In our book, Living the Mass: How One Hour a Week Can Change Your Life, Fr. Dom Grassi and I include a feature in every chapter called The Other Six Days of the Week in which we strive to show the connection between what we do at Mass and how we live the Mass the other six days of the week. Now, there is a website titled www.other6.com that encourages people to “find God” not […]
I was thinking this morning about how to explain the Catholic faith to someone in such a way that it can be grasped in simple terms (no easy task for a faith that is actually quite complex). It occurred to me that the Church already provides a simple structure for talking about our faith through the “4 pillars” of The Catechism of the Catholic Church: Creed, Sacraments, Morality, and Prayer. Even so, I was looking […]
Here’s my plan for this evening’s session: We will complete the church history Powerpoint that we began last week (we have 2 more time periods to go through). Throughout the Powerpoint, the young people have been filling in a note-taking sheet with pertinent names and dates. When we are finished, we’ll review the info on the note-taking sheets and then I’ll arrange them into 5 small groups (2 or 3 in each group) and assign […]
The Powerpoint presentation I did last night on Church history went very nicely. First, I would say that the kids were intrigued at the notion of a “high-tech” religion class. They got a very clear message that “something was up” for that night’s class. It’s always good to communicate the message, as they arrrive, that “there is most definitely a plan for this session and I need YOU to fit into that plan ASAP!” Second, providing […]
I’m going to try something different tonight. I’ve put together a Powerpoint presentation on Church history. It’s the first time I’ll be using this technology in this particular setting (a weekly religious education session). If you don’t know what a Powerpoint presentation is, here is a brief explanation: PowerPoint is a graphics program by Microsoft that allows you to produce a professional-looking presentation made up of a series of “slides.” The slide presentation, which can […]
I had a great evening in Naperville, IL, yesterday, with 150 catechists at St. Raphael Parish! We talked about the tools that catechists need to be more effective and the DRE, Jane Ehrlich, had copies of my book, The Catechist’s Toolbox available for sale. She also went out of her way to prepare a focal point that featured a couple of tookboxes, including a giant multi-drawer toolbox! To top it all off, she also placed tools on […]
Last night was a night of ups and downs. We began by reviewing how to pray the Rosary and then we moved into our reflective prayer and prayed the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, connecting this to our last class when we learned about the Cross of Jesus. A couple of the young people were pretty hyper and couldn’t sit still. I even had to pause at one point to ask one of them to […]
A colleague of mine attended a workshop on adolescent ministry given by Dr. Robert McCarty, executive director of the National Federation for Catholic Youth Ministry. She shared her notes with me and I was struck by one thing that Dr. McCarty emphasized over and over again: he said that we must teach our young people to live deep, not fast. I absolutly love that notion and I plan to share it with my young people […]
For my session tonight, I’m bringing in the one and only trophy I ever won in my life: a 2nd place trophy for floor hockey, earned when I was in junior high. My brother John and I ventured over to the Boys’ Club in our neighborhood and joined a team there and went all the way to the finals, coming up just a little bit short. The little 10-inch trophy stands proudly in my basement […]
Tomorrow I’m off to Milwaukee for their Lifelong Faith Formation Conference…I’m presenting a session on the Old Testament. I did a quick look ahead to this coming Monday’s session and I find that we will be focusing on the Cross of Jesus and our understanding of suffering. Our textbook points out the fact that vivid portrayals of the Crucifixion did not become commonplace until Middle Ages when suffering was so prevalent in the lives of […]
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