“Truly, I say to you, whoever does not receive the kingdom of God like a child shall not enter it” (Mk 10:15). Here is what is new: the disciple must not only serve the little ones, but also acknowledge himself as a...
During these first eight years of Pope Francis’s time on the Chair of Peter, one theme that has come up again and again is the periphery. Francis made “going to the peripheries” a priority—perhaps even the priority—of his pontificate very...
Yesterday, I posted about the most widely-read articles on Where Peter Is over the past year. Today—as promised—I am highlighting many of the articles that I believe exemplify the amazing work of our brilliant and faith-filled contributors. To be completely...
I want to begin my Christmas 2020 reflection with the first four stanzas of the poem Esperanza by Alexis Valdés, a Cuban-American poet based in Miami, Florida. When the storm passes and the roads are tamed, and we are the...
Pope Francis continually encourages us to reflect inwardly on our spiritual lives in ways that compel us to take concrete actions toward building God’s kingdom on earth. I recently wrote about some ways that eschatological reflection can lead us to...
Members of the pro-life movement often describe policies that work to undermine the recognition of human dignity and to devalue human life as promoting the “culture of death.” This term was made popular by Pope St. John Paul II in...
So far in the “Loneliness Today” series we’ve had eight installments looking at different facets of the phenomena of loneliness and social isolation in the Church and the world today: The youth encounter in Tokyo last fall Loneliness among the...
The previous installment of “Loneliness Today” touched on the potential spiritually beneficial aspects of loneliness. It discussed the literary or symbolic place (topos) of the “desert” and cited Simone Weil’s controversial assertion that Christianity seeks a supernatural use for suffering...
Initially, this installment of “Loneliness Today” was going to be about either the loneliness faced by parish priests (who, in the age of COVID-19, I’m sure miss public celebrations of the Mass just as much as we do) or the...
The past few weeks have certainly been stressful for most of us. Less than two months ago, the life-threatening virus that has infected people around the world was, for many of us, an interesting international news story. Today, many of...
I didn’t originally plan to write about the phenomenon of social distancing in this series; indeed, I wasn’t even aware that the term existed when I began writing these essays about loneliness. However, three months into the “Loneliness Today” series,...
When Pope Francis promulgated the apostolic exhortation Amoris Laetitia in 2016, much of its teaching was widely ignored in favor of what would become years of arguing over a single footnote that potentially opens the sacraments to some Catholics who...
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