HISTORY MATTERS Spirituality for Busy People The monk-pope Gregory the Great assured Christians that a life of contemplation and a life of active service go hand in hand. Chris Armstrong
For those who think administrators are no more than "empty suits," with nothing to teach us spiritually, the early medieval Pope Gregory I ("the Great") is the great counter-example. Gregory (ca. 540-604) was a contemplative mystic at heart who struggled all of his days with the conflict between busyness and intimacy with Christ. ...
Though many medieval people strove to earn God's forgiveness by good works, others—even those following the most rigorous religious lifestyle, monasticism—knew salvation is entirely by grace. One Carthusian monk wrote that the "inner goal, to forsake the world and follow Christ, cannot be had by one's own natural powers but is by the free gift of God."
The Holy Land For several centuries (long before the Crusades) Palestine was a Christian country, and this forever changed the history of the land. These Palestinian Christians carried on the legacy of the early church, preserved the biblical sites, and survived the Islamic conquest. Take this quiz to find out how much you already know, or can guess, about this chapter in Christian history.
December 2, 1697: St Paul's Cathedral in London, designed by Christopher Wren, is dedicated. It replaced a medieval cathedral at the site that had burned in the Great Fire of 1666.
December 2, 1859: Militant messianic abolitionist John Brown is hanged at Charles Town, (West) Virginia, for his attack on Harper's Ferry. He was convinced that only violent action could end the horrors of slavery (see issue 33: Christianity and the Civil War).
December 2, 1980: Three American nuns and a lay churchwoman are killed by death squads in El Salvador. Some 70,000 Salvadorans are estimated to have died because of terrorists or civil war during the 1980s, including many Catholic clergy.
"Act in such a way that your humility may not be weakness, nor your authority be severity. Justice must be accompanied by humility, that humility may render justice lovable."
