The BeatiDudes

Michael Lehmann’s RCIA director gave him one piece of advice: stop grading the Church’s teachings one at a time and ask whether the Church itself is trustworthy. He thanked her, said it was really helpful because the answer was No, and walked out. Michael is back with the BeatiDudes, Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein, to tell the story of how a cradle Catholic who found serious faith...

Michael Lehmann has prepped people for hundreds of national TV hits, and the Lord’s reward was to shove him onto the scariest stage: open mic night. The former Yale football recruit, whose hips quit before his career got going, went from political science to a divinity degree to DC communications, and he now runs a monthly clean comedy showcase on Capitol Hill. His goal is to launch Catholic comic...

Christopher Haley didn’t lose his atheism by doubting it. He lost it by trying to live it better. The self-described evangelical atheist committed to his own principles, that love is just chemistry and truth is relative, and watched his life get bleaker. Then he hit the one thing he couldn’t argue away. Beauty was real, and denying it wouldn’t mean he was wrong about something; it would mean he wa...

Hitler’s public enemy number one wasn’t a general or a spy. He was a Catholic philosopher who wrote about Mozart. Dietrich von Hildebrand fought Hitler at the level of ideas and had Nazis at his door within hours of their march into Austria. Then he was nearly forgotten in America, until a twenty-something decided to spend a gap year translating him. Twenty years later, Christopher Haley, vice pre...

Zuriel Merek was writing music about grief before his own had officially begun. His dad had lived with dementia for more than a decade and was in memory care; Zuriel was his primary caregiver, and he knew the end was coming. The friend who asked him to write that score had no idea. Zuriel is back at the Tiny Table with Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schiefelbein, and the friend in question is...

Zuriel Merek entered the Catholic Church at the 2012 Easter Vigil, went home, and cried. It wasn’t joy. He felt nothing at all. A pastor’s kid who started doubting God in second grade and grew up thinking the Pope might be the antichrist, Zuriel spent years as an agnostic touring with rock bands for $50 a show. Then he walked up to a priest in Arlington and admitted he wasn’t Catholic, wasn’t even...

The patron saint of coffee is also the patron saint of unattractive people, and his story is holier than the joke. St. Drogo was disfigured by disease on pilgrimage and reportedly seen in two places at once. He spent the rest of his life in a little shed beside a church, receiving the Eucharist through a window. George Jacobson is back with the BeatiDudes, Paul Kolker, Nick Bezner, and Jeff Schief...

George Jacobson never won a single catechism bee. As a kid, he memorized the Baltimore Catechism word for word, qualified every time, and still lost. Now, at 20, he teaches the faith to more than 200,000 people on Instagram. It started when basketball season ended his senior year and left him 4 free hours a day, which he spent talking about Mary. About 800 videos later, a simple Canva graphic on h...

Cliff Riley went to the University of Dallas to play Division 3 basketball, and almost as soon as he arrived, he started applying to transfer out. Ninety pages of reading a day and a campus full of rules seemed like a steep price for a jump shot, and he came very close to heading home to UCLA. Then the Great Books got under his skin, and so did a group of guys who were real athletes, totally norma...

Cliff Riley argues for a living, which makes it strange that his biggest career move came the moment he stopped trying to control the outcome. Six months ago, he left a litigation partnership at a large national firm for a small boutique called SL Law (strategic litigation, though everyone calls it Salt and Light), taking cases for religious objectors and against abortion providers. Roughly half t...

Fr. John Anthony tried to arm wrestle God into letting him become a doctor, and the only prayer that finally brought him peace was the craziest one he could think of. A Highland Park kid turned Virginia Military Institute graduate, Navy officer, and printing equipment salesman who fired his own boss, he went on a pilgrimage to Medjugorje, surrendered the whole plan, and spent his first two years a...

At seven weeks, a baby is the size of a coffee bean, and its heartbeat can already be seen on ultrasound. Anton Krecic built a company on that fact two weeks after his wedding, when he Googled "pro-life coffee" and got zero results. Seven Weeks Coffee gives 10% of every sale to pregnancy centers, roughly half its profits, and has now supported more than 1,500 of them. At the Sent Summit in Denver,...

