How’s this for a translation of Scripture? Jedu…

How’s this for a translation of Scripture?

Jedus say, `Ain’t nobody gwine light a lamp and den hide um someweh weh day cain’t shum. Needa e ain’t gwine pit de lamp ondaneet a bushel baskut. E gwine pit de lamp on top ob a table so dem wa come een de house kin see de light.’”

No, this is not “The Gospel According to Br’er Rabbit”, nor a quote from an old Amos and Andy radio show. It is the official rendering of Luke 11:33 according to the recent “Gullah” translation of Luke’s Gospel, titled, De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write, published in 1995 by the American Bible Society, the Protestant organization which has for decades produced translations of the Bible in hundreds of the world’s languages. De Good Nyews Bout Jedus Christ Wa Luke Write is the first book of the Bible to appear in this tongue.

From De Good Nyews Bout Translayshun? by Helen Hull Hitchcock at Adoremus.org

Here is the cover of the new book by Father Be…

Here is the cover of the new book

by Father Benedict Groeschel that will be available from Our Sunday Visitor in June.

Breaking News Trappist Abbot M. Basil P…

Breaking News

Trappist Abbot M. Basil Pennington, the monk known worldwide for his books and ministry on centering prayer, has resigned as head of Our Lady of Holy Spirit Abbey in Conyers.

Twelve Ways to Know God by Peter Kreeft Jesus d…

Twelve Ways to Know God by Peter Kreeft

Jesus defines eternal life as knowing God (Jn 17:3). What are the ways? In how many different ways can we know God, and thus know eternal life? When I take an inventory, I find twelve.

1. The final, complete, definitive way, of course, is Christ, God himself in human flesh.

2. His church is his body, so we know God also through the church.

3. The Scriptures are the church’s book. This book, like Christ himself, is called “The Word of God.”

4. Scripture also says we can know God in nature see Romans 1. This is an innate, spontaneous, natural knowledge. I think no one who lives by the sea, or by a little river, can be an atheist.

5. Art also reveals God. I know three ex-atheists who say, “There is the music of Bach, therefore there must be a God.” This too is immediate.

6.Conscience is the voice of God. It speaks absolutely, with no ifs, ands, or buts. This too is immediate. [The last three ways of knowing God (4-6) are natural, while the first three are supernatural. The last three reveal three attributes of God, the three things the human spirit wants most: truth, beauty, and goodness. God has filled his creation with these three things. Here are six more ways in which we can and do know God.]

7. Reason, reflecting on nature, art, or conscience, can know God by good philosophical arguments.

8. Experience, life, your story, can also reveal God. You can see the hand of Providence there.

9. The collective experience of the race, embodied in history and tradition, expressed in literature, also reveals God.You can know God through others’ stories, through great literature.

10. The saints reveal God. They are advertisements, mirrors, little Christs. They are perhaps the most effective of all means of convincing and converting people.

11. Our ordinary daily experience of doing God’s will will reveal God. God becomes clearer to see when the eye of the heart is purified: “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.”

12. Prayer meets God—ordinary prayer. You learn more of God from a few minutes of prayerful repentance than through a lifetime in a library.

Unfortunately, Christians sometimes have family fights about these ways, and treat them as either/or instead of both/and. They all support each other, and nothing could be more foolish than treating them as rivals—for example, finding God in the church versus finding God in nature, or reason versus experience, or Christ versus art.

If you have neglected any of these ways, it would be an excellent idea to explore them. For instance, pray using great music. Or take an hour to review your life some time to see God’s role in your past. Read a great book to better meet and know and glorify God. Pray about it first.

Add to this list, if you can. There are more ways of finding and knowing God than any one essay can contain. Or any one world.



Read more of Peter Kreeft’s takes at his web site.

