Sacred Signs: On the Physical Side of Being Spiritual with Dr Kent Lasnoski

“The liturgy,” wrote Fr. Romano Guardini, “is not a matter of ideas, but of actual things, and of actual things as they now are, not as they were in the past.” In order to understand the liturgy, he went on, we need to “discern in the living liturgy what underlies the visible sign, to discover the soul from the body, the hidden and spiritual from the external and material.”

Guardini was one of the towering Catholic intellectuals of the twentieth century and a major influence on the thinking of Pope Benedict XVI, Pope Francis, and philosopher Josef Pieper. Yet in 1911, Guardini, for all his erudition, wrote a little book entitled Sacred Signs in which he gently and simply explained this connection between the material stuff of the Mass and the inner world of the spirit.

Dr. Kent Lasnoski, Assistant Professor of Theology at Wyoming Catholic College, received his Ph.D. from Marquette University, where he studied the theology of marriage and sexual ethics, that is, things both spiritual and physical. He has been teaching Guardini’s Sacred Signs to our freshmen and shares both his own and his students insights on the physical side of spirituality.