Every Sunday the Catholic Church reads set texts, the same everywhere: a reading from the Old Testament, a psalm, often a letter, a piece of the Gospel. Whoever goes to the service does not choose which texts to hear. They lie ready before you arrive.

The texts are a conversation among themselves. The first reading is chosen toward the Gospel, the psalm between them is the congregation's answer. Whoever engages with it enters a play of call and response.

It began with a sermon, on 21 June 2026, in Santa Maria dei Carmini, the church in my immediate neighbourhood here in Venice. A Sunday morning, the Italian only half understood, older ladies all around fanning themselves. The priest had taken fear as his theme — paura — and asked whether there could be such a thing as a private faith at all, one you need not profess before others. The day's Gospel, Matthew 10, held the opposite: Do not be afraid — and whoever believes confesses before others.

A thought came to me that the priest had passed over. What it takes to profess is encouragement. I was surprised he did not pick up what was obvious to me, but stayed with the appeal — "Profess!" Afterwards, at the "post-liturgy" — a Spritz Select on Campo Santa Margherita — I looked up the Sunday readings and hit on the idea for this series.

Once a week I read these texts and see what comes. Sometimes a lot, sometimes little, often with a sting. What comes, I then unfold with Alfred Adler's Individual Psychology. It understands a person through relationship. This series belongs to a larger work, a connectivist anthropology. You don't need to know it to read along.

I am not out to interpret the Bible. What was originally meant, I don't ask; and whether they are true, I don't decide. I leave the sting in them. No sermon, no refutation. I take the readings as they are: old texts, read for millennia, interpreted, appropriated, and not exhausted. I hear what comes over from them, and I answer. Whether someone believes or not changes nothing in that.

It's precisely the friction that makes the texts interesting. They are religious texts; they won't hold still. Sometimes one of them says something that won't fall into line. Whoever loses his life will find it is no advice for the office and no lesson in charity.

Read along, and bring your own questions. Where it leads, I don't know.