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Art Winter, who died at age 89 on May 11, was on the editorial staff of National Catholic Reporter from 1966 to 1974, and was its managing editor, coming on [...]

Lenten ashes, candles, centering prayer, monastic retreats--these aren't just for Catholics any more. An interest in the whole array of Catholic spiritual resources and practices is showing up in Protestant, [...]

The cause of all human trouble is our inability to sit quietly in our rooms alone, wrote the essayist Montaigne. A small number around the country who have chosen to [...]

Science, once seen as the enemy of spirituality, is now making common cause with it in one area, in a search for meaning and purpose. It seems absurb to think [...]

California, the state with the nation's toughest environmental laws and regulations, faces an attack on all fronts from the Bush administration, according to the state's conservation activists and leaders. From [...]

Good heavens, this is gorgeous music,' exclaimed a reviewer after a concert featuring a symphony and a flute concerto from contemporary composer Einojuhani Rautavaara. Finnish composer Rautavaara and a number [...]

A walk through the local supermarket means navigating past the spectacle of the produce department. The Garden of Eden probably didn't look as good. There all the radishes are lined [...]

A mythic folktale from Madagascar explains how both death and children came into the world. In the story, the first woman and the first man were asked by the Creators [...]

One of the first civilians to enter the German death camp at Belsen a few weeks after its liberation in April 1945 was a sensitive British artist named Mervyn Peake. […]

"Copenhagen" was reported to be the No. 1 query on the world's leading Internet search engines during the first week of the U.N. conference held in Denmark's capital city from [...]

