Homily Studio

Join Jenny Dawson and John O’Connor in conversation, reflecting on the scriptures for the Feast of the Ascension of the Lord..

Read the scriptures for this feast at this link.

John mentioned the Casey Cole OFM video clip which you can see at this link.

Join John Kleinsman, Jelvine Cortez and Colin MacLeod in conversation reflecting on the scriptures for the Fifth Sunday in Eastertide.

Read the scriptures for this Sunday at this link.

John’s concluding prayer is based on this prayer for Pope Leo.

Join Laurel Lanner & Rory Paterson in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for the Fourth Sunday in Eastertide.

Read the scriptures for this Sunday at this link.

Join Kate Kearins and Kath Petrie in conversation with Merv Duffy reflecting on the scriptures for the Third Sunday in Eastertide.

Read the scriptures for this Sunday at this link.

Mention is made in the conversation of:

Join Rory Paterson & John Kleinsman in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for Easter Sunday – 20 April 2025.

John K quotes from Middlemarch by George Eliot (pen name) of Mary Ann Evans

https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/on-visiting-forgotten-tombs/

“What Eliot understood was that an ethics of social participation is not only dependent on abstract ideals, imagination and vision – Shelley’s argument in A Defence of Poetry – it is both sited and situated, enacted in the small and intimate moments of everyday life in which an idea or vision is turned to practical politics. 

Of course, the only examples that we can know are those that have been documented by historians, passed down in folklore or across generations of family history … but many of us know that the actions of a good teacher, a kind aunt or helpful stranger changed or enhanced the course of a life. A good life, in this context, is not immortalised in either great poetry or grand monuments to heroic people but is defined by how we go about our daily lives, our unremarkable habits and routines of life. The moment of death marks the beginning of being forgotten. People may be unremembered and their tombs unvisited, Eliot suggests, but their acts are all the more significant because they have participated in her optimistic vision of ‘the growing good of the world’ through small gestures and quotidian practices.

It is this sense of lives that are lived and forgotten that is perhaps felt most acutely in an abandoned graveyard; the dash that separates two dates on a tombstone symbolises, as the poet Sylvia Plath observed, the whole span of a life. Visiting unvisited tombs presses political questions about an everyday ethics of participation, about what we are each doing in the dash – the dent marked in stone– the time between the date we already know and the unknown date that will balance the asymmetry.” 

Join Jelvine Cortez, John Kinder & Catherine Gibbs in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for Palm Sunday.

Read the Palm Sunday scriptures at this link.

Jelvine mentions Pope Benedict’s Encyclical letter Saved by Hope which you can find at this link.

Join Rutger Keijser, Kath Petrie and Triona Doocey in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for the Fifth Sunday in Lent.

Read these scriptures at this link.

And if you would like to take up the invitation of today’s contributes and offer one written personal experience of God to the next volume of Fifth Gospel Living…..more info at this link.

Join Kate Kearins and Susan Apathy in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for the Fourth Sunday in Lent.

Read the scriptures for the Fourth Sunday in Lent at this link.

John mentions Benedict XVI reflection on the two sons. Read more at this link.

Join Jelvine Cortez, Laurel Lanner and Rory Paterson in conversation with John O’Connor reflecting on the scriptures for the Second Sunday in Lent.

Read the scriptures for this Sunday at this link.

Laurel referred to Cardinal Sarah’s book The Power of Silence: Against the Dictatorship of Noise. More info at this link.

Read the scriptures for Ash Wednesday at this link.