AMDG: A Jesuit Podcast

Christmas is a weird time of year. No other season is such a potent combination of stuff happening. You have family traditions and maybe drama…definitely a whole lot of feelings. There’s consumerism and anti-consumerism. Heck there’s a whole soundtrack we share and bicker over. Plus, for Catholics and other Christians, there's the whole Jesus as God incarnate thing. To help host Mike Jordan Laskey...

Acclaimed memoirist and poet Mary Karr joined the Jesuit Book Club to talk about her most recent poetry collection, "Tropic of Squalor." The Zoom gathering turned into a deep spiritual conversation, full of Mary's sharp insight and humor. We hadn't planned on running the book club meeting as an AMDG podcast, but it was too good not to share. Learn more about Mary: https://www.marykarr.com/ Learn m...

Fr. Brian Paulson, SJ, began his ministry as president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States in September. He comes to us in DC after seven years as the provincial of the USA Midwest Province, headquartered in Chicago. Fr. Brian talked to host Mike Jordan Laskey a bit about Advent and this period of transition for him, plus Fr. Brian's big-picture vision for the Society of Jesus...

Why do some "secular" music or art experiences feel sacred? Guest Tom Beaudoin, Ph. D., is a theology professor at Fordham University has spent a lot of his career exploring this question. He joins host Mike Jordan Laskey to talk about encountering the divine in music, plus a conversation on Tom's new research project on the effects the ancient Pantheon temple (now a church) in Rome has on its vis...

Thanksgiving is a time of tradition. How we celebrate the holiday today probably has a lot to do with how we celebrated the holiday growing up. The foods we place on the table. The special napkins we pull out of the closet. The signature cocktail we serve our guests. The dessert – pies and brownies and more. Take a moment: How much of your Thanksgiving experience reflects the Thanksgivings that ha...

Today's episode is about storytelling, imagination and prayer -- three things St. Ignatius of Loyola saw as interconnected. Fr. Bill Cain, SJ, has a rather intimidating bio: He’s a Peabody and Writers’ Guild award winning screenwriter who has worked on several films and television shows, including Nothing Sacred, Thicker Than Blood, and more. His work for theater includes Equivocation, 9 Circles,...

Last month, Pope Francis officially launched a two-year process of reflection and listening called a Synod of Bishops. Synods bring church leaders together to discuss and act on important topics related to the life of faith, and this edition is about the concept of synodality itself. Synodality is a big, obscure word, and our guest, Sr. Nathalie Becquart, is one of the most qualified people in the...

The early days of November give us ample opportunity to celebrate holy women and men. November 1st is All Saints’ Day; November 2nd is All Souls Day. And November 5th is the Feast of All Saints and Blessed of the Society of Jesus. But how many Jesuit saints do you really know? If you went to a Jesuit school, you can probably name a few – maybe you lived in Gonzaga Hall or went to class in a buildi...

The sculpture looks so much like a homeless man, people have called the cops on it. It’s a life-size sculpture of a person huddled under a blanket on a park bench. Get close to the artwork in any cities that have a copy of it, like Toronto or Rome, and look at the feet. You’ll find two wounds carved into the bronze, the only signs that the person show here is Jesus himself. It’s a powerful and cha...

Jesuit-educated actress Siobhan Fallon Hogan has had an incredibly busy acting career over the last three decades, from appearing in Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld in the early 1990s to roles in movies like Forrest Gump, Men in Black and the Lars Von Trier musical drama Dancer in the Dark. Most recently, she made her screenwriting debut with a movie called Rushed. Siobhan also stars in the film...

The National Basketball Association season starts next week. If you flip on a marquee matchup on ESPN or ABC sometime this fall, you’ll probably hear the voice of today's guest: play-by-play announcer Mike Breen. Mike is widely regarded as one of the best announcers in the world in any sport. He informs without overexplaining. He shows excitement and love of the game without being cheesy. He perfe...

"Every child matters," reads Rosella Kinoshameg's fluorescent orange tee-shirt. The shirt is part of a national movement to recognize the harmful history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada. Rosella's shirt commemorates the thousands of children who were compelled to attend these schools, where practicing Indigenous cultures or languages was forbidden in an effort to assimilate children in...

