Fratelli Tutti: opening the borders
Don’t blame children for food poverty (COVID-19 blog no. 40)
COVID at St Cuthbert’s (COVID-19 blog no. 39)
Pope Francis, peoples, and culture: Preparing for a future post-COVID with Fratelli Tutti (COVID-19 blog no. 38)
An integral part of what it is to be a people is to be a community who are organised and working for the common good, and to be rooted in their own cultural history. It is this that the Theology of People is always moving towards: the practical means for the people and the poorest amongst them to find their liberation and salvation.
Remote learning and the Eucharistic potential of online education (COVID-19 blog no. 37)
Why doesn’t Pope Francis wear a mask? (COVID-19 blog no. 36)
L'Arche and COVID-19 (COVID-19 blog no. 35)
Empowerment in a time of pandemic: reflections on Rahner's theology of sickness (COVID-19 blog no. 34)
Rahner argues that times of confrontation with sickness and death should be for individual Christians (and so, I would add, for Christian society also) among the most important phases of our lives; an opportunity to anticipate our death, to rehearse surrendering to the grace of the invisible God, and to live life with a renewed hope and energy.
My career may not survive this tempest (COVID-19 blog no. 33)
Mental health, spiritual wellbeing, and COVID-19 (COVID-19 blog no. 32)
There are many analogies for describing how it feels to emerge from a national lockdown: tentative baby steps, gasping for air, relief after a bad dream, waking up one day to find we live in a completely different world.
This range of feelings and emotions reflects the variety of human experience during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, including the differing effects on mental health.
The St Vincent de Paul Society: Nourishing faith and friendship during COVID-19 (COVID-19 blog no. 31)
As COVID-19 struck, Tower House in Brighton, run by the St Vincent de Paul Society, was forced to temporarily close. Volunteer Luke Fernandes reveals that this potentially catastrophic turn of events has inspired alternative ways to support older and isolated people and, he adds, lockdown has provided an opportunity to nourish our faith.
Welcoming the stranger within at a time of Brexit and COVID-19 (COVID-19 blog no. 30)
Father Hudson's Care How: COVID-19 has impacted our work and the various groups whom it accompanies (COVID-19 blog no. 29)
A familial response to Laudato Si' in the time of COVID (COVID-19 blog no. 28)
During lockdown, families and individuals were stripped of the relevance of anything apart from the state of their home life, and inner attitudes. Every certainty became uncertain, and placed in lockdown, we had no choice but to sit with our being rather than our doing, and how uncomfortable that made us feel.
Catholic Social Teaching and COVID-19: the economy (COVID-19 blog no. 27)
The basic question is simple: how well did the choices made promote the common good? The answers, however, are complicated and contested, since the common good is far from self-evident. Catholic Social Teaching can help, as it provides five sound, relevant, and quite practical principles of economic justice.
Mary's Meals during the COVID-19 pandemic (COVID-19 blog no. 26)
The suffering, uncertainty and fear caused by COVID-19 around the world seems to have helped many of us understand more deeply the need for God, and created a new heartfelt desire for us to speak with Him on a regular basis. And we have recently seen this manifest itself in many powerful ways within this diverse and global Mary’s Meals family.
COVID-19 and the Society of Catholic Artists (COVID-19 blog no. 25)
COVID, community, and food banks (COVID-19 blog no. 24)
Our conviction is that the experiences of the past months have underscored the centrality of community to the work of food banks, and, indeed, to the wider voluntary sector. And as we anticipate the impending challenge of the economic outlook, rising unemployment, increasing concerns around mental health and wellbeing, we will need to draw on the rich resource of community to enact and advocate for long-term change.
What’s so funny about health and safety? (COVID-19 blog no. 23)
Dignity at work and the rights of the worker are at the heart of Catholic Social Teaching, which stands in total contradiction to the culture of profit-driven indifference to the lives of ordinary people in their places of work. Yet deaths from workplace accidents or diseases remain staggeringly high on a global scale, with the International Labor Organisation citing an average of more than 2.78m per year.