by Fabio Hurtado We live, in fact, in a world starved for solitude, silence, and privacy, and therefore starved for meditation and true friendship. — C.S. Lewis It was almost a year ago when during a meeting – I use that term loosely to describe four friends gathering at a local pub to drink draft beer and talk through theology and life – that we faced this question: If God is a loving father why would he abandon his children... Read more
By Russell Shaw When religion and secularism butt heads on public policy—a regular occurrence these days—religion typically is obliged to fight with one hand tied behind it. Unfair, you say? Certainly it is, but that’s how the game is played now. Consider the escalating argument over euthanasia and its first cousin, assisted suicide. For a religious believer, the most powerful argument against these practices concerns God’s authority as Lord of Life. To a secularist, though, god-talk is ruled out in... Read more
By Very Rev. Robert Barron Kenneth Branagh’s “Cinderella” is the most surprising Hollywood movie of the year so far. I say this because the director manages to tells the familiar fairy tale without irony, hyper-feminist sub-plots, Marxist insinuations, deconstructionist cynicism, or arch condescension. In so doing, he actually allows the spiritual, indeed specifically Christian, character of the tale to emerge. I realize that it probably strikes a contemporary audience as odd that Cinderella might be a Christian allegory, but keep... Read more
by Denise Bossert A young virgin lowered her head in humility and gave her fiat to God’s archangel, whose message would change her life and the course of history forever. On March 25th, we celebrate it, the Feast of the Annunciation. In that moment, Old Covenant gave way to New Covenant. Mary became God’s game changer, his pièce de résistance. In the days that followed the Annunciation, Mary sensed that many things were changing. God had called her to the... Read more
Visiting the Community of Sant’Egidio in Rome for a full week in February was the experience of a lifetime. Spiritually and socially it was a profound experience in what turned out to be a pilgrimage of charity and peace. Intellectually speaking, it raised challenging questions on the state of the Church and the Catholic faith in Europe, the pontificate of Pope Francis, and the ways in which his teaching and example might be put into practice. My visit happened to... Read more
A man I know was walking his dog when a neighbor woman approached him and inquired about his wife. Not having seen her out and about in quite some time, the lady wondered: Was she well? “Not really,” the man said, going on to explain what that meant. “I’m sorry,” the woman said when he finished. “Is there anything I can do to help?” “Not really,” the man said again. “Except—say a prayer.” The woman hesitated a split second, and... Read more
By Colette M. Liddy The World Communications Day messages come out every January 24, the feast of St. Francis de Sales, a patron of journalists. This year I had to look for it; there has been hardly any chatter on Pope Francis’ message, “Communicating the Family: A Privileged Place of Encounter with the Gift of Love.” This message is a quick read and encourages us to see family as a “privileged” place, where we can “encounter the gift of love.”... Read more
By Very Rev. Robert Barron Last week, the attention of the world was riveted to a deserted beach in northern Libya, where a group of twenty one Coptic Christians were brutally beheaded by masked operatives of the ISIS movement. In the wake of the executions, ISIS released a gruesome video entitled “A Message in Blood to the Nation of the Cross.” I suppose that for the ISIS murderers the reference to “the Nation of the Cross” had little sense beyond... Read more
by Daniel Mitsui Early in 2010, a priest commissioned me to draw Saint Michael in the style of a Japanese woodblock print. At the time, I had little knowledge of East Asian art, despite having some Japanese ancestors. My strongest artistic influence was (and remains) the religious art of medieval Europe. My patrons soon began requesting other transpositions of Catholic iconography into the idiom of ukiyo-e. I enjoyed drawing Our Lady of Perpetual Help with a halo of lotus leaves,... Read more
By Very Rev. Robert Barron The British writer, actor, and comedian Stephen Fry is featured in a YouTube video which has gone viral: over 5 million views as of this moment. As you may know, Fry is, like his British counterparts Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins, a fairly ferocious atheist, who has made a name for himself in recent years as a very public debunker of all things religious. In the video in question, he articulates precisely what he would... Read more
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