Fr. Richard Rohr is a Franciscan priest of the New Mexico Province. He founded the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati in 1971, and the Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque in 1986, where he presently serves as its founding director. He is a regular contributor to Sojourners and Tikkun magazines, and the author of books such as Everything Belongs: The Gift of Contemplative Prayer, Things Hidden: Scripture as Spirituality and Adam's Return: The Five Promises of Male Initiation, He is a sought-after speaker and retreat giver. Themes he addresses include the integration of action and contemplation, community-building, peace and justice issues, male spirituality, eco-spirituality, and the cosmic Christ. In this section, NCR's Rich Heffern talks with Rohr about this last subject, how Jesus fits into the new universe story. Heffern: At Christmas Eve Mass in my parish every year I hear the proclamation of the genealogy of Jesus, Christianity's central figure, stating that all of creation is only a few thousand years old. I wince when I hear it because of the update we got that is the cosmological story science has been telling us for the last hundred years. It's Christmas though, and I want Jesus, together with the update. How does Jesus fit into that new story from science that tells us the universe is 14 or 15 billion years old and our Earth at least 5 billion years old? Rohr: Much of Christianity has made Jesus Christ into a denominational savior figure while others have looked upon his saving grace as limited to a few who meet strict qualifications. But what about creation as a whole? How far back and forward in time does the Christ figure extend, and who exactly is Christ? Christian scripture, in fact, gives us Jesus' place in that history counted in billions of years if you look for it--in the prologue to John's Gospel, for example, or in the Pauline hymns of the letters to the Colossians and Ephesians, or in the opening of John's first letter. All speak of Christ existing from all eternity We just don't see those references. They've never been unpacked for the majority of Christians, and we don't have theology to know how to see it. Christ is not Jesus' last name. The book of Acts says God has raised up Jesus and anointed him as the Christ. Our new awareness of the cosmos' vastness and unimaginably ancient history is forcing us to rehear those scripture texts. It's exciting good news. The Jesus we now have, the Jesus we participate in, are graced by, are redeemed by, is the risen Christ, the eternal Christ. The word "Christ" means "the anoint ed one," and that anointment by God includes us and all of creation. The Gospels are about the historical Jesus. Paul, however, whose writings make up a third of the New Testament, never talks about that Jesus. He is talking about the Christ. Jesus is the microcosm; Christ is the macrocosm. There is a movement between the two that we ourselves have to imitate in our life and walk, the resurrection journey Western Christianity has plucked Jesus completely out of the Trinity. The historical Jesus has become the new monotheistic God--God the Father for all practical purposes. Once you no longer have a Trinitarian view, you no longer have a dynamic view of God. When you emphasize Jesus apart from the Father and Holy Spirit, then creation is just an afterthought or a backdrop to a limited salvation drama, "an evacuation plan to the next world," in Brian McLaren's phrase. We become preoccupied with those last three hours of Jesus' life, when we get the blood sacrifice that gets us humans saved, our ticket to heaven punched. Protestants are somewhat worse than we are on this, to be honest. The real trump card of Christianity is not just that we believe in God. The mystery we are about is much more than that: It's that the material and the spiritual coexist. It's the mystery of the Incarnation. Once we restore the idea that the Incarnation means God truly loves creation then we restore the sacred dimension to nature. We bring the plants and animals and all of nature in with us. They are windows into the endless creativity, fruitfulness and joy of God. We assert that we believe in the sweep of history, humanity and all of creation that Christ includes. Incarnation is already redemption. Bethlehem was more important than Calvary. It is good to be human. The Earth is good. God has revealed that God has always been here. It's a Franciscan approach, and indeed was the theology of key Franciscan figures like Duns Scotus and St. Bonaventure. It will increasingly become mainline spirituality as we become more comfortable with an expanded view of the mystery of Incarnation in the cosmos. If we Christians had taken this mystery seriously, we would never have raped the planet like we do, never have developed such an inadequate theology about sexuality. What does the Resurrection mean in this more cosmic view? Resurrection fits into this shift in point of view beautifully and necessarily. Jesus died, Christ arose. That's precisely what the transformation is -Christ's consciousness untied from a specific place and time. When I was studying systematic theology back in the 1960s, my professor put it this way: If a video camera had been present at the moment of Jesus' resurrection, we would not have seen a body leaving the tomb but probably a vast flash of light as that limited human body that contained Jesus became identified with something beyond space and time. It's a way to understand the Resurrection. That's why you and I have access to Christ. It's why Jesus can say he is with us until the end of time and available everywhere. You can see the New Testament's Resurrection stories saying precisely that. The angel asked, "Why are you looking up to the heavens for him?" The opening of John's letter tells us that, in Jesus Christ, what existed from the beginning is now reachable, touchable, knowable, seeable and lovable. We humans can't fall in love with a concept, with something that is just pure energy. The gift of the Incarnation is that we have someone now we can see, touch and love. Also, until we saw Jesus we couldn't imagine what God was like. We come at God inductively. Start with Jesus then we know what the heart of God is like. [ILLUSTRATION OMITTED] Then we can move backwards to the cosmic Christ who exists from the beginning. Then we live in a coherent universe where there is no division between the natural and the supernatural. That's the unique message of Christianity, that there is nothing God is not available to. "From the beginning" means from the time of the Big Bang 14 billion to 15 billion years ago. Duns Scotus said the first idea in the mind of God was the Christ, and what the Christ means is the confluence of divinity and physicality, spirit and matter, when the material and spiritual worlds coexist, we have Christ. Medieval icons always depicted Jesus Christ holding up two fingers, proclaiming in fact, "I am fully human and fully the son of God at the same time, and I hold these together. My divinity does not cancel out my humanity." The Vatican last month hosted a meeting of the world's scientists to discuss the possibility of life elsewhere in the universe and the implications of that for Christian theology. When you think of how our idea of Jesus would fit into a universe possibly teeming with life, an image comes of Jesus trudging across the light years lugging a cross. If we don't have a more developed theology of the cosmic nature of Christ, then if the discovery of extraterrestrial life happens--and there's a good chance it will--we will be in major trouble. If Jesus becomes more the Christ, does he also become more remote from us? Just the opposite: Everything that happens to Jesus must happen in our individual souls as well. The Incarnation means the divine indwelling is not out there, over there. It happens within us. This movement from Jesus to the Christ means that the same anointing that was given to Jesus is given to all of us. That's why he didn't say, "Worship me." He said, "Follow me." We've projected more onto Jesus than he ever asked for. Also Jesus didn't move from Jesus to the Christ without death and resurrection. And we ourselves don't move from our independent, historical body to the Christ consciousness without dying to our false self. We, like Jesus himself, have to let go of who we think we are, and who we think we need to be. We have to become the naked self before the naked God. That will always feel like dying. We need to know, experientially, that naked, undecorated self is already and forever the beloved child of God. Jesus' life is also our life. Carl Jung called Christ the archetype of the soul. Jesus came forth from God, was initiated in baptism, went through a normal growing up then developed a ministry, was rejected, suffered, died and ascended--returned back to where he came from. We all go through that journey of transformation that returns us to where we began but with a freer consciousness. We've turned Christianity into that evacuation plan for the next world. The term "cosmic Christ" reminds us that everything and everyone belongs. We're all unworthy but the mystery of the Incarnation means the divine indwelling is in all of us. We're indeed the body of Christ. God's hope for humanity is that one day we will all recognize their the divine dwelling place is all of creation. Christ comes again whenever we see that matter and spirit coexist. This truly deserves to be called good news. [Rich Heffern is an NCR staff writer. His email address is rheffern@ncronline.org.] Reviewed by RICH HEFFERN

Amid a storm of foreclosures and other housing woes, a cross-country bus named the 'Recovery Express' left Antioch, Calif., on March 6 for Washington, arriving four days later. On board [...]

Writer, retreat leader and spiritual director Sr. Joyce Rupp lives in a rich world of images--fresh bread, cups, goodbyes, doors, invitations, dancing, sorrow and sauntering. 'The wonder of images, symbols, [...]

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Crows gather in cottonwoods by the Rio Grande River, down from the nearby Sandia Mountains that tower a mile above the city of Albuquerque. A community-operated irrigation canal, or acequia, [...]

On June 19, the day President George Bush and presidential hopeful Barak Obama, in separate trips, toured flood-ravaged areas in Iowa and Illinois, the U.S. Climate Change Science Program released [...]

A baffling and profound mystery lies at the heart of one of the fastest-growing research areas in science today. The mystery is human consciousness and how--or even whether--it arises out [...]

Every five years the nation's farm and food policies are tweaked by the U.S. Farm Bill, one of the largest compendiums of legislation with direct implications for social justice, food [...]