More Disturbing News about the Tennessee Volunteer…

More Disturbing News about the Tennessee Volunteer football team from the Atlanta Journal Constitution:

Bob Gilbert, a syndicated columnist whose writings are published in six newspapers in Tennessee, is scheduled to meet today with Southeastern Conference investigator Bill Sievers. Gilbert says he has evidence of academic misconduct involving several players on Tennessee’s 1998 football team, which won the SEC and national championships.

Tennessee, the SEC, and the NCAA have investigated the claims over the past three years, but the SEC is apparently taking another look at the allegations, which were first made public by Linda Bensel-Meyers, an English professor at the university.

”A blind man couldn’t miss a lot of the manipulation that was going on with those (academic) transcripts,” Gilbert said. ”The SEC didn’t want to see it. The NCAA didn’t want to see it. The president of the University of Tennessee didn’t want to see it. They’re all in denial.”

Gilbert said SEC commissioner Roy Kramer called him Tuesday to voice concerns over his column published Monday. In the column, Gilbert wrote that the SEC ignored ”compelling and incriminating” evidence when it first looked at the allegations two years ago.

Gilbert, 65, is a 1960 graduate of Tennessee and worked 29 years as the university’s director of news operations until retiring in 1996.

Gilbert’s allegations include:

A Tennessee football player was expelled at the end of the fall semester in 1998. Under university regulations, the student-athlete should have sat out a full year before re-applying for admission, but he was reinstated the following semester and participated in spring football practice.

A football player who was on academic probation for four semesters had eight grade changes to remain eligible under SEC and NCAA requirements. In the fall semester of his last year of eligibility, the student-athlete flunked four courses.

On several transcripts of football players, failing grades were changed to incomplete marks and then changed back to failing after football season.

Bensel-Meyers complained in 1999 about plagiarism and grade changing involving student-athletes. Tennessee conducted its own investigation in the fall of 1999, but the school said it found no improprieties. The NCAA performed a follow-up audit and informed Tennessee in March 2000 that it was discontinuing its inquiry.

The NCAA looked into the matter again in August 2000, but again found no wrongdoing. However, following the investigations, Tennessee took its tutoring program out of the hands of the athletics department and turned it over to the provost’s office.

”According to (Bensel-Meyers), the NCAA has never looked at this evidence,” Gilbert said. ”She offered it to the investigator, but he

wouldn’t take it.”

Gilbert’s accusations come less than two weeks after Wayne Rowe, a sportswriter with the Mobile (Ala.) Register, said he sent $4,500 to former Tennessee quarterback Tee Martin while he was still playing for theVolunteers. A Mobile businessman said the money was embezzled from his insurance company by an employee who wrote Rowe two checks. Rowe resigned from the newspaper on May 10 and has yet to provide the newspaper with wire transfer receipts that prove the money was sent to Martin.

Words from the Shepherds of the Church First Ca…

Words from the Shepherds of the Church

First Cardinal Mahoney (May 14th):

My Brother Priests: We have all been overwhelmed for many weeks now with the constant publicity highlighting the sexual abuse of minors by Catholic priests all across the country. These news reports have been very distressing for us all, but these reports have helped us turn our prayers and our focus to reaching out to the victims with all available spiritual and pastoral assistance.

It is quite likely that very soon the public media will highlight the case of Michael Baker, a former priest of this archdiocese. You need to be aware that such a story could come anytime now, and you need to be aware of the seriousness of his case.

Sometime in late 1986, Baker disclosed to me that he had problems in the past of acting out sexually with two minors.

Baker was sent to a treatment center for evaluation and recommendation for his future. Following treatment, it was decided that he could do specialized priestly ministry not related to children and youth. He was subsequently given various ministries, such as special outreach to our retired priests. All during this time, we had no reports of abuse.

Early in the year 2000 we learned that two men in Arizona were preparing to sue Baker for past sexual abuse. Once we became aware of that situation, he was removed immediately from all priestly ministry in accordance with the policy in effect at that time. Baker agreed to petition the Holy See for laicization, which was granted shortly thereafter. We have now learned that further allegations are being made against Baker.

