Catholic Education Today – Episode 1 – An exciting and challenging time https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/davidranson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/EPISODE-1-An-Exciting-Age-a-Challenging-Culture.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

Catholic Education Today – Episode 2 – The Catholic School at the Intersection of Two Worlds https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/davidranson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/EPISODE-2-The-Catholic-School-at-the-intersection-of-two-worlds.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

Catholic Education Today – Episode 3 – Developing a Strategy of Navigation https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/davidranson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/EPISODE-3-Developing-a-Strategy-of-Navigation.mp3

Catholic Education Today – Episode 4 – Towards a New Pedagogy of Evangelisation https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/davidranson.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/EPISODE-4-Towards-a-new-Pedagogy-of-Evangelisation.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

The kingdom of God comes clothed in ordinariness and dressed in vulnerability.  We are here, probably like the tenants, expecting it to come in grand schemes in a form before which we would tremble.  Instead it comes rather in a way that we can easily scoff and dismiss, so ludicrous can it first seem to us.  God has come to us as a baby, as one socially marginalised, as one hanging on a tree, as bread.  None of these ways has the elements of a grand army, a mighty battalion.  Like the landowner’s son in the parable all these ways are disarming in their simplicity. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/27th_Sunday_in_Ordinary_Time.mp3Podcast: Play in new window…

As disciples of Jesus, and as members of the Church, we are those who have been given the eyes and the ears to see and to hear when and how the Kingdom of God is showing itself.  We are those, therefore, who can perceive in the most unlikely and the most ordinary of places that something extraordinary is occurring. We are those who have been gifted by our faith to read in something that at first might seem a long way away from the Church and from what is religious, the presence, nonetheless, of a genuine spiritual reality. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/Homily_for_26_Sunday_2020.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

Whatever good we strive for then must be out of a sense of celebration for what we know we have already received from God.  In the Kingdom of God economics and gratitude are integrally linked.  When our lives are a celebration of what we have received already from the sheer graciousness of God, they are marked by a simplicity which is essentially hospitable.  We no longer need to acquire feverishly at all costs  We do not look on others in terms of what they have done, or what they have achieved, of how well they perform, how much they have acquired. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/25th_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

The mystery of forgiveness is central to the Christian perspective.  Forgiveness, though, is a challenge. It is a mystery. And it is a journey. It is an appointment that awaits each and every one of us.  Each and every one of us carries hurt, some of them very deep.  Each hurt presents with the challenge: to forgive or not to forgive.  The challenge is unavoidable.  The decision, however, is ours to make or otherwise.  It is our Christian discipleship that impels us each day to enter the journey of forgiveness.  It is here, perhaps more than anywhere else, that the depth of our Christian commitment becomes apparent or otherwise. It is in the challenge of forgiveness that…

The Gospel recognises that our relationships are never easy, including the relationships between fathers and their children which we mark here in Australia on Father’s Day. They are always fraught with the possibility of hurt, with disappointments, with projections, with disillusionment.  Their demand is constant.  Yet, it is what happens in and through them that determines our real sanctity.  We do not grow in holiness by practicing more religion.  We grow in holiness by practicing more listening, more humility, more love – by genuinely encouraging one another rather than putting wedges between ourselves. https://media.blubrry.com/davidranson/content.blubrry.com/davidranson/Homily_for_23rd_Sunday_of_Year_A.mp3Podcast: Play in new window | DownloadSubscribe: RSS

One of the most radical truths we will learn in life is that which is expressed by the Australian novelist, Patrick White, “The mystery of life is not solved by success, which is an end in itself, but in failure, in perpetual struggle, in becoming.” We can spend our whole life learning the meaning of this.  It confuses us given that it is the opposite of what we want.  It is the antithesis of the culture in which we have been immersed and which seduces us in subtle ways so that we become despondent because we find we are not as free as we think, not as in control as we want to…