This Transforming Word: Cycle B: Commentary on the Readings for Sundays and Feast Days of Cycle B of the Lectionary Through 2024, Including Full Scrip

Familiarity often breeds contempt...or at least boredom, and the readings for the Sundays and feast days in the church calendar are familiar. So how can we keep the transforming word of God from lulling our minds and hearts like a warm bath, having little or no effect except to encourage us to drift into a daydream?

One answer is to listen, and that is what this book is about: preparing to listen. For only if we have been mulling the words of Scripture for a while, allowing them to seep into our subconscious, can we be fully attentive when we hear them again at Mass. Another answer is to read the passages we are about to hear in a new and different language, one that forces us to sit up and take notice and think, "Oh, that's what the author was trying to say." And a third answer is to get ourselves a guide to the text, someone who has studied the Bible and spent her professional lifetime trying to navigate and explain it.

This Transforming Word offers all three: preparation, new translation, and an experienced guide. This volume contains all the readings in the Roman Catholic Lectionary for Cycle B through 2021. A companion volume is available for Cycle A. The Cycle C volume will be released Fall 2015