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Athens to Jerusalem and Back Again: Forms of Contemplation in Art and Liturgy

adoremus.org

Athens to Jerusalem and Back Again: Forms of Contemplation in Art and Liturgy - Adoremus

Yet He is not far from each one of us, for “In Him we live and move and have our being;” as even some of your poets have said, “For we are indeed His offspring.” —Acts 17:27-28 A decisive moment in the history of Christianity’s engagement with the world occurred in St. Paul’s speech to the Athenians in the Areopagus (Acts 17:22–31). As Paul weaves the words of the pagan poets into his Christian preaching, two questions immediately arise. What is the relationship of the classical Hellenistic world to the Gospel? And what is the relationship of aesthetic or literary form to the form of the sacred that is divine revelation?1 These questions are of moment in themselves, but they also point us toward a question of even greater importance. What is the essential nature of the Christian liturgy in its relation to the human person, history, and the structure of being? That the question of the relationship of Athens and Jerusalem should have any direct implication regarding the nature of Christian …

Cor ad Cor Loquitur: Sacred Polyphony in the Roman Rite

adoremus.org

Cor ad Cor Loquitur: Sacred Polyphony in the Roman Rite - Adoremus

In the Latin Church’s musical tradition, plainchant—an umbrella term for all forms of Western liturgical chant—has always occupied a prime position as the ideal and officially sanctioned form of sacred music, repeatedly defined in the magisterium as the liturgical music par excellence. Across two millennia of ecclesial teaching and practice, plainchant has been upheld not merely as one option among others, but as the normative musical expression of the Roman Rite. As Pius XII put it: “The Gregorian chant which has been used in the Church over the course of so many centuries, and which may be called, as it were, its patrimony, is gloriously outstanding for this holiness” (Musicae sacrae, 42). Plainchant is the Church’s liturgical song not as a matter of taste or historical sentiment, but because it developed alongside the liturgy, growing in step with its form and content (hence William Mahrt’s characterization of “the musical shape of the liturgy”). It is a monodic song that safeguards …

New Book Models How Praying with Sacred Art Can Help Us Encounter God

adoremus.org

New Book Models How Praying with Sacred Art Can Help Us Encounter God - Adoremus

When Catholics think about praying, we often think about using words and gestures. For instance, our prayers usually begin and end with the Sign of the Cross, which involves both speech and physical action. In the sacramental life, however, the Church acknowledges that there are other components beyond words and actions that help us enter more deeply into the mysteries of our faith, such as sacred music, architecture, art, and time. Derek Rotty’s book, Praying with Sacred Art: Pondering the Mystery of Redemption through Visio Divina, highlights the importance of encountering God through iconography and artistic depictions of biblical themes. Rotty, a convert to Catholicism, freelance author, husband, and father of five, provides thoughtful examples of how to apply the ancient monastic practice of lectio divina (a four-step method of praying with Scriptures or spiritual texts) in reading sacred art. This adapted method he calls visio divina. The book comprises 228 pages, consisting of …

Oxford Movement Approaching 200: The Tractarians and the Curious Hunger of Today’s Students

adoremus.org

Oxford Movement Approaching 200: The Tractarians and the Curious Hunger of Today’s Students - Adoremus

As the 200th anniversary of the Oxford Movement approaches, one suspects that St. John Henry Newman, John Keble, and Edward Bouverie Pusey—the principal architects of the Oxford Movement—would look upon the state of modern Christianity with the same expression they wore in 1833—somewhere between astonishment, alarm, and possibly resignation. Yet if they could stroll through Oxford today, dodging electric bicycles and undergraduates dressed in the latest forms of cultivated carelessness, they might also permit themselves something they were not especially known for: hope. For a strange thing is happening. Not only in Oxford but across the English-speaking world, a new generation is rediscovering the very realities the Tractarians fought to uphold: reverence, doctrine, beauty, sacramentality, and the supernatural character of the Church. Unlike their Victorian predecessors, however, today’s youth have endured not the fading embers of a Christian culture, but the long aftermath of liturgical …

Alexander Schmemann and the Eucharistic Universe

adoremus.org

Alexander Schmemann and the Eucharistic Universe - Adoremus

I grew up in an Evangelical Protestant context, shifted direction to Canterbury, where I spent over a decade, and crossed the Tiber in 2015. There were many people and books that helped me cross the river into the Catholic Church. One of the crucial figures was the Orthodox liturgical theologian Alexander Schmemann (1921-1983). He helped baptize my imagination, teaching me to think sacramentally. I owe Schmemann a debt of gratitude and I am not the only one. For example, Aidan Kavanagh, OSB (1926-2006) and David Fagerberg, two key Catholic liturgical theologians, are deeply shaped by Schmemann’s thought. As both Kavanagh and Fagerberg would attest, the East has much to teach the West; “the Church must breathe with her two lungs!”1 Schmemann is a liturgical theologian in the proper sense of the term. He did not write dogmatic treatises about liturgy, nor did he write systematic theology that simply mined the liturgy for theological examples. Rather, participation in the Orthodox Divine …

5 Bible verses for when your child doesn’t text back

aleteia.org

5 Bible verses for when your child doesn't text back

For parents with teens and adult children, save this article for those all-too common times when you're lying in bed stressed! Every parent of older children knows the feeling. You glance at your phone. Nothing. You check again a few minutes later, convinced you must have missed the familiar buzz or chime. Still nothing. You're torn between frustration, annoyance, and a niggling fear. Of course, logic tells us that there's a good reason for why your message has gone unread. Perhaps your teenager is out with friends and has completely forgotten they have parents to consider. Maybe your college student is travelling, or your grown-up child simply has other things on their mind. While you recognize the countless innocent explanations, emotionally your imagination has already embarked on a cross-country tour of worst-case scenarios. It's actually one of the curious challenges of modern parenting. A generation ago, parents worried until they heard the front door open. Today, we worry because …

Morning Minute Retreat (July 11, 2026)

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