Our newest blogger here at dotMagis is Becky Eldredge, a writer, speaker, and spiritual director in training who lives in Athens, GA, with her husband and two children.  Becky has been active in ministry for 14 years, primarily in retreat work and adult faith formation.  She is currently the coordinator of the Partner Program at Charis Ministries, which gives retreats for young adults in 26 cities.

Becky is working on her certificate in spiritual direction at Spring Hill College.  In her free moments she writes the blog Everything Is Holy Now.  We’ve been working for a while to get Becky to join us.  She’s finally here. She will start blogging tomorrow.

Our sister blog Picturing God: Faces and Traces of the Divine celebrates its first anniversary tomorrow. The blog has featured images of nature, people, objects, and places, all evoking God’s presence. I love it. Many of the pictures are extraordinary. It’s a daily way to experience finding God in all things.

To celebrate, Loyola Press is giving away Ignatian Inspiration calendars to five lucky people who comment on the Picturing God page. Details here. Check out the site if you haven’t already, and considering subscribing to receive the daily picture by e-mail.

My friend Vinita Wright is having a great time with her re-launched blog Days of Deepening Friendship.  The theme of DDF is “women growing wiser.”  Vinita is building a lively online community with discussions of the spiritual issues women face as they move through life’s natural seasons.

Here’s what she said this week about those pesky interruptions that are so annoying:

Interruptions are life. The unexpected is simply the life you have but don’t yet know about. The wise woman accepts that reality. What does she do with the unexpected, the disruption, the unwelcome call or caller? She engages with it, with everything she has. She looks for the layer of grace and God-ness that is always there, somewhere and somehow. She pays attention and looks for the wisdom waiting to be tapped in the day that has suddenly changed direction.

Drop in and join the conversation.

I thought I would highlight several of the comments that readers have made on this blog lately.

Nino said this about my post about St. Mark Ji Tianxiang, a Chinese layman and drug addict who was martyred in 1900:

This also reminds me of St. Andrew Wouters, one of the martyrs of Gorkum (who’s feast is also celebrated on July 9 together with the Martyrs of China). St. Andrew was a diocesan priest who led a scandalous life. He was a womanizer and fathered several children. When he was offered freedom in exchange of his faith, he made the famous reply, “Fornicator I always was; heretic I never was.”

Lynda shared her own experience as a convert in a comment to a post called “An Evangelical Lay-Centered Church:”

The RCIA Team emphasized that conversion of heart comes before the teaching of Catholic doctrine. I am now on the RCIA Team and the RCIA materials all stress conversion first. Sometimes I have to defend that position when some of the sponsors question why we don’t start out with “Catholic dogma and doctrine” but people need to know Jesus first or nothing makes sense. I continue to hear the message of conversion of heart from the pulpit and thank God

And finally, Fr. Peter Fennessy, SJ, tells a Jesuit joke.

Yesterday the Loyola Press 3-Minute Retreat received its 10,000th “like” on Facebook.  Try it if you’re looking for a good way to pray in the spirit of Ignatius.  Here’s what Elizabeth Cruz in the Philippines says about it:

Visiting your website and religiously doing the 3 minute retreat refreshes me and an awesome experience to encounter God everyday. Doing the 3 minute retreat in the morning before work gives me extra energy for the day while doing it in the evening before going to bed makes me peaceful and calm. It invigorates me.

Last month Other6, a web community dedicated to helping its members experience God in all things, marked its 20,000th post.  This is another excellent resource for prayer from Loyola Press.

Don’t forget to enter our contest to win a copy of Paul Coutinho’s book Ignatian Pathway.  Details here.

Would Ignatius spend a lot of time on Twitter and Facebook if he was around today?  Perhaps not, says Lisa Kelly:

With all our technology we truly have the capacity to live our lives in almost constant contact with others virtually anywhere.  So really, I don’t ever have to say goodbye.  “We” can live on via email forever. I wonder what Ignatius would say about trying to do so.