As your archbishop, I assume full responsibility for allowing Baker to remain in any type of ministry during the 1990s. If I had known in those years what I discovered in early 2000, I would have dismissed him from all ministry and requested his dismissal from the priesthood in the late 1980s.

I offer my sincere, personal apologies for my failure to take firm and decisive action much earlier. If I have caused you or your parishioners additional grief by my handling of the Baker case, I ask your forgiveness.

Such situations illustrate vividly and clearly the reason why our archdiocese now has firmly in place a “zero tolerance” policy–past, present and future. No one who has been determined to have sexually abused a minor can be allowed to serve in any ministry in the church.

I ask your continued prayers as we move through this time of purification.

From Bishop Joseph Imesch (Joliet):

Joliet Bishop Joseph Imesch seemed unfazed as a lawyer questioned him in 1995 about bringing in a priest who had been convicted of molesting an altar boy in Michigan.

“If you had a child,” the lawyer recalled asking the bishop during the deposition for a civil suit, “wouldn’t you be concerned that the priest they were saying mass with had been convicted of sexually molesting children?”

Replied Imesch, “I don’t have any children.”

Bishop Joseph Hart (retired):

Hart referred questions to his attorney, who issued a news release Tuesday stating that Hart welcomed the investigation because he wants to “put an end to these false allegations.

“I state clearly, without any equivocation, that I have never engaged in any improper sexual behavior involving minors in my more than 46 years as a priest,” Hart said in the statement.

This is a continuation of the 73 Steps to Spiritua…

This is a continuation of the 73 Steps to Spiritual Communion with God. The previous posts are below and in the archives to the right. This is the 28th step:

(28) To speak the truth with heart and tongue.

St. Benedict’s counsel here is geared toward a conversion of feelings, so that the truth I speak with my mouth, I also feel in my heart. Of course, such truth will be spoken with conviction.

Many of us know instinctively what is true, we just don’t feel like paying any attention to it. Conversion of “feelings” is an important part of opening oneself to God.

If you don’t feel like converting to the truth, it is because some untruth has grabbed your heart. Opening your heat to God’s love will have a surprising result–you will literally feel the truth.

Too often we look toward those who should model religious faith but instead wear their faith for all to see. Jesus condemns the Pharisees and hypocrites of his day because they keep the tax collectors and prostitutes from coming to the Kingdom of God by their example. In other words they make religious belief in God seem unattractive.

Our eyes should always be focused on Christ. We shouldn’t look to anyone else.

The people who encountered Him were drawn to Him. So will we be.

Then speaking the truth will be a matter of allowing the tongue to proclaim what the heart feels.

Day # 7 of 9 to pray Cardinal Law’s Novena durin…

Day # 7 of 9 to pray Cardinal Law’s Novena during this period between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost, I will post the prayer for the next nine days, to make it easier for you to join in:

”Almighty and merciful God, by the power of the Holy Spirit you raised Jesus Christ, your Son, from death and filled him with new and abundant life.

”Then, in accordance with your loving plan, you sent the Holy Spirit upon the disciples at Pentecost, that by his mighty gifts they might be joined to the Risen Lord in his Body, the Church.

”By a fresh outpouring of the Spirit’s gifts give new life to the Church in the United States this Pentecost.

”We beg that the Spirit will bring healing to the victims of clergy sexual abuse and their families.

”We pray that the Spirit will warm the hearts of those whose faith has been weakened by this scandal.

”We ask that the Spirit will bestow mercy and repentance on the abusers.

”We earnestly desire that the Spirit will renew and reform the whole Church in the likeness of Christ.

”Fill every member of the Church with holiness so that, working together as the Body of Christ, we might be built up in faith, hope and love in order to proclaim the Gospel with joy.

”We ask this through Christ our Lord. Amen.”