Here is a very helpful Advent/Christmas Calendar that is very appropriate for grown ups…it includes very substantive information and background as well as links to more resources when you click on each day’s link. This comes to us from the Institute for Christian Formation. Advent/Christmas Calendar: Year of Grace 2013
I was privileged to spend a wonderful day with nearly 100 catechetical leaders from across the great State of Indiana at the Indiana Conference for Catechetical Leadership in Indianapolis. They invited me to be their keynote speaker and to do a couple of breakout sessions and I was thrilled to have the opportunity to spend the day looking at how we can set hearts on fire during this Year of Faith. My deepest thanks and congratulations […]
This coming Monday, November 12, I am going to be on the road and will not be able to teach my 6th graders 🙁 so I prepared a simple lesson plan for the substitute catechist to complete in my place. The focus continues to be on Moses and the Exodus/Passover event. Here’s what I sent to my DRE: Hi Arlene, For Monday (11/12), please have a sub do the following: Distribute Finding God student books (they […]
I enjoyed the last couple of days in Northern Wisconsin with 100 catechetical leaders looking at how we proclaim the story of salvation through a Catholic lens. We had a wonderful time together and I hopefully set the stage for my long-time friend and colleague, Carole Eipers, to take over and carry the gathering through tomorrow. The event was organized by the Wisconsin Directors of Religious Education Federation (WDREF). I had the pleasure of seeing […]
I was honored to write a new course for the University of Dayton Virtual Learning Community for Faith Formation (VLCFF). It is called Bible Basics and the required text for the course is my book, The Bible Blueprint: A Catholic’s Guide to Understanding and Embracing God’s Word. Thanks to Richard Drabick, the Assistant Director of the Institute for Pastoral Initiatives for inviting me to write the course and to Sr. Angela Ann Zukowski, MHSH, the Director […]
This coming Monday, my sixth-grade religious education class will move forward in our Old Testament exploration to encounter da man: Moses! The story of the Exodus/Passover event is the centerpiece of the Old Testament and Moses is the “standard of excellence” when it comes to OT characters! With that in mind, we are going to begin by showing a good chunk (50 minutes) of The Prince of Egypt, beginning with the scene where Moses encounters […]
Here’s the final installment of a summary of this past Monday’s session on Abraham and God’s plan for salvation. After completing the Bible activity on Abraham, we still had time to pray a decade of the Rosary in order to mark October as the Month of the Holy Rosary and most of the kids had brought one in as requested…I had extras for the few that didn’t. We dedicated our prayer to the people in […]
Here’s the third installment of a summary of this past Monday’s session on Abraham and God’s plan for salvation. About a half-hour into the session, after prayer and reviewing the previous session (and a ton of Q & A!), I then arranged the kids in pairs and assigned them a passage about Abraham that they were to read in their Bibles and report on (using this worksheet). As I suspected, they were loathe to move […]
Here’s the next installment of a summary of this past Monday’s session on Abraham and God’s plan for salvation. After we finished reviewing the stories from the previous week and answering gobs of questions, we then talked about how all of these stories describe how God created us to live with him but then human kind sinned and distanced ourselves from God. I said that, “Today, we’re going to see how God revealed a plan […]
Last week, we began an excellent conversation about the catechetical process and, in particular, the principles of divine pedagogy and the role of human experience (the shared praxis approach of Dr. Thomas Groome). Thanks to all for your rich insights and thoughts. Today, I’d like to continue that conversation by offering my critique of Dr. Caroline Farey’s article, “The Truth Will Set You Free”), Faith Magazine, Vol. 41, No. 5, Sept-Oct 2009) which I referred […]
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