Books by Sam Portaro

Daily Lenten reflections with a novel approach.Lent is often a season given to denial of physical pleasure and sensation, but we're already denied these by a cultural atmosphere saturated with visual images, noise and air pollution, violence, and processed foods that dull the senses. The physical senses play an integral role in the human capacity for emotion and feeling. Overstimulation in the physical senses gradually erodes one's ability to feel emotion. Yet empathy-emotional identification and connection with others-is crucial to liturgical engagement, especially in the highly dramatic practices of the signal events of the Christian Year. Sam Portaro proposes to restore our ability to participate emotionally in the Lenten journey by revisiting the five physical senses-one per week-in Lent. The discipline of a 40-day preparation for Easter suggests the importance the Church places on this seasonal retelling of the central acts of Christian redemption. Sense and Sensibility encourages the reader to renew a relationship with the physical senses that is a prerequisite to a deeply attuned engagement with the biblical stories read, taught, and liturgically re-enacted in the rites of Ash Wednesday, Palm Sunday, Holy Week, and Easter.

In the Episcopal Church, it seems the only real purpose and end of Christian discernment is professional ordination, either to the priesthood or to the vocational diaconate.

Calling upon teachers G.K. Chesterton and C.S. Lewis, Sam Portaro wades into the abyss of confronting a life of faithfulness in a world where the Church has created a dictionary unintelligible to anyone not part of itself.

In these meditations on the lesser feasts and fasts of the church calendar Sam Portaro asks the question, What do these saints and commemorations have to say to Christians today?

This book is a hopeful and creative reflection on the positive aspects of conflict in our relationships and institutions, as demonstrated throughout scripture in the life and ministry of Jesus, the early church, the church today, and within ourselves.

In his accompanying volume to Brightest and Best: A Companion to the Lesser Feasts and Fasts, Sam Portaro offers meditations for each of the weekdays for the seasons of Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Holy Week, and Easter.