A blogging Brother

The man in the photo is Brother Patrick Cousins, SC. He's a Brother of the Sacred Heart and is working on a doctorate in Religion at Syracuse University.


I've never met Br. Patrick (BP to his students) and I'm not sure how or when I came across his blog - but I'm glad I did.

Br. Pat is not a daily blogger but his posts are worth waiting for and have picked up in frequency of late. His essays reflect the thinking of a well read doctoral student who has the insight and skill to bring his knowledge to bear on the topics he addresses. Serious readers will find good food for thought on Cousin's blog.

Here's a recent example:

As I was listening to (Walter) Brueggemann’s sermon, I was caught up with realization that I almost never hear a sermon on a psalm. My experience in Catholicism is that sermons are more often on some piece of Catholic doctrine, or on a moral kernel to be gleaned from the gospel, or perhaps Paul (although it seems that Paul is too close to the Protestant schema for most Catholics to know what to do with him). The psalms, though, particularly the lament psalms, present the grittiness of life lived with God and the boldness of making big complaints and big imperatives of God – something many of us are not comfortable with. Brueggemann concluded another clip I watched this morning with the line, “If people are caught in dogmatism or in moralism, they tend not to see how incredibly artistic it all is.” One of his big motifs is the need for the artistic, the poetic, to bring speech to the stuff we usually deny – the heartache and uncertainty and rage we feel and then feel bad about feeling, because good people aren’t “supposed” to think that way. So, we prefer a safe denial to a risky honesty and thereby truncate God to only having access to the acceptable parts of our lives, and the shadow part of our lives and our personalities runs unchecked and unhealed.

I'm pleased to add Br. Patrick's Blog to my sidebar.

-ConcordPastor