Ash Wednesday Assignment:Your Reading For The Next Forty Days and Beyond ...

Pax Christi has a suggestion for those of you observing Lent – in addition to "giving up" something, give some thought to peace. In the words of one of the reflections on that site:

Save us from our desire to hurt as we have been hurt,
to punish as we have been punished,
to terrorize as we have been terrorized.

Give us the strength it takes
to listen rather than to judge,
to trust rather than to fear,
to try again and again
to make peace even when peace eludes us.

Also, I learned today that three gentlemen from my "People I'm Reading" list (Messrs. Steve Bogner, Nathan Nelson, and Joe Cecil) are among the collaborators on a new group blog on Catholic social teaching, Sollicitudo Rei Socialis. Anyone who buys into the current media trend to label religious thought as being the preserve of a single political party, could learn a lot from those folks.