These are challenging days for those doing the work of undergraduate education, and perhaps especially so for those who mean to pursue that work in light of the Gospel. In the midst of economic challenges, we must ask again what the real purpose of a college education is. How should we think about the classical project of the liberal arts? What about ongoing challenges in making education availabl...
Hermeneutics has always been a challenge, even with something seemingly simple. Allow me an example. I was teaching catechism for three- to five-year-olds at our parish on Sunday, and I asked the kids to draw a picture of the Holy Family’s flight to Egypt. Well, after five minutes my son brings up his uncontestably creative rendition. I could see Mary, Joseph, and Jesus, but there was a fourth fig...
With deference to Pope Francis’ magisterial authority as well as to his pastoral guidance as the chief shepherd of the Church, we offer a reading of Amoris Laetitia with the aim of aiding pastors and lay men and women in their understanding and application of the document. This deference urges a reading that both respects the direction in which Francis is leading the Church and reads his teaching ...
The introduction of human rights language into the social mission of the Catholic Church evident in Pope John XXIII’s encyclical Pacem in terris (1963) is often seen as a delayed response to the modern world. From this perspective, Vatican II’s Declaration on Religious Freedom rode on the back of America’s centuries-old first freedom. Even the magna carta of the modern social encyclicals, Pope Leo...
For more than a century, the Blessed Virgin Mary has caught the imaginations of filmmakers of all religious persuasions: devout believers, agnostic, and even atheist affiliations. The intersection of theology and secular culture presents the monumental challenge to filmmakers of depicting what escapes all visual categories: Transcendence and Mystery. The cinematic depictions of Mary of Nazareth ra...
Human Dignity vs. the Throwaway Culture
Human dignity is innate by virtue of each human person being made in the image of God. It is independent of a person’s role in society, talents and weaknesses, and demographic profile. Each person is entirely unique and irreplaceable. The persecuted, the degraded, the humiliated person has dignity. No one can strip a person of his or her dignity, even if the...
Where are the men? How do we get more men involved and engaged in our ministries? I hear these questions time and time again from people across the country in my travels as an educator, minister, and scholar. I hear them from every population: priests, nuns, brothers, pastors, lay ministers, catechists, parishioners, teachers, and coaches. I hear them in every context: parishes, churches, colleges...
In 2005 David Foster Wallace gave the commencement address at Kenyon College. The speech, which has acquired the title “This is Water,” still makes the rounds on the Internet regularly.[1] When I first heard it, blaring from my computer while I was giving my daughters a bath, I was struck by how compelling it is, and how close Wallace comes to telling the graduating class of 2005 that to flourish ...
It all began with a couple of nuns serving meals out of the trunk of their car. The food was for hungry people who arrived in Nogales, Sonora, deported from the United States to Mexico. Every day the sisters would prepare as much food as they could carry and drive to the border’s port of entry, where daily busses would leave bewildered immigrants in an unfamiliar city. Today, this operation has ev...
It happened on November 6, 2013. At the end of his weekly general audience with approximately 50,000 attendees, Pope Francis caught sight of a man in his fifties. He was sitting in a wheelchair and accompanied by his aunt Lotto who recalled: “We didn’t think we would be so close to the Pope, but the Swiss Guard kept ushering us forward until we were in a corner in the front row. When he came close...
