I’m not sure how to begin an essay like this because it’s a genre of writing that I have not really done for Where Peter Is before. This site features everything from personal reflection to theological disputation, but blind rage is generally outside the ambit of tones and styles that we run. Typically...
I originally set out to continue walking the Camino de Levante because it is the route that starts from my home province in southeast Spain. I wanted to connect home with the shrine of Saint James during this Xacobeo—the Compostela Holy Year—by walking that particular route. It was very challenging because of the...
As someone raised in an Evangelical home on the edge of the Bible Belt, it shouldn’t come as too much of a surprise that I was wary of the devotion that Catholics have for the Blessed Virgin Mary. The usual misconception of believing they worship her weighed on my mind in those times...
A reflection on the readings for Sunday, September 26, 2021 — The Twenty-sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time The first person I ever spoke to about becoming a Catholic priest was a Methodist minister. I remember it like it was yesterday—I was sitting in a hospital waiting room during my freshman year of college. A friend’s...
“No, it cannot be permitted that laymen who profess to be Catholic should go so far as openly to arrogate to themselves in the columns of a newspaper, the right to denounce, and to find fault, with the greatest license and according to their own good pleasure, with every sort of person, not...
Migrants are not seen as entitled like others to participate in the life of society, and it is forgotten that they possess the same intrinsic dignity as any person. Hence they ought to be “agents in their own redemption”. No one will ever openly deny that they are human beings, yet in practice,...
[Editor’s note: I was surprised when I awoke this morning with an email from Spain, sent to me by the author from a breakfast bar in El Toboso. So enjoy this bonus letter from the Camino. The next episode will appear in the usual Monday slot, “If God wishes it,” as the author...
These days the term “gaslighting,” meaning the emotional manipulation of someone that causes them to question their sense of reality, is frequently used in the context of the news media and interpersonal and organizational dynamics. The word comes from the title of a 1944 movie called Gaslight, which was based on a 1938...
In a recent conversation with a Reformed Christian acquaintance, I was commended for converting to Catholicism even though certain aspects of Catholic teaching are extremely offensive to my preexisting political and moral opinions. I told him that in some sense I converted to Catholicism because of that. I felt that I needed and...
In Evangelii Gaudium, Pope Francis discusses how “spiritual worldliness” can creep into the Church. He writes: This worldliness can be fuelled in two deeply interrelated ways. One is the attraction of gnosticism, a purely subjective faith whose only interest is a certain experience or a set of ideas and bits of information which...
Have you ever had an “a-ha” moment? Six decades on this earth have taught me two lessons about “a-ha” moments. One: when they arrive, pay attention. Two: when it passes, spend some time looking back and more deeply. This week’s CatholicsRead books drive home these two points splendidly. Lesson #1 A few years...
As the rate of Covid cases and deaths has risen in North America over the past two months due to a surge caused by the Delta variant, different groups of Catholics seem to hold diametrically opposed views of how to respond to the pandemic. Archbishop Valery Vienneau of the Archdiocese of Moncton in New...
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