TWO ANNOUNCEMENTS
I) January at the Knoll – with Champurrado (receta incluida)
Don't Stay outside! Warm up with a cup of Champurrado and join the rest of the Maryknoll Family in conversation
Tuesday, January 25, 7pm EST
Zoom: 868 7326 4251 / Password: 283478
Chocolate is native to Mexico and it was first cultivated by the Mayas and the Aztecs. Early Spanish colonists to Mexico adapted their ceremonial beverage known today as Champurrado.
Ingredients:
1 ½ cups water, 1 cinnamon stick, 1 whole clove, 1 pod star anise (Optional), 4 ¼ cups milk 2 tablets Mexican chocolate (such as Chocolate Ibarra®) ¾ cup pinole (coarse ground maize flour) 1 pinch crushed piloncillo (Mexican brown sugar cone), or more to taste
Directions:
Step 1 Bring water, cinnamon stick, clove, and star anise to a boil in a saucepan; remove from heat and allow spices to steep until water is fragrant, about 10 minutes. Strain.
Step 2 Heat milk, chocolate, and pinole in another saucepan over medium heat, whisking until chocolate is dissolved and liquid is thickened, about 10 minutes. Remove from heat and add piloncillo; let rest until sugar is dissolved, about 5 minutes more. Pour cinnamon water into chocolate mixture and stir to combine.
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2) ORBIS – This month’s newsletter
We begin a new year with fresh hopes and expectations, while still carrying the weight of much uncertainty and issues unresolved. This month marks the anniversary of the assault on the Capitol, a reference point for an ongoing threat to our democracy. Several recent books bear directly on this crisis and deserve renewed attention.
First among these is Faith and Reckoning after Trump (edited by Miguel A. De La Torre), with contributions, written in the immediate aftermath of January 6, 2021, that remain crucially relevant to the tests—both political and spiritual—before us.
Many of these essays deal specifically with the threat of white nationalism and its corrosive effect on Christianity in America. Kelly Brown Douglas’s Resurrection Hope: A Future Where Black Lives Matter, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’s Martin Luther King and the Trumpet of Conscience Today, and Jermaine J. Marshall’s Christianity Corrupted: The Scandal of White Supremacy are among recent titles that address this.
After a year marked by a continuous series of historic natural disasters the urgency of addressing climate change becomes increasingly clear. Catherine Keller’s Facing Apocalypse: Climate, Democracy, and Other Last Chances draws on the dreamscapes of the Book of Revelation to provide a stunning guide to the pathologies of our times. Gary Gardner’s The Earth Cries Out: How Faith Communities Meet the Challenges of Sustainability addresses both the peril of the moment and hopeful paths forward that communities of faith can undertake, together.
Meanwhile, we enter a second year of the global COVID pandemic. In The Pandemic and the People of God, Gerry Arbuckle, both a theologian and an anthropologist, takes a wide view of the lessons of this time and articulates a strategy for restorative hope in a post-COVID-19 world and church. Walter Brueggemann calls it “The best book I have read on the pandemic.” This also follows A. E. Orobator, SJ’s The Pope and the Pandemic: Lessons in Leadership in a Time of Crisis, a deeply moving account of how Pope Francis has shown the interconnection between the social, ecological, and spiritual challenges uncovered by the pandemic, and the need to respond with solidarity, compassion, and structural change.
All these challenges offer an agenda for the year to come. But recent books also provide a framework for navigating this path. John Haught’s new work, The Cosmic Vision of Teilhard de Chardin summons courage, insight, and hope to participate in the awakening of an unfinished universe. Dorothy Day’s On Pilgrimage: The Sixties shows how to live faithfully in response to the signs of the times. Rabbi Arthur Waskow’s Dancing in God’s Earthquake offers wisdom in negotiating those times when the ground beneath us is shaking. Finally, Fratelli Tutti, Pope Francis’s encyclical on fraternity and social friendship, holds a mirror to all the challenges of our times, while outlining a social and spiritual agenda for renewal.
With thanks to all our readers and blessings on the year ahead,
Robert Ellsberg
Publisher