I think he would say that we need to first acknowledge the gift that we have in our friendship. Here and now.  I don’t know what the future holds for either of us so let me take a moment, here and now, to thank you for the gift you have been to me. Name it. Celebrate it. Wallow in it for just bit.

Then I think he would say, regarding staying in contact, we ought to use technology in as much as it helps us on our end to respond to God’s love, and rid ourselves of it so far as it hinders us in responding to God’s love.  If by staying in contact with me, you are not being fully present to those in your daily life now, you will be missing out on the presence of God in them, and they will miss out on experiencing it in you—and I know it is so fully present in you.  You need to be fully present there in this next phase of your life.  That is where God needs of you. That is what I want for you.. . .

“We” don’t have to live on via email or texting or Facebook. “We” live on in our Oneness with Christ. And in that, we will never lose contact.

Read the whole thing.

What do you like about Ignatius and Ignatian spirituality?  Here’s a sampling of some responses here and on our Ignatian Spirituality page on Facebook.  Add your own reflections in the comments.

Carol Voss: The freedom to explore and stretch the talents I have been given all AMDG, the knowledge that something is NOT just my imagination, it is the stirring of the spirits, and the sheer joy of detachment from all things unless they point me to His will.

Mary Sutton: Removing my focus on life and all its problems, and raising my eyes and focusing on God. When I do this, I can experience God’s love for me, and from this love, I can better accept the person who I am, a child of God, much loved by Him.

Antonio Matta: Finding God in all things.

Marion Chatterley: To look for that which is life-giving and actively choose to invest energy in that direction.

Ruth Wibisono: That God is trying to communicate with us through everything around us. So Finding God in all things really is just a response to God’s initiative to communicate with us in the first place.

Mike Romeu: Discernment, detachment, the Examen, finding God everywhere/all the time (not easy!), the beloved sinner, I am loved by Him.

Jay Kronenberg:  Finding God in all things, the good and the “bad,” is what has particularly touched me about this approach to spirituality.

Su Scipe: The Exercises.

Anna Lyn Salva Saludes-Aguilar: Ignatian indifference…

dotMagis blogger Tim Muldoon has been writing an excellent weekly column at the website Patheos, which is devoted to “a global dialogue about religion and spirituality.”  It’s full of interesting stuff.

This week Tim writes about the royal wedding and the beatification of Pope John Paul II, concluding thusly:

In our information age, noble ideas are hard to find. The past week, while characterized by attention to these hopeful stories, has also created conversations about the shadow side of these stories. The history of Prince William’s family is not a perfect one, nor is the history of Britain without stain. There are many who love John Paul II, but there are also many who criticize the fact that the crisis of sexual abuse was unchecked during his watch. In both stories, then, we can see something of the paradox that characterizes the human condition: we have an appetite for hope, yet find ourselves chewing on tainted food. Perhaps the appetite itself is a clue to why nothing in the world can ultimately satisfy the human heart, and why by God’s grace we find ourselves restless until we rest in God.

Yesterday the Ignatian Spirituality page on Facebook passed a milestone when it received its 10,000th “like.”  That’s a nice big round number–something to celebrate.  God is found in all things.  In the wired up, interconnected, always-on digital world of the 21st century, the Ignatian Spirituality Facebook page is a place where lots of people are finding God.  Surf over there and take a look, if you haven’t already.

The page is closely linked to IgnatianSpirituality.com.  The dotMagis posts appear there, as do the Picturing God images.  To mark this occasion, we’ve collected some of the most popular Facebook-dotMagis posts.  It’s called IgnatianSpirituality.com Reflections,  and it’s yours free.

UPDATE: The 10,000th person to “like” the Facebook page has been identified.  She is Mary Kate McAdams, a student at Boston College.  She is in a class taught by Tim Muldoon, one of our dotMagis bloggers.

I have a cell phone that isn’t very smart. You might say it’s barely sentient. I use it for texting and phone calls, occasionally as an alarm clock.  Articles like Jack McLain’s list of favorite Catholic apps in America make me want to upgrade to a smart phone.  One of his favorites is the Three-Minute Retreat from Loyola Press.  You can get it free on the web or for 99 cents as an iPhone app.