My brother Bob and his wife Sue live on a small farm nestled in a valley or 'hollow' below a steep forested hillside in the Missouri Ozarks. In February, a [...]

We are severely damaged by the absence of 'meaningful mysticism' today, says author Fr. Diarmuid O'Murchu. However, 'explorations in sexuality and science are key areas now that are leading us [...]

We've all seen, or lived in, those multi-winged, rambling buildings with expanses of grass and woodland surrounding them, owned by and housing Catholic religious orders. Built where once communities flourished […]

By RICH HEFFERN Part 3 Food: Local ways When I lived on a farm in the Missouri Ozark Mountains, one of my favorite places to visit was up by the [...]

It seems like the lines of snow geese go on forever, as they wing north over the gentle hills and stubbled fields of Brown County, Kan. Their staggered, V-shaped groups [...]

Between Ronald Reagan's characterization of the Soviet Union as the Evil Empire and Sept. 11, 2001, the word evil was rarely heard in public discourse. It cropped up only on [...]

Many say we need a patriotism consistent with the `light of Christ' It looks like a kind of second flowering of spring in early autumn, the way the flags have [...]

Schools of social work and nursing prepare students to handle spiritual crises The sacred and the secular were once entirely separate dimensions. A Catholic education traditionally prepared a student to [...]

Program works in partnership with 10 dioceses Most Catholics report being so busy there is no time to pray, let alone study their faith, that career and family obligations swallow [...]

If you take the rich resources of religion and spirituality out of the educational enterprise, something is missing. That's why Catholic campuses play key roles in the education of our [...]

Many have found comfort and wisdom in the primal Christian images In the past two weeks, both the deep meaning and the fragility of our daily life have been brought [...]

Muslims view U.S. policies as new Crusade, experts say In the agonizing spasms of a few morning hours on Sept. 11 our country changed, completely transformed from what it had [...]

Earth's crisis is fundamentally spiritual A woman started it. Then a soft-spoken Catholic priest deepened its scope. The ecology movement began in .earnest in 1962 with the publication of Rachel [...]

Delegates from 103 countries, gathered in Providence, R.I., for the General Chapter of the Dominican order, have elected their 87th master since the foundation of the order in 1215 by [...]

TV documentary shows that web of life is fraying What on earth are we doing to the Earth?' asks journalist Bill Moyers at the beginning of a two-hour program that [...]

Values, morality enter debate over conservation They look like light bulbs on steroids or Star Trek gizmos. In the current debate over the nation's energy future they have become icons, [...]

Mindless growth is the ideology of cancer A low morning sun flashed through breaks in the bare hardwoods as e drove the roller coaster road to he store. On a [...]

Her testimony figured into 23 capital cases on Oklahoma Prosecuting attorneys in Oklahoma City relied on Joyce Gilchrist's scientific testimony for 13 years to fortify their cases. Now she is [...]

`We believe that the human brain has been genetically wired to encourage religious beliefs.' --Andrew Newberg Those who deeply and regularly pray report that when praying they feel at one [...]

The Jesuit president of the University of San Francisco, Fr. Stephen Privett, responding to recent news reports of Vatican intervention at the university, said he had received no word from [...]

Once again California, first in freeways and orange groves, leads the nation -- this time in honoring the life of the country's foremost Hispanic civil rights leader with a state [...]

Women invent new `rules' for our time The more things change the more they stay the same, Early in the last millennium there took place in Europe what historian of [...]

Archbishop Patrick Flores of San Antonio said he will ask theology teachers in his archdiocese to sign papers affirming their commitments to teach authentic Catholic doctrine, as U.S. bishops will [...]

In January the seed catalogs arrive. Shortly after, here in the Midwest the red cardinals begin to sing, no matter how frigid the weather or how dark the mornings. My [...]

God is always with us, finding us in the fog Patricia Livingston leads workshops, retreats and seminars throughout the country. In 1990, Livingston was given the U.S. Catholic Award by […]

Suffering is built into the birth patterns of the entire cosmos Near the cabin that my wife and I keep in the Missouri Ozarks there is a grove of wild [...]

Vladimir Lenin was once quoted saying that if he had just 10 of St. Francis of Assisi in his Bolshevik retinue, he could have taken over and transformed the world. […]

Truthteller creates and destroys Saturday mornings when I was a kid, I never missed 'Andy's Gang' on the tube. Host Andy Devine appeared live every week with a supporting cast [...]

Recently my wife and I spent a weekend in our little house back in the woods in the Ozark mountains. Evening fell. There was no moon that night. In the [...]

Between shame and sensationalism lies `sustainable sex,' a way to communion with an individual and with `all of life' In the 1950s I went to high school seminary, where, like [...]

Expert says the work begins with men's grief and pain Dominican Br. Joseph Kilikevice is director of the Shem Center an interfaith retreat and spirituality center in Oak Park, Ill. [...]

Kathy Marchant is a dreamer. Her inner-city neighborhood had seen better days. She lives on the West Side, a mostly Hispanic area in Kansas City, Mo. Kathy's day job was [...]