Recently I had the pleasure of being one of the featured speakers for the Ancient Faith Speaker Series, offered by the St. Raphael School. It was going to be essentially the same lecture I gave at AFCon last year, but that changed as soon as the world went crazy. So although the bones of the lecture are similar to my lecture on How to Create Christian Culture, it became mostly all about…
I was joyfully surprised to see my friends talk to each other about my favorite topic this past week. Now, as we slowly prepare to go back into the world ,now is the best time to think about how to consciously create culture and communities. And so, without further ado, the Sheehans speak with Jonathan Pageau about culture creation! Please share this post with as many people as possible! It’s time to…
I’m sure you’ve heard the word much these days: resilience. A catch word, of sorts. But what does it mean, practically speaking? And how do we become better at it? Last week, I had a wonderful conversation with Fulbright Scholar and psychology student Liza Kotar (who also happens to be my cousin). She is currently in Moscow practicing resilience in very real ways. Our conversation was wide-ranging and I found it challenging…
Staying positive in this crisis can be difficult. Not because there is a paucity of good in the world. No, there are many who are astounding me with their creativity and their ability to make a good thing out of a tragedy. What worries me is how many Christians seem content with quarantine-worship at home, as though it were enough. Add to that some very odd assertions about the Church being merely…
I have the great pleasure of welcoming author Laura E. Wolfe, who wrote a wonderful guest post about fear and the coronavirus. Here is Laura, in her own words: Laura E. Wolfe is the author of Sasha and the Dragon (2017) and the forthcoming novella Gerasim (2020), both from Ancient Faith Publishing. She’s using the current social distancing suggestions to catch up on her TBR bookcase, play more board games with her…
Have you ever had the surreal experience of realizing you’re inside someone else’s breakthrough moment? When you’re seeing the lightbulb go off, or someone come to terms with their past, all right in front of your eyes? As though Oprah herself had suddenly come into the room and given everyone free stuff. Well, I had an experience like that recently. I was at a writer’s workshop. One of the writers there was…
How are you all feeling? I’ve gone through the gamut of freaked out to cautiously optimistic to excited. Most of the time, I feel encouraged by much of what I see and I feel the profound rightness of this happening at this moment. Yes, there is much that is frightening and painful. But there is much more that is good, I’m convinced of it. As a friend of mine and priest said…
It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it? Especially if you spend too much time reading the news media. There was a time (I think) when the news was concerned with facts and truth. Now, it seems that the most important thing they’re interested in is inducing panic by any means necessary. Oh well. I prefer to focus on the positives of this interesting time we’re living in. It’s a time to descend…
What a strange time. We have never been so interconnected, so interdependent, so close to one another. And now, we have never been so incapable of dealing (emotionally, financially, spiritually) with a pandemic. In times like these, it’s especially helpful, I think, to read stories that help us make sense of our reality. We are storytelling creatures, our Savior spoke in stories (parables), and we are singularly incapable of dealing cooly, rationally…
The world is going mad around us. Who knew that it wouldn’t be the zombie apocalypse, but a virus with a mortality rate less than some flu epidemics? People are fighting in store aisles for toilet paper. Some lovely human beings are trying to financially capitalize on the sufferings of others by buying (and reselling) tens of thousands of bottles of hand sanitizer. And the best, culturally, that we seem to be…