McGrath Institute Blog

Looking for new ideas or resources to engage your faith or your ministry? Here are our weekly curated links, including offerings in each of the following categories: Prayer for the Home, Educational Opportunities, Resources (for ministers, educators, parents, etc.), and Flourishing and Fun.

We’ve considered some problems with our contemporary political discourse and made some suggestions about how a “Catholic political discourse” can improve the present situation. We are left to consider: At the end of the day, what can the Catholic truly expect from politics? The great American Catholic writer Walker Percy answers this question best by suggesting that humans both must learn to be at home in their homelessness and find some rootedness in imperfect communities.

With the uncertainty and pain of the coronavirus pandemic compounded by the injustice, suffering, and division rampant in the world today, the need for compassionate outreach and pastoral creativity is ever more apparent. Entering into an intentional process of pastoral creativity begins with a commitment to engage in movements of prayer, reflection, and attending to others that can open your heart to the ways God works within and through you. 

One of the oldest reflections on friendship is Plato’s Lysis in which Socrates suggests that a friend “somehow belong[s] to his beloved either in his soul or in some characteristic, habit, or aspect of his soul.”^[1] Developing this intuition, Aristotle, later argued that in a perfect friendship, friends must “live together,”^[2] by sharing deeply in one another’s inner life, famously describing such a friend as “another self.”^[3] True friends are those whose hearts and minds pursue the same thing—goodness for Plato and virtue for Aristotle.

Looking for new ideas or resources to engage your faith or your ministry? Here are our weekly curated links, including offerings in each of the following categories: Prayer for the Home, Educational Opportunities, Resources (for ministers, educators, parents, etc.), and Flourishing and Fun.