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Yesterday I wept like I haven’t wept for a long time. It was an oceanic type of weeping, one that was wider than the whole world. A cry that made me believe again in things I had given up… I went to bed late because I couldn’t stop weeping. And all of that was because of the inauguration of Brazil’s new president: Lula, Luis Inácio Lula da Silva. Let me tell you why. Lula has become the president of Brazil for the third time and the inauguration had a rite of passage where Lula was becoming the president of Brazil.…

Pelé died yesterday and the worlds heartbeat stopped beating for a little for me. I am not old enough to have seen Pelé play in his fulness. When Brazil won the World Cup in Mexico with the most mesmerizing soccer team in history, I was one year old. But I am old enough to remember him playing at Cosmos and finishing his career saying to a packed stadium in New York City: “repeat after me: Love Love Love.” As I write from New York, I can feel his words echoing in my memory. Pelé (and Corinthians) made my childhood be…

Ritual at World’s End: Essays on Eco-Liturgical Liberation Theology. By Cláudio Carvalhaes. York, PA: Barber’s Son Press, 2021. 344 pp. $59.00 Reviewed by: Rachel Joy Wheeler (bio) Spiritus: A Journal of Christian Spirituality Volume 22, Number 2, Fall 2022 Johns Hopkins University Press I was delighted to be gifted with this book by a colleague who has been the liturgist and pastoral musician at the Catholic parish where I belong. This colleague has worked with me over the years in such a patient manner by reassuring me, especially when I have made mistakes, that “liturgy is messy,” something Carvalhaes’ book…

  This precious brother from India sent me an email this morning with this poem about a shoe shining boy. I don’t know him but I was deeply moved. He allowed me to post the poem.   Eyes! On your feet By James   It is one of the busiest Railway stations Trains come and go every fifteen minutes People come and go for their work A social process or a vicious life cycle? A gentleman standing on the platform and looking straight ahead in the opposite direction A man bowed under his feet, polishes his shoe Personally denies socially…