What are your greatest needs that From the Abbey can help you fulfill?

For the past couple months, I have been running a marketing survey, asking you what you have tried to help you grow in your faith, what has worked for you and what has not. Response to this survey has been awesome, and I really appreciate all of your input! Ultimately, I plan to use your responses to guide me to create products (DVDs, online content, books and workbooks) that will serve your needs the best.

But there’s also a lot more we can learn from them! I have started a new blog series to explore and analyze the responses to the survey. Whether you took the survey or not, I encourage you to engage with these posts. Read them and comment on them. It really promises to be a fruitful discussion!

Why do you think you didn’t grow in your faith this past year as much as you wanted to? Come back here to the blog in order to find out what other people are saying!

Pope Benedict XVI Calls for a Year of Faith
From Jeff

Perfect Opportunity for the Launch of the Catholic Learning Plan!

Pope Benedict XVI has declared that 2012 will be a Year of Faith. In other words, it will be a year for us to
focus on growing in intimacy with God
bring the faith to others in a new and dynamic way.

The foundation of both of these goals is to know your faith! We learn more about our faith so that we can know God more deeply in intimacy and so that we can more ably share the faith with others.

What a great opportunity this Year of Faith presents to all of us! What better time to launch a new online Catholic learning system? You have heard me talk about the progress (and lack of progress) I am making on this project. Well, it must be time to stop talking about it and to finally get it off the ground!

Yes, the official launch of the Catholic Learning Plan will happen early in 2012. Maybe even in January!

Register for the Catholic Learning Plan Here

Updatea,

I am almost finished with the first online course, “Salvation History.”

Research and writing are well underway for the second online course. The video production for this course should be much, much more quickly.

I am creating an online program for adults who are interested in creating an adult education system in their parish. It’s easier than it sounds! More details on this project will come in future enews updates.

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I was interviewing for my job at Columbus Catholic High School. I had applied for a position teaching English and social studies. During the interview, the principal asked me if I would be willing to teach a Christian morality class to juniors. Looking for any advantage in the interview, I said I would be very interested, but I wasn’t so sure I was qualified. Well, they hired me on the spot. Apparently they weren’t able to find anyone else who was even willing to try to teach that course.

I spent my first semester of teaching literally learning Catholic moral teaching half an hour ahead of my students. And the class was horrid. I couldn’t answer any of the students’ questions. I was relying on a textbook that was built around stories and “values processing.” And I completely failed to convey to my students the beauty or the importance of learning Catholic teaching. I decided at the end of that school year that if I was going to continue teaching that class, I needed to learn my faith better. So I signed up for a master’s degree in theological studies.

At the entrance interview for that degree program, the professor asked me, “So, tell me what the documents of the Second Vatican Council have meant in your life.” My respond was a blank stare and a stammered, “. . . you mean, there were documents?” I wasn’t even aware that an ecumenical council produced documents that a person could actually read and study. I thought the interview was over right then and there. But the professor actually told me not to worry about it. The entrance interviews usually exposed more ignorance than knowledge about the faith, and their main purpose was to gauge the needs of the class. Whew.

So, my in my first year of the master’s degree program, I sat in a class called Fundamental Theology and I learned many of the basic truths of our faith – and more importantly, how these truths fit together. As I sat in that class, I kept asking myself, “Why did I need to come to a master’s degree program in order to learn this stuff? Why isn’t anyone teaching this to adults in the pew?”

I was convicted right then and there that this was to be my mission. I didn’t want Catholic adults wondering why they had never learned the fundamentals of our faith before.

As I studied, something else caught me by surprise. Even though this was a master’s degree program, what we were learning was far from being stuffy academia. In fact, the learning processes was engulfed in a great sense of joy. As we grew in knowledge, we were actually also growing in intimacy with God. Our theology was truly “faith seeking understanding.” Learning was exciting and meaningful.

I wanted to share this same sense of wonder, awe, meaning, excitement and joy with others. I was able to do that for 10 years as a high school teacher at Columbus. I even had students say that moral theology was their favorite class! That surprised everybody.

Then I quit teaching to become a stay-home father for our two children. But my sense of mission never left. In fact it grew. So, I started researching adult learning to see how I could bring this mission to Catholic adults. And boy did I learn a lot! OK, I’m still learning a lot! There has been some great research into adult learning, and almost none of it is being utilized by the Church. So my mission has now become to share with Catholic adults the joy of the learning the faith. I will be utilizing this research to make learning programs that are more effective. More than that, I’ll be sharing with you from this research and from Catholic teaching how to truly take control of your life, orient yourself toward what is truly important, and stop living the lie that is telling you that you don’t have time to read, study, pray and grow in the areas of your life that would make you truly happy! That’s my mission. I hope you’ll join me!

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The Incarnation of Christ is such a great sign of love that it has transformed an entire season of the year in to a season of joy, even for those who don’t know Jesus. In the Incarnation, Jesus so completely emptied Himself of His rightful glory as the Second Person of the Trinity that when He took on human nature, He came to earth as a tiny, helpless baby in a poor family. Imagine the creator of the universe stripping Himself of every form of dignity and power. He could have taken on human nature as a fully-grown human, with at least some station in life. Instead, He puts Himself at the complete mercy of human parents.

True love is sacrificing yourself for the good of another person in order to ensure they receive all that is good. The only better example of love we have is Jesus’ sacrifice on the Cross.

That’s why gift-giving is such an appropriate expression of the Christmas season. In giving gifts to one another, we offer a piece of ourselves (our money representing our labor and time) as an expression of love. Yes, our crazy culture has warped this beautiful expression of love into a materialistic expression of our right to have stuff. But that doesn’t erase the potential of the powerful potential that gift-giving has to point our minds and hearts to the true sacrifice of love made by Jesus.

One way to preserve the true meaning of gift-giving is to include gifts that point your loved ones directly to Christ. As you know, the mission of From the Abbey is to promote Catholic literacy and to lead people to the Joy of the Truth. Gaudete Sunday and the third week of Advent is such a perfect time for you to explore how From the Abbey can help your loved ones find the Joy that comes from knowing the awesome love of God.

Are you ready to get started spreading the Joy of the Truth to your loved ones? Click here to find out how From the Abbey can help!

What else are you doing to point your loved ones to the love of Christ and the Joy of the Truth this Christmas? Please leave your comments below!

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The form below is the same form to the right. Even though the field for your recommendation is small, it should let you write as much as you want.

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Faith Finances by Tomas Zordani

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