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Category: Feature

“This terrible and inconceivable wound to humanity”

This morning, Pope Francis dedicated his entire Sunday Angelus address to the war in Ukraine, imploring Russian President Vladimir Putin to cease hostilities and calling for peace. Francis explained that he was doing so because “this terrible and inconceivable wound...

New School Year Reads

At the ripe old age of five, I embarked on a long path of learning how to create a sense of orderliness and discipline for my mind, body, and heart. On my first day of kindergarten, my mother defined the...

Reading the Catholic Classics

What makes a literary classic? That was the opening question of a lecture during my last graduate theology course. The premise of the course was that the Lectionary can be read as a classic would. So, what is a classic?...

Seeing Beyond

As much as I loved working with the freshmen at Resurrection High School in Chicago, the ever-present challenge was to help them see beyond their own very circumscribed experiences. My thirteen- and fourteen-year-old students were growing in their knowledge of...

Blessed John Paul I’s Letter to Jesus

Editor’s Note: Today’s beatification of Pope John Paul I came up on me quickly. Earlier this year, I planned to write an apologia in favor of his cause for canonization, in response to critics who say that too many popes...

Theological Flights of Fancy

The work of theology, in addition to looking over what we know and what we can extrapolate from divine revelation or from the observable world around us, also inherently involves a certain amount of speculation. Sometimes our theological speculation involves...

An easy way to make your Church more welcoming

Hopefully this is the rare church architecture post that will be well-received by Catholics and other Christians across the ideological spectrum. An article that appeared in the National Catholic Reporter last week, “Disabled Catholics praise pope’s example in publicly using...

Following the Way of God’s Love

I am a big fan of historical and contemporary romances and I consume them in exactly the way that Amazon Kindle envisioned it—voraciously. With a total of 664 in 2021 and over 300 as of mid-August 2022, I feel confident...

A most unlikely cardinal

The stone the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. By the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes. This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad. — Psalm 118:22-24 (NABRE) For...

Tools for Ministry

I recently made one of my DIY dreams come true. In the unfinished section of our basement, I put up pegboard, added various sizes and shapes of hangers, and displayed all of my tools. Though the edges weren’t exactly level,...