As of 2023 Area Catholic Communities are preparing for their pastoral visits with Bishop Neary. This will bean opportunity for each ACCs to tell their story - stories embodied with hope and challenges. Stories that are transforming of how to encounter others, navigate change and to be a people of hope. Upon hearing the vision and hopes of these pastoral visits, Deacon Jim Schulzetenberg was caught on video responding. Listen here:
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SJU Campus Ministry Fills FYRE Retreat
by Phoebe Carstens, SJUfaith Graduate Student Intern
On the weekend of September 29 – October 1, 2023, 70 CSB and SJU students, 13 student leaders, and 3 Campus Ministry staff members travelled to Alexandria, MN for a weekend full of faith-sharing, rest, and building community. SJUfaith’s annual First Year Retreat Experience (FYRE) brought together first year students across different academic majors, cultures, and even faith traditions for some time dedicated to introducing students to Benedictine values and forming connections with one another. The three-day retreat included talks by student leaders, small group reflection time, guided prayer, dance parties, nature walks, and team building activities.
One of the primary goals of FYRE is to provide the space for first year students to get to know students who are outside of their regular spheres: faces they might see across the altar at the 9PM student mass but have never met, campus leaders they see facilitating clubs and student events but have never had a conversation with. FYRE is the place to put names to faces and stories to names. This was exemplified in the praise and worship time Saturday evening. After a day full of talks and small-group sharing about community living, listening, and moderation, interspersed with lectio divina and lively skits, we took a pause to pray and sing together. For the final song, everyone in the chapel arranged themselves in one big circle, arms around shoulders so that all were included. As each person sang about being their sibling’s keeper, it was clear that these were not mere words — this had really become a community.
CSB Campus Ministry Paints the Word
with Karen Handeland On October 3, 2003, approximately 35 students and a few sisters from St. Benedict’s Monastery gathered for Painting the Word this October as a Lifeline Event with Campus Ministry at the College of Saint Benedict. The retreat was sponsored in part by Bridge Builders for a Thriving Mission. Artist Karen Handeland walked participants through the creative process. They were delighted to dive into prayer and painting based on the parable of the Sower and the Seed. It was an encouraging and inspiring evening! Painting the Word experiences like these use Seeing the Word pamphlets from Liturgical Press and involves both Lectio Divina and Visio Divina.
What’s Your Big Idea for Community?
The Bridge-Builders for a Thriving Mission Initiative provides up to $2,000 for approved big ideas that support thriving communities.
In honor of Black History Month, here are some resources that amplify Black voices:
Books
1. Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter, Traci C. West
Description: “Bringing to the fore the difficult realities of racism and the sexual violation of women, Traci West argues for a liberative method of Christian social ethics in which
the discussion begins not with generic philosophical concepts but in the concrete realities
of the lives of the socially and economically marginalized. By presenting conscience-jarring stories of individual women’s experience and endurance of prejudice, violation, and subjugation, she demonstrates how racism can impact key ideas in Christian ethics, influence government policy on welfare, infect public practice, and invade worship. Her unique method of combining theory and practice allows these stories to critically engage the ideas of Reinhold Niebuhr as well as feminist and womanist ethicists.”
Key Ideas: Personal accounts, intersections of public policy, worship, and discrimination, ethical approach to topics of racism with Christian foundation, feminist and womanist values.
About the Author: “Traci C. West is Associate Professor of Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School, Madison, New Jersey. She is the author of Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, violence, and Resistance Ethics.”
2. Racial Justice and the Catholic Church, Bryan Massingale
Description: “Confronting racism is difficult but essential work if we are to heal the brokenness in our society and our church. In the author's words, ‘We all are wounded by the sin of racism... How can we struggle together against an evil that harms us all?’ Racial Justice and the Catholic Church examines the presence of racism in America from its early history through the Civil Rights Movement and the election of Barack Obama. It also explores how Catholic social teaching has been used--and not used--to promote reconciliation and justice.
Massingale writes from an abiding conviction that the Catholic faith and the black experience make essential contributions in the continuing struggle against racial injustice that is the work of all people. His book is essential reading for all those concerned with justice and healing in our world.”
Key Ideas: Racial justice, intersection of Catholicism and racism, relevance of racism to everyone, Catholic Social Teaching
About the Author: “Bryan N. Massingale is professor of theological and social ethics at Fordham University in New York. He previously taught at Marquette University, where in 2009 he received that institution’s highest award for excellence in teaching. A consultant to many faith-based justice organizations, he served as president of the Catholic Theological Society of America and convener of the Black Catholic Theological Symposium.”
Lecture:
“Racism and the Soul of America” special by Eddie Glaude Jr.
Description: In the months before the presidential election of 2016, Glaude describes how we are in “a crisis of imagination” which prevents us from putting ourselves in the shoes of others, an inability “to see ‘as yet’, to look beyond opacity of now, to see what’s possible.” More than creativity, imagination is an instrumental of moral good and involves and “empathetic projection.”
Key Ideas: racism, racial equity, social justice
About the Speaker: Eddie Glaude Jr. is the William S. Tod Professor of Religion and African American Studies at Princeton University and Chair of the Department of African American Studies. He is the author of the award-winning book In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America and co-editor with Cornel West of African American Religious Thought: An Anthology. His latest book is Democracy in Black: How Race Still Governs the Soul of America. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science from Morehouse College, a master’s degree in African American studies from Temple University, and a PhD in religion from Princeton University. His scholarly pursuits and public service have been informed by his years growing up in the coastal town of Moss Point, Mississippi.
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