Privatus roman
It concentrates on the creation, manipulation and experience of public space. Year B The Feast of the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary.The Politics of Public Space in Republican Rome deals with a concept (public) that was at the core of the Romans’ understanding of their political world (the res publica).In this capacity I serve my bishop by serving my fellow deacons and their wives as well as having charge of forming new deacons. In addition to serving in parish ministry, I serve as Director of the Office of the Diaconate for the Diocese of Salt Lake City. Along with 5 classmates, I am privileged to be a member of the first D.Min class at the seminary. Most recently, I earned a Doctorate in Ministry (D.Min) at Mount Angel Seminary, Oregon. I am a graduate of the University of Utah and the Institute in Pastoral Ministry at St. After serving as a deacon for 11 years at The Cathedral of the Madeleine in Salt Lake City (8 years before I was ordained for a total of 19 years), I am now assigned to St Olaf Parish in Bountiful, Utah.
I married in 1993, became a Dad for the first time in 1994 and most recently in 2011 (quite a spread). I am also a Roman Catholic deacon of the Diocese of Salt Lake City. I am husband and Dad to six lovely children. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.ĭecember, 1843 My prayer is that we may allow ourselves to be so haunted, not by taking a sentimental stroll down memory lane, which is what the culturally-filtered versions of Dickens' novella usually bids us do, but by pondering the true meaning and significance of the Incarnation of the Son of God, which has been described as an event "so earth-shattering that it enacts something akin to the psychoanalytic concept of trauma" ( Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of Christian Theology 7). Here's what Dickens wrote as the preface to A Christmas Carol: I have endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me.
This is the true message of Christmas, as Dickens' A Christmas Carol, for those who deign to actually read it rather than have it culturally filtered and sentimentalized for them, can see. Hence, we need to be ransomed by the only One who can pay the price. How we (fail to) observe Advent clearly shows that Israel is captive today as of old, perhaps more enslaved now than then, due to our failure to recognize the bonds that constrain us, the realization of which would surely cause us now, as it did Israel then, to turn to God as the one, true source of hope. It bears noting that "Privatus Dei Filio," which we traditionally translate as "until the Son of God appear," is more accurately translated, "deprived of God's Son." Now, there's an Advent point-of-reflection. I firmly believe that observing Advent in a quiet, prayerful manner, engaging in acts of charity, born of faith, through which we make manifest the hope we have for the day of our Lord Jesus Christ, along with penitential acts, like fasting, are effective ways to counter the grotesque sentimentalization of faith, which is the reduction that follows from allowing ourselves to be spiritually co-opted. "I'd like to buy the world a Coke" and all that.
This is what often counts for us as tradition because it's what we deem worth handing on. Increasingly how we commemorate "Christmas season," all of which happens and comes to an end on Christmas day (i.e., the true beginning of Christmas), is by looking back longingly on ad campaigns of old. It is a way to resist Western hedonistic consumerism, which, due to skillfully manipulative marketing over decades, has largely succeeded in reducing Christmas to an orgy of buying and self-indulgence.
It seems to me that observing Advent in our present cultural context, above all other aspects of truly Christian praxis, is a way for followers of Jesus Christ to resist so many things that are, to state it bluntly, contrary to authentic Christianity.