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Joseph's avatar

This was a wonderful interview. I teach (and was taught) at Benedictine College, with the luxury of having an abbey of Benedictine monks just up the hill, and I can see in them a lot of the things Dr. (Ms.? Mrs.?) Hitz talks about. On the one hand, there's the clear joy and conviction of their lives, and their very Benedictine stability—it's been a real blessing, especially as I've gone from undergrad to grad school to professional life and marriage, to know that they're still they're, still saying Masses and praying the Hours and just being monks. I credit them with shaping a lot of my outlook on life, even though I never felt the call to join. On the other hand, when you spend enough time around them, you realize that they're still people. They have different (often vastly different) ages, personalities, and temperaments, and those don't go away for having made vows; in fact, you eventually realize that they probably get on each others' nerves from time to time. But in the midst of busy school years, as students are trying to sort out their lives and faculty their classes, they remind us to slow down and pray and remember the purpose of our lives. I think Dr. Hitz's book would inspire even more reflection on these ideas, so I'll probably read it.

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Irene's avatar

This article has many "gems" of spiritual value that I had to write down. This one in particular: "And the more difficult and important something is, the more time it takes to let it unfold. [These are] the defects of our intellectual culture, which of course are getting worse in an age when reading big, long books, which takes a lot of patience and time and struggle, is becoming less common than looking around for bits of information to put together into a coherent whole as quickly as possible.

There's a shallowness in our intellectual culture and a desire for quick results, which makes the situation for religious questions harder".

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