National Catholic Reporter, the newspaper, is just one of the projects of National Catholic Reporter Publishing Company Inc. For more than 45 years, we have also published Celebration, a resource for parish leaders focused on liturgy and worship.
Celebration was founded, it says of itself, "with the conviction that doing justice, restoring unity and healing divisions lay at the heart of our worship. Celebration helps readers to enhance and deepen worship and parish life by providing a diverse array of content in a monthly magazine format."
If you're a regular reader of our feature Scripture for Life, you are getting a tiny taste of the wealth of content Celebration has to offer.
This Lenten season, Celebration is making its material available in one convenient spot, along with some selections from NCR and our other project, Global Sisters Report, to showcase all that NCR Publishing Company Inc. has to offer.
Visit celebrationpublications.org/lent-easter to find ways to enhance your prayer and reflection over these holy days using Sunday commentaries, articles, art and graphics from Celebration, NCR and GSR.
No matter what liturgical season you find yourself in, you can start your day inspired with Celebration's daily Scripture reflections.
Daily Bread is a series by five authors who first share the daily lectionary readings among themselves and then write short reflections. Bookmark this webpage, celebrationpublica tions.org/dailybread. While you are there, sign up to get an email alert, and you'll get a daily reminder to look at the reflections.
In Pencil Preaching, Pat Marrin — the cartoonist who brings you Francis, the comic strip — breaks open the Word every morning with a pencil sketch and a short meditation. Find them at celebrationpublications.org/pencil preaching.
I hope that you've been listening to our podcast, NCR In Conversation, now in our second season. The full collection is at NCRonline.org/podcast, and you can listen to them there on your computer or tablet. On that page also you can find instructions on how to get the podcast on your Android or iPhone and how to subscribe to NCR In Conversation through iTunes, Podbean, Radio Republic or your favorite podcast player.
Brittany Wilmes, NCR engagement editor, produces and hosts the podcast, which is engineered by managing editor Stephanie Yeagle and Toni-Ann Ortiz, our art director. (Ortiz also designs and lays out the newspaper.)
If you're looking for Lenten resources, two podcasts are must-listens. For the first week of Lent, Wilmes interviewed Nancy Sylvester, a member of the Sisters, Servants of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of Monroe, Michigan, about contemplative reflection. Sylvester tells Wilmes why this practice is more important now than ever, and she walks through the steps for starting your own contemplative practice. That is "Episode 44: Contemplation for Lent."
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After listening to that, stick around another few minutes and listen to "Episode 45: Spring Books preview." Wilmes gets NCR books editor Jamie Manson into the podcast studio to talk about books that Manson is having reviewed over the next few weeks.
Manson is always fun to listen to, especially when she is excited about something, and she is very excited about three books featured this spring that explore the Lenten-Holy Week-Easter themes of suffering, sacrifice and resurrection.
The books, which Manson calls "perfect for Holy Week reading and beyond" are The Unmoored God: Believing in a Time of Dislocation by Jesuit Fr. Paul Crowley, Creation and the Cross: The Mercy of God for a Planet in Peril by St. Joseph Sr. Elizabeth Johnson and Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision by John Dominic Crossan and Sarah Sexton Crossan.
I won't tell you any more. Listen to the podcast and wait, as patiently as you can, for the books coming this spring.
[Dennis Coday is NCR editor.]
