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 ...

Weekly, I post four articles that I found significant and a poem accompanied by some comments about what we can learn from them. Our lives are enriched by seeing better. Each week, one article comes from the world of photography, a discipline that is about seeing. Another article comes from the world of technology, hence seeing something of the future. Another article takes up an aspect of our life together, seeing more clearly the other. Another article refers to faith, seeing the unseen. Finally, the weekly post concludes with a poem, because poetry is about seeing words whose arrangement allows us to see anew. Today, the first two articles travel through Green Bay and pay indirect homage to the Packers of Titletown as they have their first home game of the NFL preseason. Next, we move to our life together, examining the decay of power. The fourth article looks at urban congestion and traffic. We'll close with poetry from a priest, Fr. John P. McNamee. 21st Century Mona Lis...

With the inaugural selection in Mark Zuckerberg's " A Year of Books ," Zuckerberg demonstrates that the readings will not be lightweight or fluffy. Moisés Naím 's The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being in Charge Isn't What it Used to Be  makes significant observations of our changing landscape. Naím, a scholar at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, earned a Ph.D. from the Sloan School of Business at MIT, served as Minister of Trade and Industry in Venezuela prior to the ascendance of Hugo Chavez, and edited the journal Foreign Policy . Naím deploys his relationships and observations, as well as strong concepts and impressive statistics, to weave together the thesis of The End of Power . Upon seeing the provocative title, I came at the book with a couple of lenses. First, the use of the word "end" occurred to me as an Aristotelian use, as in "final purpose." I wondered then if Naím w...