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 ...

Robert Putnam's latest work, Our Kids: The American Dream in Crisis , is alarming. Like his previous works, Putnam, in the research terms of sociology, tells us what we already know. This time, as usual the bearer of bad news, he tells us that "our kids" are in trouble. We've known that, but we prefer not to see those "other kids" as "our kids." "Scissor graphs," as Putnam dubs them, demonstrate the expanding gap between upper-class and lower-class parents and children in the U.S. (68). He includes 13 critical graphs in his work, and each one should raise an alarm. The word "gap" appears on at least 74 pages of the 277 pages of text, fully a quarter of the book (excluding acknowledgements, notes, and index). "Gap" would appear more frequently were it not for the rich illustrations of how so many American youth live. Perhaps the measured tones of the Malkin Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard University John...