Fire Starters: Igniting the Holy in the Weekday Homily

Though daily Mass is held most frequently, resources for daily homilies can be in short supply. In this book, Bishop Sklba offers a rich collection of ideas — fire starters — for preparing brief, spiritually nourishing homilies for daily Eucharist. Like building a campfire, where one ignites the logs with more easily flammable paper, these "fire starters" are intended to provide the spark for weekday homilies. God's Spirit provides the flame.

Each day, the biblical citations and summary phrases for the reading and the gospel plus the refrain from the psalm are provided. After each citation, Bishop Sklba offers a series of meaningful insights from his expertise as a Scripture scholar, prayerful study of Scripture, and many years of preaching and pastoral experience. These brief entries provide knowledge and inspiration that will stimulate personal prayer and spark homily possibilities for the preacher every day.

Fire Starters will support anyone privileged to be called to leadership at weekday celebrations of the Eucharist to prepare for the important ministry of preaching.

Bishop Richard J. Sklba served as auxiliary bishop of Milwaukee for over thirty years. He is a well-known biblical scholar, completing the licentiate in Sacred Scripture from the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Rome. He is a member and former president of the Catholic Biblical Association of America. He has served on many committees of the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, chairing its subcommittee on the Review of Scripture Translations from 1991 to 2001. In 1988, he received the Catholic Theological Society of America's John Courtney Murray Award for achievement in theology.

"In Fire Starters, Bishop Sklba has given us a wealth of information complemented by thought-provoking questions to expand our understanding of the biblical text and to lead us to reflect upon how these texts impact our lives in our messy, nitty-gritty world. Drawing on the best of contemporary biblical scholarship Bishop Sklba brings us into the biblical world and the nuances of its language to better understand the message of presenting a spirituality that is both biblically based, and at the same time, contemporary. Though intended to assist preachers in their preparation of homilies, Fire Starters could easily become a source of prayerful reflection on the biblical readings of the day for all who want to immerse themselves in Scripture by daily meditation on the biblical text."

ISBN: 9780814634158