Fr Ronald Rolheiser, Author at Catholic Herald

Fr Ronald Rolheiser

October 26, 2017

No community should botch its deaths. That’s a wise statement from Mircea Eliade and apropos in the face of the recent death of Kathleen Dowling Singh. Kathleen was a hospice worker, a psychotherapist, and a very deep and influential spiritual writer. She is known and deeply respected among those who write and teach in the

Close the distance, not the gate

October 19, 2017

Assessing the times, the Nobel Prize-winning author Toni Morrison asks this question: “Why should we want to know a stranger when it is easier to estrange another? Why should we want to close the distance when we can close the gate?” Except this isn’t a question, it’s a judgment. It’s a negative judgment on both

Words that open and close our minds

October 12, 2017

Thirty years ago the American educator Allan Bloom wrote a book entitled The Closing of the American Mind. This was his thesis: in our secularised world our language is becoming ever more empirical, one-dimensional and devoid of depth, and this is closing our minds by stripping us of the deeper meanings inside our own experience.

Healthy and unhealthy fear of God

October 05, 2017

As a theologian, priest and preacher, I often get asked: “Why isn’t the Church preaching more fear of God any more? Why aren’t we preaching more about the dangers of going to hell? Why aren’t we preaching more about God’s anger and hellfire?” It’s not hard to answer that. We aren’t preaching a lot about

A prayer for stillness

September 28, 2017

“Be still and know that I am God.” Scripture assures us that if we are still we will come to know God, but arriving at stillness is easier said than done. As Blaise Pascal once stated: “All the miseries of the human person come from the fact that no one can sit still for one

Our struggle with riches

September 21, 2017

A number of years ago I attended a funeral. The man to whom we were saying goodbye had enjoyed a full and rich life. He’d reached the age of 90 and was respected for having been both successful and honest. But he’d always been a strong man, a natural leader, a man who took charge

God’s order to kill the Canaanites

September 14, 2017

In his autobiography, Eric Clapton, the famed rock and blues artist, shares candidly his long struggle with an addiction to alcohol. At one point in his life, he admitted his addiction and entered a rehab clinic, but he didn’t take his problem as seriously as was warranted. Returning to England after his stint in the

Achievement versus fruitfulness

September 07, 2017

There’s a real difference between our achievements and our fruitfulness, between our successes and the actual good that we bring into the world. What we achieve brings us success, gives us a sense of pride, makes our families and friends proud of us, and gives us a feeling of being worthwhile, singular and important. We’ve

Stuck in traffic

August 31, 2017

There’s a famous billboard that hangs along a congested highway that reads: “You aren’t stuck in traffic. You are traffic!” Good wit, good insight! How glibly we distance ourselves from a problem, whether it is our politics, our churches, the ecological problems on our planet, or almost anything else. We aren’t, as we want to

The power of ritual

August 24, 2017

I don’t always find it easy to pray. Often I’m over-tired, distracted, caught up in tasks, pressured by work, short on time, lacking the appetite for prayer or more strongly drawn to do something else. But I do pray daily – despite the fact that I often don’t want to and despite the fact that

God needs a better press

August 17, 2017

The word “Protestant” is generally misunderstood. Martin Luther’s protest that led to the Protestant Reformation was not, in fact, a protest against the Catholic Church. Properly understood, it was a protest for God. God, in Luther’s view, was being manipulated to serve human and ecclesial self-interest. His protest was a plea to respect God’s transcendence.

Our utmost in dealing with our faith

August 10, 2017

The complexity of adulthood inevitably puts to death the naïvety of childhood. And this is true too of our faith. Not that faith is a naïvety. It isn’t. But our faith needs to be constantly reintegrated into our persons and matched up anew against our life’s experience; otherwise we will find it at odds with

← 1 … 8 9 10 11 12 … 18 →

Sorry, no search matching search results found. Please try again.