I stopped watching “The Chosen” because I suddenly realized, in a deep and visceral way, that television was robbing me of what the hard work of imaginatively constructing biblical scenes in prayer affords me. The problem was not the content or the quality of the production, but the very medium itself.
Culture of the Home, Part 3: Customs (Letters to Parents Series IV)
It is customary to assume that children rebel against their parents. What is often discounted, though, is just how strong the influence of parents is. If children do rebel, it is rebellion against the standard the parents have established. Rebellion itself shows the outsized influence of parents.
It turns out, however, that the myth of rebellion is overblown.
Culture of the Home, Part 2: Time (Letters to Parents Series III)
Culture of the Home, Part 1: Space (Letters to Parents II)
Mass Shootings and the News Feed
Why 'This Is Us' Matters (or Mattered)
I wrote this article back in 2017, when my wife and I first started watching This Is Us on NBC (we actually watched it on network TV in 2017). As we were finishing the series in 2022 (on Hulu) with our teenage daughter, who had grown to really like it, I remembered what I had thought fire years ago about what might eventually undo this really excellent drama. Sure enough, it undid itself in just the way I feared it would. I bolded the key line down below.
What I'm Working On at the Turn of the Year
Prioritizing Faith in College
If you try to “keep your faith” in college, you’ll likely fail. “Keeping your faith” is a defensive position in a game of stamina with the odds stacked against you. You don’t prioritize something by waiting to see what happens with everything else first so you can make the important thing “fit.” That’s the biggest mistake when it comes to developing your faith in college. The first and most critical step is to make basic, intentional commitments right from the start.
Only Reconciliation Can Cancel Transgressions
If there is a mystery greater than the conversion of heart in the sinner who repents, then it is the mystery hidden in the wounds of the victim who forgives. Those wounds are the mysterious font of forgiveness. The victim does not just say to the perpetrator, “I forgive you for these wounds” but indeed “I forgive you from these wounds.” The victim creates a new meaning from the previously closed and definitive meaning inflicted upon him or her in the offender’s wounding act. These sites of violence are now sites of forgiveness. The peace of reconciliation flows from these wounds.
This mystery of forgiveness is hidden in the body of the crucified and risen Christ. When he appeared to his disciples on the evening of the first day of his Resurrection, he first offered them peace. “When he had said this”––in other words, only then––“he showed them his hands and his side” (Jn 20:20, RSV). They see his wounds. But what are those wounds? Those are the wounds for which they themselves are culpable. Those are the wounds of their neglect, their complicity, their betrayal, their abandonment, and their cowardice. Those are his wounds alone and not wounds they themselves also bear because they were not there with him. And yet, before he showed them his wounds, he offered them peace. Not the peace achieved through suppression and domination, but the peace of freedom (see: John 14:27).
Read the whole essay in the Church Life Journal.
6 secular films (and 6 religious films) that all Catholics should watch
From among many others that might be highlighted, I have chosen six films released in the past 20 years that demand more than passive gazing from us as viewers and which promise to draw us into a wider space of realistic imagination. For Catholics, these are the kinds of films that beckon us toward a deeper engagement with the world as it is or as it might be. These are films that urge us to reckon with ourselves and the mystery of being human. These are also the kind of films that can forge bonds of communion between religious persons and nonreligious persons, who together may ponder and question the deeper significance of who we are, who we have been and who we might become.
Prophet of Longing: The Music of Audrey Assad
There are some prayers so tender and so true that they seem to say everything that needs to be said with only a few words. From the sanctuary of Saint Joseph Church in South Bend such a prayer arose with melodic sweetness, offered on behalf of many from Catholic singer/songwriter Audrey Assad: “I’m a broken stone, so lay me in the house you’re building.” …
What I'm Working On to Close Out 2020
A Letter from St. Nicholas to the Accidental Arians of 2020
A Different Proposal for Reopening College in the Fall
10-Part Series on the 10 Commandments
The gift (and responsibility) of Catholic schools
Advent with Oscar Romero
Biographies of saints that get it right, Part 4 of 4
You cannot tell the story of a saint without telling the story of God’s love for his people. The saint is where the love of Christ is made manifest in a particular way, in a particular time, for particular communities and people. Saints never stand alone: Christ is with them, and they bring Christ to others.
In this fourth and final installment of this series on biographies of the saints, we examine two works: “Oscar Romero and the Communion of Saints” (Orbis Books, $24) by Scott Wright with Octavio Duran, and “Bakhita: From Slave to Saint” (Ignatius Press, $16.95) by Roberto Italo Zanini — both testify to the presence of communion in the life of every saint.
Biographies of saints that get it right, Part 3 of 4
The lives of the saints are never mere biographies, because their real lives are hidden in Christ with God (cf. Col 3:3). To see these men and women as a saint means learning to see Christ’s beauty in their particular life. Perhaps no one is better suited to see a saint for who he or she really is than other saints. Some of these men and women even write about other their fellow members of the Church triumphant as a testament to Christ’s glory made present to and effective in the lives of those who have learned to love them.
In this third installment in a series on biographies of the saints, we examine two works about saints — one written by a saint himself (St. Bonaventure on St. Francis), and another written by one whose cause for canonization has begun (Dorothy Day on St. Thérèse of Lisieux).
Biographies of saints that get it right, Part 2 of 4
It is difficult to write about the saints. Their biographers face the twin dangers of reducing their subjects to a mere biography or of sapping their subjects in pious drivel. When biographers get it right, though, the saints come alive to inspire and challenge those who meet them in and through these biographies.
In this second installment in a series on saint biographies, we look to two modern works about two medieval reformers: “Catherine of Siena” by Sigrid Undset and “St. Philip Neri: I Prefer Heaven” by Giacomo Campiotti (director) and Mario Ruggeri (screenwriter).