Each semester, when teaching the passion, death, and resurrection narratives of the Gospels to my students, I also teach the Paschal Mystery and assign the text of the Exsultet. The Exsultet is the prayer chanted […]
Category: Holy Week
Jesus’s Ordinary Love
Every year, I find myself struck by a sense of strangeness over the Triduum: it is such an extraordinary time for the Church, and yet the days often still feel very ordinary. Many people still […]
Egypt’s Palm Sunday Martyrs: Time and Resistance
Today, dozens of Coptic Christian churchgoers were killed in two simultaneous bombings in Tanta and Alexandria, Egypt. As the so-called, self-proclaimed caliphate of ISIL claims responsibility for the attack, Christians and people of good will the […]
The Responsibility of Being a Prophetic People: Holy Thursday, Martyrdom, and the Feast of Blessed Óscar Romero
On Holy Thursday, the Roman Catholic church celebrates both a Chrism Mass in the morning and the Evening Mass of the Lord’s Supper. Every March 24th since 1980, the church also remembers the martyrdom of […]
Is there Enough Mercy for Judas?
Few biblical characters loom as large in our imagination as Judas Iscariot. The theological problem posed by Judas and his motivations have spilled oceans of ink, whether in the Gnostic sects that hailed him or […]
Confronted, Confronting, Comforted: Reflections for Holy Week’s “Ordinary Days”
Holy Week balances the drama and ordinariness of Jesus’s last days in almost equal measure. Holy Week’s high liturgies literally script us into Jesus’s last days. We waved palms for Jesus and demanded His crucifixion […]
Daily Theology 