The priest who brought Lorenzo Henrie back to the Church wasn't standing in a parish. He was on a Kevin James movie set, and Lorenzo, a Hollywood kid with no interest in getting serious about God, almost didn't show up. What happened next turned a former child actor into a man hosting a hundred industry friends a week to work through the proofs for God's existence, and eventually into a producer b...

"It's just business" is a line we borrowed from The Godfather, and Andrew Abela, PhD, would like to know why we let the mob define it. As founding dean of the Busch School of Business at The Catholic University of America, he built a school from the ground up on faith, natural law, and virtue, betting that good people would also make good business leaders. The bet is paying off: his graduates are...

Johann D'Souza, PhD, has one stated goal for his approach to friendship: find the most magnanimous people alive. He means the rare ones who combine serious professional competence with an actual pursuit of virtue, and he says they are almost always lonely, because everyone around them wants to know why they don't just settle for mediocrity like a normal person. When he finds one, he tells them the...

Dr. Johann D'Souza has a one-sentence solution to the biggest problem facing young people, and he will tell you upfront that almost nobody listening will actually do it. Never give your child a smartphone. He spent years assuming the answer had to be more complicated than that, researching apps, filters, and monitoring software, before realizing the complication isn't the technology. It is the wor...

Ben Budia is back in the studio, and this time the Knights of Columbus policies stay in the drawer while he tells the guys how a kid from Alicante ended up in Texas with eight children. He grew up watching his father start jeans brands, a construction company, a pavement company, and a toothpick company, and at 14 he got handed a beat-up notebook and a promise: four thousand dollars for every buil...

Eight seasons in, and Ben Budia is the first guest to arrive at the Tiny Table by motorcycle, in a tie and a jacket, in 110-degree Texas heat, on the theory that if it is 120 out you simply must go 120 or faster. That is roughly the energy of the whole conversation. Ben is the General Agent for the Knights of Columbus in Texas, which means 24 agents and about 30,000 families under his care, but th...

Comedian Nazareth is back with the BeatiDudes, and the Friday half of this visit turns from punchlines to providence. It opens with a round of Blessed Are the Joke Makers at the Tiny Table, where a conspiracy theorist prompt produces Honda sponsoring the early church because the apostles were all in one Accord, plus a Sonic ice callback that should probably be reported to someone. Then Nazareth te...

Comedian Nazareth grew up Greek Orthodox in Kuwait, came to America, and built a career that was about to break wide open. Vegas rooms, management, an NBC sitcom in development. Then a friend invited him to church, where he met Christ personally, and then called his manager to quit. About 250 expletives later, he was released. What brought him back to the stage was a deacon telling him that God cr...

Sean Corcoran is back with the BeatiDudes, and he brought news that landed on his phone 42 times in a single day. A group called Men for Choice, which public records show had zero dollars to its name last year, is suddenly funded on college campuses and training young men to be pro-abortion. Sean's take is worth contemplation. The side that spent decades insisting men's voices do not belong in thi...

At 19, Sean Corcoran fought to save his first child and lost. When he went to the same campus counselor who was helping the mother of his child navigate her abortion, she told Sean this situation did not affect him because he was a man. He believed her, kept it inside, failed out of college three times, and eight years later was homeless and overdosing in a hotel room at the end of a seven-year me...

Fr. Ken Geraci of the Fathers of Mercy joins the BeatiDudes for one of the most moving conversations from the early days of the show. Fr. Ken explains the deep connection between forgiveness and healing, describing unforgiveness as something corrosive that can eventually damage the person carrying it. He reminds us that forgiveness is not pretending an offense was acceptable or waiting until the p...

Devin Schadt joins The BeatiDudes for a powerful conversation about conversion, marriage, fatherhood, and seeing life's trials through the eyes of faith. Devin shares the remarkable story of his conversion at age 24, when a life marked by selfishness, theft, broken relationships, and despair finally brought him to his knees in a Catholic church. That surrender eventually transformed not only Devin...

Kyle Whittington is back with The BeatiDudes to share what happened when his commitment to the Catholic Creator Conference moved from an exciting side project to a genuine leap of faith. Kyle explains why he walked away from a secure, well-paying career and entered a season where providing for his wife and children requires a level of trust in God he had never experienced before. Rather than wrapp...