When the appointment of new Detroit auxiliary Bishop Flores was announced, our comments box and emailbox was flooded with good wishes and high praise from people who knew him. It continues – this from a correspondent:<\/p>\n
\n\nI was in the seminary for a few years, and the last year I was there I had the privilege of Msgr. Flores serving as both vice-rector and my formation director. He was a wise and holy director and the most gifted homilist I have ever heard. <\/p>\n
But here’s what you’ll find most interesting. That year Msgr. Flores began teaching a course he titled "Grace and Nature in Modern Catholic Literature". It was the most fascinating – maybe even transformative – class that I took during my formation. We read seven works: Benson’s Lord of the World<\/em>; Chesterton<\/span>‘s Ballad of the White Horse<\/em>; Tolkien’s Return of the King<\/em>; Greene’s The Power and the Glory<\/em>; O’Connor’s Wiseblood<\/em>; Percy’s The Moviegoer<\/em>; and Hansen’s Atticus<\/em>. Msgr. Flores not only discussed the books, but brought in supplemental reading from his vast theological knowledge: Aquinas, Augustine, and Newman, but also Kierkegaard and even Neitzsche. How did the concerns of these writers echo or explicate the concerns of theologians and philosophers throughout history? Clearly his two favorites were Greene and O’Connor. It was after completing the class that having sparked my interest in O’Connor I browsed around the web and happened upon your site and blog.<\/span> <\/p>\n
He had a few goals in teaching the course. First was the observation that grace is real, but it generally appears within rather than above the human drama. The novelist has the gift of being able to see and speak about the world as it is – a world offered and transformed by grace (certainly an observation O’Connor made, though maybe others before her as well). Second was the simple point that theology need not only take place in the academic stratosphere, but should touch every aspact of life. Finally, he noted that preaching is always telling a story – ultimately the story of God become man for the sake of our redemption. As he was teaching men preparing for ministry, he thought it beneficial for his students to see how these great artists offered a compelling, imaginative vision of grace working through nature.<\/span> <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/blockquote>\n
Marvelous!<\/p>\n
And even better…inspiring. <\/p>\n
Why do I always get the most inspired when I have to go off and do other things????<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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The Catholicism comes from her side. Amy grew up in a number of places - Indiana - Washington, DC - Lubbock Texas - Arlington, Virginia - DeKalb, Illinois - Lawrence, Kansas - and Knoxville, Tennessee, where the family settled in 1973. She attended Knoxville Catholic High School, then the University of Tennessee where she majored in history. She received an MA in Church History from Vanderbilt University, where she wrote a thesis on the changing role of women in 19th century American Protestantism, and the ways Scripture was used to justify those changes. She worked as as a teacher in Catholic high schools and a Parish Director of Religious Education and started writing for the diocesan press - the Florida Catholic - in 1988. Amy has written columns for Our Sunday Visitor and Catholic News Service at times over the past twenty years. Her articles have been published in venues ranging from Our Sunday Visitor to the New York Times to Commonweal. She has written 17 books. 18, if you included the as yet tragically unpublished novel. Amy has five children, ranging in age from 26 to 4 and was married to Michael Dubruiel, who died unexpectedly in February 2009. She lives in Birmingham, Alabama.","url":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/author\/awelborn"}]}},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/180"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4311"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4311\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4311"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4311"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.beliefnet.com\/columnists\/viamedia\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4311"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}