Blog Archive
Contemplating the messiness of Christian life
The Messy Jesus Business Blog is an ecumenical Christian gathering of musings about what it means to live the Gospel today. A variety of contributors offer prayer, poetry, book reviews, creative nonfiction and prose about what it means to live a life of faith in our complex, modern times.
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Advent Readiness and Mutual Hospitality
Our home has a Christ room. The room is simple, outfitted with an enormous depiction of Rembrandt’s “Return of the Prodigal Son,” and remains intentionally open for short-term stays of all kinds. We have hosted family members and friends (and friends of friends), kindred community-cultivators, monks and nuns, refugees, respite-seekers and people yearning for imaginative…
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Dorothy Fortenberry: Climate and Creation
Episode 55 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, with Sister Julia Walsh. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Stitcher | Email | RSS | More “We all will be affected by climate change… can we learn how to understand each other as shared participants in this project of being on earth together?” –Dorothy Fortenberry IN THIS EPISODE In this episode of Messy Jesus Business,…
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Advent In a Time of Unbelief
We missed the first Sunday of Advent. While we’ve missed nearly every Sunday mass for the last two years, this one felt particularly discouraging. Maybe because the day before I was heard on more than one occasion saying, “I’m going to go to mass tomorrow if anyone wants to join me,” verbally attempting to hold…
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David Hockney and ‘the Duty of Delight’
On the cusp of turning 80 years old in 2020, David Hockney, the British pop artist known for his vivid California landscapes, decided to go to Normandy to paint the arrival of spring on his iPad. Taking his iPad outside in ‘plein air’ (a French expression referring to the act of painting outdoors), he painted…
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The Holy Grail: God’s grace on earth
Recently I watched the “The Fisher King” for the first time. For those unfamiliar with this 1991 film, it stars Jeff Bridges as a Howard Stern-esque shock jock who tells people “how it is.” One day a man called Edwin phones in. He is a repeat caller and a bit of a loser. Today he…
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Carmen Acevedo Butcher: Healed by Translation
Episode 53 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, with Sister Julia Walsh. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Stitcher | Email | RSS | More IN THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Messy Jesus Business podcast, Sister Julia Walsh talks with author, scholar, and translator of spiritual texts Carmen Acevedo Butcher about the messiness of spirituality, healing and relationship. Together they discuss the wisdom Brother…
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Embracing the Dead
After my father died in 2020, I began to have dreams about him returning from the dead. Sometimes we found a way to revive him. Sometimes it turned out he hadn’t been dead at all. I once dreamed we had buried him by mistake, and I had to dig him up again. My brother and…
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Sister Eileen McKenzie: The Complexity of the Call to the Way of Christ
Episode 52 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, with Sister Julia Walsh. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Stitcher | Email | RSS | More “Christ is The Way and whatever is in the way is The Way.” – Sister Eileen McKenzie IN THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Messy Jesus Business podcast, Sister Julia Walsh talks with another Franciscan Sister of Perpetual Adoration,…
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Discipleship and Decay: Why I Resist Greatness
In this part of the world (here in the Upper Midwest, in the United States of America), it’s the season of decay. Decay is colorful, creative, expansive. Alive. When one walks through the woods in the crisp autumn air, one may notice a full rainbow of fungus speckling the path, the rotting logs and devouring…
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Ivan Ng: The Journey from Pride to Christian Humility
Episode 51 of Messy Jesus Business podcast, with Sister Julia Walsh. Podcast: Play in new window | Download Subscribe: Stitcher | Email | RSS | More IN THIS EPISODE: In this episode of Messy Jesus Business podcast, Sister Julia Walsh talks with Ivan Ng during her visit to Singapore for the International Conference on Cohesive Societies in September 2022. They explore Ivan’s conversion to becoming…
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Little Winter Flower
Soon after I turned 24 last winter, I went on a weekend hermitage. I stayed in a solitary cabin in rural Illinois, remote and full of bare trees, ice, quick, glittery sunsets and freezing temps at a retreat center, run by the Sisters of St. Joseph. My first day there, I spent a long afternoon…
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Prison reform and COVID-19
Quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic forced many of us into involuntary confinement and isolation. The painful experience reminded us that humans are social animals who long to be free — free to move about, associate, make choices and form bonds. For the two million Americans who are currently incarcerated, quarantine merely extended the punitive logic…
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