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Showing posts from May, 2017

How to Make Friends in Just Three Days

By Ida Williams, Director of Marketing and Communications How do you make new friends in just three days?  1. Use the enticement of dogs. 2. Engage with the mystique of the Monks of New Skete.  3. Indulge with monastic hospitality. That is what happened this past weekend at New Skete’s The Art of Living with Your Dog Seminar.   Twenty-eight guests, dubbed the Storm Troopers, * left on Sunday afternoon sharing hugs, email addresses, and a few tears.  (Oh, wait.  The tears were mine.) The first thing we all had in common is dogs.  The guests love dogs, the brothers love dogs, the staff and volunteers love dogs.  What were we talking about?  Oh, yeah, DOGS.  Photos of dogs were shown on smartphones, and dog stories were shared.   There were dogs in the classroom, dogs being trained in the room next to the classroom, dogs lying next to our feet while we ate lunch under cover of a tent, and eight puppies in ...

Ascension: A Crowning Glory

A homily by Brother Marc Isaiah 2:1-5; Acts 1:1-12; Luke 24:36-53 When I try to feel what the followers of Jesus must have felt at the death of Jesus, I am thrown back onto my old memories of dispiriting situations. When my mother’s father was living with us after my grandmother died in December 1950, he never spoke to us about his service as a soldier fighting with the Austro-Hungarian armies. Now he was particularly isolated with those experiences, living in the United States, no longer in his own home, with his wife gone, away from buddies who spoke the same language and could understand how it was fighting in North Africa. He spent a lot of time sitting outdoors gazing over the large meadows and broad horizons where we lived. Of course we tried to understand and were sympathetic; we were especially intrigued to learn of the bullet wound in his shoulder, physical proof he had really been there. He let me have his only souvenir from World War I: his old enamel-coated water...