Did you mean Albert Nolan? His work is, I think, exceptional. I have been reading him in tandem with Sr Thea Bowman, Fr Bede Adam, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero and the Bible (I love the beautiful language of the Douay Rheims).

Nolan’s work is providing the framework for my discernment and preparation for my move, in January, to a Catholic Worker house, with a community committed to short/longterm hospitality for refugees from two war-ravaged (primarily) Islamic countries and a deep, joyful involvement in the rich traditional spirituality and ritual and daily life of the Roman Catholic Church, even as the community seeks to engage the institutional Church in its own “examination of conscience” and process of reconciliation with God’s people and world.

I chose this particular Worker community because it will allow me to be in close and frequent contact with the one progressive active/contemplative community that continues to compel me because of its openness and comfort with the possibility that the community, and its members, may be as wrong and only as right as any other community and group of individuals in the Roman Catholic community; that what has been prophetic may no longer be so by the very next stroke of midnight; that a new prophetic voice may cost the last prophets dearly in their lives of human desires and struggles and habits. It suggests to me that this community is willing to risk deep change and sacrifice significantly to maintain continuity of presence and forum for the Holy Spirit through Catholic spiritual life in this increasingly desperate and deteriorating country. I hear it questioning basic assumptions about the way it “lives community” and its vows, trying to throw out its sometimes obsfucating religious jargon, trying to get down to the brass tacks and stark facts of the way they live their lives and WHAT margins their lives beckon the rest of society toward. They are looking at their lives as they are actually factually lived hour to hour, day to day, in response to their awareness that the context for religious life now is American realities that are very different from those of the 70s, 80s and that a huge number of today’s discerners were BORN in the early 1990s (!!!!) in an American world comfortable with “good works” but profoundly adverse to the idea of a spirituality that embraces and celebrates and talks about and practices sacrifice as a paradoxically painful but healing aspect of the Reign of God in this world so wildly and destructively avoidant of the need for overt, concrete sacrifice by any one of us who has more of any thing or resource (and maybe even opportunity) than we need. That is what is missing for me in much of what I encounter in progressive communities, and it is what I admire in this very new generation of Catholics: being formed in a spirituality of the cross and personal sacrifice is not anathema for them. It is not about submission to authority. Sacrifice is an act of love in a world where there **is** enough for everyone (the Earth itself and all creatures included) but most of us do not understand or have a practice of the daily mechanics of the sacrifice required of each of us if each is to gain access to her God-given share. That is what I hear in the voices and see in the actions of these young women who are choosing more traditional Roman Catholic religious communities: I hear a prophetic, joyful, loving voice calling us to a “little way” of personal and communal sacrifice; a prophetic voice that has developed as quickly as the promise of the 60s and 70s has deteriorated and in direct response to that deterioration. It strikes me that the Catholic emphasis on sacrifice – both in our spiritual practice and in our active, communal lives – may never have been so necessary, so revolutionary, so healing, so creative, so prophetic. Nor so difficult because the construct of “sacrifice” has been so politicized that, I think, we tend to respond to the concept of sacrifice with every faculty and resource and language but those of our spirits.

Related is a fabulous article by Laurie Brink OP, “Can we allow a new generation to shape religious life?” (published in the Winter 2007 issue of HORIZON; I found it on the internet last winter).
Her work and Nolan’s, informed by the others I mentioned above, are thrilling to me. A single paragraph of Nolan, combined with a few lines from one of the others, can guide me into a very peaceful and challenging conversation with God.

Jean