Today’s guest might make you reexamine everything you think you know about the current state of the Catholic Church in the USA. Fr. Tom Gaunt, SJ, is a Jesuit priest and the executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Since it was founded in 1964, CARA has conducted hundreds of social science studies of the Catholic Church. If you want to know how many priests w...

During this Ignatian Year—this 500th anniversary of the conversion of St. Ignatius—a lot has been said about “cannonball moments.” The phrase comes from Ignatius’ own life story: he’s struck in the leg by a cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona. It’s that injury and its subsequent, painful recovery that confines Ignatius to bed and ultimately presents him with the opportunity to read and reflect on...

There’s a series of Star Wars books called From A Certain Point of View. Two have been released to date, each to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, respectively. Each book contains 40 short stories from 40 different authors assuming the perspective of 40 different, minor characters from those classic films. The whole idea is to give read...

Back in the innocent days of February 2020, host Mike Jordan Laskey sent a Twitter message to author Nick Ripatrazone in reply to a tweet Nick posted about reading the Graham Greene novel "The Power and the Glory" for Lent, which is something he does every year. What if we invited others to read along with us and talk about it online? Mike asked. Nick was up for it and the Jesuit Book Club was bor...

Nobody in the history of swimming has been as good at freestyle as our guest today is. Katie Ledecky is the literal GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), as she is the world record holder in the women's 400-, 800-and 1500-meter freestyle. (If you're an American who prefers yards to meters, Katie also has the fastest-ever times in the women's 500-, 1000-, 1500- and 1650-yard freestyle events.) Katie is just...

It was only a few weeks ago that Fr. Jean Denis Saint-Felix — the superior of the Jesuit community in Haiti – was our guest on this podcast. He shared with us his reflections on the assassination of the Haitian president. Tragically, a lot has happened in Haiti in just these few weeks. On August 14, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake devastated Southwestern Haiti — an earthquake even stronger than the one...

It’s cliché to say but Ignatian Pilgrimage: There’s an app for that. It’s called “Journey with Ignatius” – and it’s a cool new project developed by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. On today’s episode, Fr. Casey Beaumier, SJ, director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, shares the thinking and reflection that went in to developing this app. But the conversation...

It’s not every day you crack open a copy of the New Yorker Magazine and find a long profile of an incredibly impressive, inspiring young Catholic woman. But that was the case in the February 8th issue, where you can find an article headlined “How a young activist is helping Pope Francis Battle Climate change. That young activist is Molly Burhans, and she’s today's guest. Molly is the founder and e...

Jamie Kralovec’s work is deeply rooted in his faith and Ignatian spirituality, but he’s not a theologian or a youth minister. Jamie is an urban planner by trade, and he’s on the show today to convince you that caring about cities and urban parks and transit and zoning is a deeply Catholic endeavor. Jamie first saw the connections between urbanism and Catholicism while a high school student at St....

On July 31st, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. And this year, the feast is extra special. Why? Because we’re in the midst of an Ignatian Year, a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the cannonball strike that shattered Ignatius’ legs and ultimately set him on the path to conversion. Today’s guest, Cameron Be...

What are you willing to risk for what you believe? Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, is a peace activist and a member of the Plowshares movement, a largely Catholic movement of pacifists that protests nuclear weapons by damaging weapons and military property. He has spent at least a decade of his life behind bars for his witness, and was just released recently for what was called the Kings Bay Plowshares actio...

On July 7, one week ago today, in the early hours of the morning, the president of Haiti, Jovenal Moise, was assassinated in his home. The exact details of his death are still clouded in mystery, but the impact on the country is stark and tragic: Haiti, still recovering from the devastating 2010 earthquake, still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, plagued by violent gangs, economic insecurity and...

Last month, Georgetown University professor of history Dr. Marcia Chatelain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book “Franchise: the Golden Arches in Black America." The book reveals the hidden history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of Black wealth and power in American and the costs of this success story. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked Professor Chatelain what it was lik...