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Breath of the Spirit is DignityUSA’s electronic spiritual and liturgical resource for our members and potential members. Nothing can replace your chapter or other faith community, but we hope you will find further support here for integrating your spirituality with your sexuality and all the strands of your life.
We welcome relevant homilies, inspirational writings, social justice opportunities, or theological articles from other sources also — particularly from wise women and men who can help us grow as gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender (GLBT) and allied Catholic/Christians. You may volunteer to help with this program or send your comments by e-mailing info@DignityUSA.org ATTN: Breath of the Spirit.
One of my favorite Peanuts quotes is Linus’ offhand remark, “I love mankind . . . it’s people I can’t stand.” I presume it became quite popular in the late 50s and early 60s because so many of us identified with the little guy. We can love things in the abstract, but when it comes down to loving... more
I presume Paul would have benefited from a class or two in anger control before he wrote his letter to the Galatians. It’s an understatement to say he was uptight when he dictated it. He had personally evangelized the Galatian community, teaching them how to become other Christs by imitating Jesus... more
No two biblical calls are exactly the same. Though they contain the same basic elements, each is just a little bit different. In today’s first reading, for instance, Elijah permits Elisha to return home to kiss his mother and father goodbye, something Jesus forbids his prospective disciple to do in... more
One of the keys to learning the minds of our sacred authors is to learn how they use certain words. The same word may have different meanings for different authors. For instance, in today’s gospel when Luke has Peter declare that Jesus is the “Christ of God,” he’s simply saying Jesus is Yahweh’s... more
One of the keys to understanding Matthew and Luke’s theology is to employ “redaction criticism.” That particular exegetical tool, developed after World War II, tries to surface how each of the two evangelists changed the material he copied from earlier authors in order to convey his unique theology... more
Though we have four biblical accounts of Paul’s conversion, today’s Galatians pericope contains the only one actually written by Paul himself. The other three - sometimes contradictory - accounts in Acts were all composed by Luke.
There was once a time in my uncritical life when I thought the Mass I regularly experienced in the 1950s was the exact Mass Jesus had “instituted” during his Last Supper and the church had faithfully passed on for almost 20 centuries – including the vestments and Latin. But then I read Joseph... more
In listening to today’s readings, we must remember that the definition of the Trinity we learned in our Baltimore Catechism – “three persons in one God” – wasn’t formulated until the Council of Nicea in 325 CE, more than 130 years after John’s gospel was written. It certainly wasn’t a “dogma” his... more
Afraid the axiom “If you don’t use it you’ll lose it” even applies to the Holy Spirit. It’s clear from our Christian Scriptures that Jesus of Nazareth didn’t share his Spirit with us just so we could lock him/her away in our dogmas and conveniently forget about his/her presence in our daily lives.... more
One of the things about which I was certain as a child were the events that were going to kick in the moment I’d die. The catechism was black and white on the issue, and, one way or another, our religion teachers constantly reminded us of it.
(In some American dioceses, the feast of the Ascension replaces the Seventh Sunday of Easter.)
Those who don’t expect Jesus’ Parousia anytime soon really can’t appreciate the mindset of the community for whom Luke originally composed his gospel and the Acts of the Apostles. The two evangelists who... more
How do we know what the Holy Spirit wants us to do, and why is it important that we know?