Easter in Ordinary

As 2015 draws to a close, I am filled with gratitude for the opportunity to share books and articles from others that have prompted reflections and thoughts, as well as sharing experiences from the my own journey here. While my weekly collection of "Four Articles and a Poem" draws a certain readership, I have excluded them from this list. Hence, many posts in this list are commentaries and reviews of books. I am especially grateful for the ways that readers have interacted with what I have posted here. Conversation is at the heart of he time that I put into this blog. So, I share a series of my ten favorite posts from the year, posts that help engage us in what I believe to be significant conversations. 50 Ideas for Making Laudato Si' part of Parish Life . My top post of the year is my most viewed and a post that has been subsequently published elsewhere. Pope Francis' Laudato Si' was such a landmark work, I enjoyed writing these  ideas on how to live the ...

I may have a new first book to recommend to folks about the nature of community organizing. Often, I suggest Dennis Jacobsen's Doing Justice: Congregations and Community Organizing as a first book to read. I once kept a small box of Jacobsen's book in the car to give to key people when we were trying to build an organization in South Bend, IN. This weekend, I finished reading Jeffrey Stout's Blessed are the Organized: Grassroots Democracy in America , the likely replacement to Jacobsen's fine work. To begin with, I love the title: Blessed are the Organized . Invoking the Beatitudes gives a pithy, novel explanation to the purpose of organizing. The Beatitutdes, as spoken by Jesus and related in the Gospels, tells of a "blessing" given to those who, for their current condition, appear more bereft than blessed. We organize that our lives might know a blessing that we do not currently experience. The book derives its form from the fortuitous suggestion of Sta...