenna. Her words show us how we can center our lives on bringing justice and peace into the world while we wait for Jesus, the Son of God, to come among us.
This volume includes the four Sunday readings in Advent Cycles A, B and C, as well as the feasts of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the three Christmas Masses, the Holy Family, and Epiphany.
“McKenna has created two volumes that should be on every Christian’s bookshelf and in every Christian’s hands during Advent…. Combining storytelling, scripture passages, and reflective prayers, McKenna brings fresh insights to the old stories.”
Review for Religious
“Those looking for lively spiritual reading or homilists in search of ideas will find this a welcome source.”
The Bible Today
The lectionary readings for the entire Christmas season come alive through the stories and reflections of popular author Megan McKenna. Her words show us how we can center our lives on bringing justice and peace into the world while we wait for Jesus, the Son of God, to come among us.
This volume includes the four Sunday readings in Advent Cycles A, B and C, as well as the feasts of the Immaculate Conception, Our Lady of Guadalupe, the three Christmas Masses, the Holy Family, and Epiphany.
“McKenna has created two volumes that should be on every Christian’s bookshelf and in every Christian’s hands during Advent…. Combining storytelling, scripture passages, and reflective prayers, McKenna brings fresh insights to the old stories.”
Review for Religious
“Those looking for lively spiritual reading or homilists in search of ideas will find this a welcome source.”
The Bible Today
256 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 1, 1998
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November 3, 2012
This review also applies to McKenna's book on the Advent daily readings.
If you're looking for surprising new insights from the millennial singer, reality show villain, and author of "Mouthy," sorry to disappoint. This Megan McKenna is the Catholic storyteller, spiritual teacher, poet, lay theologian, and Pax Christi activist.
The Kindle edition is riddled with formatting errors, especially line breaks in mid-sentence, parts of paragraphs centered for no reason, titles where only random letters are italicized, letter spaces inserted between syllables, page numbers and running heads in mid-sentence, footnotes not linked to their callouts, groups of words run together with no spaces between them, and replacing the Maltese crosses used as bullets in the hard copy with lower case "o"s, suggesting handgun muzzles in place of bullets. The Kindle edition's text rendering reminds me of what a rendering truck does to roadkill.
Struggling through all the formatting wreckage made me more critical of the content than when I last read the paperback edition 15 years ago. I still have the same basic criticism I had then. McKenna offers some of the best homilies on law I've seen, but it confuses law with promise.
She quotes many stories and sayings from Jewish tradition, but in commenting on the lectionary readings, she reverts to Jew-bashing tropes about 1st century Judaism that had already been refuted a thousand times by 1998.
But on this rereading, I also noticed her tendency to toss out ringing groups of three abstractions and to say that a story is "about" a group of abstractions, without actually unpacking the connections.
She also refers to events from different time periods, rhetorically giving the false impression that they were all happening at once, when she wrote in 1998, that everything was always getting worse everywhere, and that nothing ever got better anywhere. And she routinely asserts public policy conclusions as self-evident, without analysis of their probable costs for people she wants to benefit, as her policy preferences followed immediately from fundamental theology.
I still enthusiastically recommend this book. If not for the formatting issues, I'd give it 4 stars. But read a hard copy if you can find one. The cover of the first edition, published by Orbis Books, has a beautiful icon, "Our Lady of Advent: The Gate of Heaven" by William Hart McNichols, S.J. In the introduction, McKenna spends 3 pages discussing it. Later reprints by New City Press have a different cover. I like orange, and the candles are pretty, but the profound icon is missing. Apparently New City didn't get the copyright to the artwork. And the Kindle version follows the New City edition. As a result, the introduction makes no sense.
If you're looking for surprising new insights from the millennial singer, reality show villain, and author of "Mouthy," sorry to disappoint. This Megan McKenna is the Catholic storyteller, spiritual teacher, poet, lay theologian, and Pax Christi activist.
The Kindle edition is riddled with formatting errors, especially line breaks in mid-sentence, parts of paragraphs centered for no reason, titles where only random letters are italicized, letter spaces inserted between syllables, page numbers and running heads in mid-sentence, footnotes not linked to their callouts, groups of words run together with no spaces between them, and replacing the Maltese crosses used as bullets in the hard copy with lower case "o"s, suggesting handgun muzzles in place of bullets. The Kindle edition's text rendering reminds me of what a rendering truck does to roadkill.
Struggling through all the formatting wreckage made me more critical of the content than when I last read the paperback edition 15 years ago. I still have the same basic criticism I had then. McKenna offers some of the best homilies on law I've seen, but it confuses law with promise.
She quotes many stories and sayings from Jewish tradition, but in commenting on the lectionary readings, she reverts to Jew-bashing tropes about 1st century Judaism that had already been refuted a thousand times by 1998.
But on this rereading, I also noticed her tendency to toss out ringing groups of three abstractions and to say that a story is "about" a group of abstractions, without actually unpacking the connections.
She also refers to events from different time periods, rhetorically giving the false impression that they were all happening at once, when she wrote in 1998, that everything was always getting worse everywhere, and that nothing ever got better anywhere. And she routinely asserts public policy conclusions as self-evident, without analysis of their probable costs for people she wants to benefit, as her policy preferences followed immediately from fundamental theology.
I still enthusiastically recommend this book. If not for the formatting issues, I'd give it 4 stars. But read a hard copy if you can find one. The cover of the first edition, published by Orbis Books, has a beautiful icon, "Our Lady of Advent: The Gate of Heaven" by William Hart McNichols, S.J. In the introduction, McKenna spends 3 pages discussing it. Later reprints by New City Press have a different cover. I like orange, and the candles are pretty, but the profound icon is missing. Apparently New City didn't get the copyright to the artwork. And the Kindle version follows the New City edition. As a result, the introduction makes no sense.
Displaying 1 - 1 of 1 review