Weekly Reflections on Justice are written by the Columban Center for Advocacy and Outreach staff, volunteers, interns, and visiting Columban Missionaries. We hope these reflections help to guide you on your own spiritual journey working toward justice, peace, and the integrity of creation.
As we continue this Lenten journey, we mindful that we walk together with migrants and refugees, and with the poor and vulnerable, sharing the journey and our common home with them, and called to welcome the stranger and to care for creation. That is the Gospel invitation to all of us in this season of Lent.
The New Year is a time for resolutions - another chance to help bring about a better world. This week, Fr. Pat Cunningham, a Columban missionaries serving in Korea, invites you to consider how you can use your time and talents to be a peacemaker. Fr. Pat shares his experience on Jeju Island, protesting the construction of a naval base. Then, we suggest 4 ways you can help bring peace to our world.
The New Year is a time for resolutions - another chance to help bring about a better world. This week, consider how you can use your time and talents to help create a fairer economy in 2018.
The New Year is a time for resolutions - another chance to help bring about a better world. This week, consider how you can use your time and talents to help care for the planet in 2018.
In the story of the Good Samaritan, Jesus shows us what it means to be a good neighbor. In our own day, his parable is especially important since the Samaritan and the Jewish man were supposedly enemies, their peoples divided by artificial walls of hostility and fear. We can break down these artificial walls by reaching out, as the Good Samaritan did, to help our migrant sisters and brothers.
We begin this 2018 New Year with a word of thank you to each of our supporters! We are inspired by the many ways that you bring justice and compassion, healing and reconciliation, to a broken world.
Why are those of us who are fortunate enough not to have worry about violence, not prioritizing "Peace on Earth" more? Why do we allow it to be only a nice word that we say, and not an inspiring goal that we try to make a reality? After all, these Advent days are here in order for us to prepare for Jesus’ coming --- so why don’t we spend it preparing a world that He'd want to see?
Immigrants and refugees, just like Joseph, Mary and Jesus, do not want to leave home and familiar surroundings. Television images of destruction in their homelands tell the reason of people's decision. World powers vie with each other putting their interests before the need of populations.
If there are poor people where we live who seek protection and assistance, let us draw close to them: it will be a favorable moment to encounter the God we seek. Let us welcome them as honored guests at our table; they can be teachers who help us live the faith more consistently.
This November 2017, is a time to give thanks, to celebrate, and most importantly, look to the utopian horizon that draws us to itself, as Pope Francis says in Evangelii Gaudium. In keeping our gaze on that horizon that is the horizon of justice, peace, love, unity, wholeness, and reconciliation, we remain guided by our founders to stay faithful to God’s will for all of Creation.
