Church Life Today

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit” (John 15:5). Disciples are Christ’s branches. We grow from him. His life courses through us. The fruit we bear is the sign of his love. As the Eucharistic Revival in the United States reaches its culmination this summer, we at Notre Dame are marking the occasion in a special way, with the performance of...

The Lord gives us what we cannot make or do for ourselves. Our first task in life is to receive. And from what we receive, we are to be changed. The mystery of the Eucharist abides in that exchange: receiving, becoming. In a new book titled Eucharist: The Real Presence of Christ , my longtime friend Tania Geist presents twelve substantive Eucharistic reflections that help small groups discover, di...

Jessica Bross helps people find their stories, craft their stories, and tell their stories. In fact, she usually writes out other people’s stories in their own voice. Jessica ghostwrites memoirs. She listens to people, she listens more, she helps them find the desire that shapes a story or theme in their lives, then she writes that story for them and with them, creating a memoir that contains that...

It’s hard—and getting harder—to discern the proper relationship between our Catholic faith and American political life. Perhaps it is time to reset the framework for how we engage politics as Catholics, even by broadening our understanding of our duty to public life beyond merely politics. In his new book, Citizens Yet Strangers , Kenneth Craycraft challenges Catholics to move away from individual...

You can’t take a souvenir from Hell into Heaven; likewise, you can’t fit the realities of Heaven into Hell. That is Gospel truth for C. S. Lewis, especially as he imagines the separation between Heaven and Hell, vice and virtue, corrupt loves and the fullness of joy in his brief, brilliant eschatological novel, The Great Divorce.  As we make the turn from Lent and Passion Week to the glory of East...

Because of Christ, the spiritual life is practical, and the practical life is spiritual. The Incarnation guarantees that. In this special episode, Leonard DeLorenzo shares some of the fruits of his newly published work, In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide . This book is especially well suited for young adults, perhaps upon Confirmation or graduation from high school or colleg...

Suffering is universal. But how do we understand suffering? Does it have meaning? Can it have meaning? And most of all, what is the meaning of suffering in Christian life? Questions like these inform the work of my guest today, Dr. Mark Giszczak, author of the new book Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know. Dr. Giszczak is Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate Scho...

It is really peculiar that Pontius Pilate’s name appears in the creed. Aside from Jesus and Mary, no other historical figures are mentioned. How did he make it into the creed? That is a question that Josh McManaway helps us to figure out. This is the second episode of several where Josh joins us to discuss the creed. He is currently working on a book on the Apostles’ Creed to help seminarians, pri...

We profess belief in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with such regularity that we likely fail to contemplate the profundity of what we declare. Josh McManaway of the McGrath Institute for Church Life is working on a book to spark new wonder and open up new depths for us about the Apostles’ Creed. In helping us learn the theology and history of our creed, Josh hopes to aid priests enrich their...

Black Catholics and Catholic Social Teaching, with Deacon James Summers Why do so many Black Catholics leave the Church and why do so few new members enter the Church? This is the twofold question that Deacon James Summers along with his wife Wendy and others sought to understand when they were appointed to the Black Catholic Advisory Board for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The answer redo...

Born from a vision to fuse rapid scientific and technological advancement with the wisdom of the Catholic faith, Catholic Institute of Technology forms scientists, engineers and mathematicians who are dedicated to upholding the Catholic faith. This brand new university will welcome students for the first time in Fall 2024 to its campus in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.  This university is the first-ever...

The question at Christmas is not about whether God will act for us. The babe born of Mary is the answer: God has given everything. The question is really about us. Will we receive Christ?  This is a most magnificent reversal, and a most perilous one. He in whom all things are created––in whom we live and move and have our being––is given into our hands. The Host has become the guest, and we, who d...

Sometimes you have to leave what’s familiar to discover what is most beautiful, most profound, and most meaningful precisely in your ordinary life. A pilgrimage is one of the best means for doing just that: departing from what you know in order to return anew. But pilgrimage is not just any kind of trip or travel, it is instead an intentional journey made to encounter Christ, or rather, to allow h...

What is the belief of ordinary Catholics around the Eucharist? That is a harder question to answer that it might at first seem. You could put forward two options and ask a respondent if they believe this or that. But it is not easy to phrase those options correctly, nor is it easy to ensure that your respondent understands what you are trying to ask. Belief in the Eucharist is not easy, and neithe...

Many of us browsing social media have had the experience of seeing horrendous images and videos from armed conflicts. Sometimes those dehumanizing acts are featured widely even before conflict fully breaks out. Seeing these things gives us a sense of rage or sorrow or concern or all of the above. It is not uncommon for our sympathies to be swayed by the suffering that we see, or the dehumanizing a...

Jessica Mannen Kimmet was searching for spiritual resources in the Church that would guide her and strengthen her during her early years of motherhood. She was experiencing significant struggles and was confronting unmet expectations. But other than a few scattered blog posts here and there, she really couldn’t find anything that would respond to her need and desire. So several years later, she wr...

To love your neighbor, you must know your neighbor. And to know your neighbor, you often times have to go beyond the mind you have. The Greek word for conversion, metanoia , means just that: “to go beyond the mind you have”, so that loving your neighbor usually requires some kind of conversion. Conversions are often uncomfortable and even painful. It can be hard but it can also be liberating and h...

One of the surest ways to incite wonder and love for the Lord in our children is for us to rekindle wonder and love for the Lord in ourselves. As mature Christians, we have a responsibility to instruct our children––to model and share our faith with them. For many of us, this begins as a daunting and uncertain task: we might question our own faith, or feel awkward in our wording or mannerisms in s...

In a 2019 study, the Pew Research Center found that just one-third of U.S. Catholics Agree that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ . That is a sobering statistic. Even if we account for the way in which the survey question may have been imprecisely formed, it still seems that the overwhelming majority of Catholics surveyed espoused belief in a more symbolic meaning of the bread and wine...

In 1965, in an NBC News documentary, J. Robert Oppenheimer reflected on his role in leading the Manhattan Project that yielded the first nuclear weapons by saying this: “We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita ; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should...

To deceive yourself is easy, but to stop deceiving yourself is hard. This truth is more apparent to each of us when we look to other people than it is when we look to ourselves. Why? Because we tend to believe the lies we have told ourselves, so much so that they really aren’t lies anymore for we have forgotten the truth. One of the gifts of excellent drama––especially tragic drama but even the ri...

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court. What might surprise many, however, is that there is a lot of agreement if not unanimity among justices when they decide such cases. In 2023, the justices returned a 9-0 decision in a religious liberty case regarding a US Postal Service worker who sought a religio...

Once when my eldest son was about five years old, we happened to be reading the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel when we came upon the account of a man with an unclean spirit. My son asked me what that meant. I didn’t know how to answer so I said: “What do you think?” He didn’t know. So we read it again. He noticed that the unclean spirit did not want to be near Jesus, and he knew that Jesus was God...

Parental Notice: Adult language quoted in the episode. The study of moral choice, character, and identity in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul was unprecedented in TV drama. Many experienced the two TV series as a journey through Dante’s underworld, even through to his Purgatorio . In a recent conference at the University of Notre Dame, five scholars of theology and philosophy analyzed various dim...

“Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God – the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and love visible in Christ” ( CCC 2052). As the Church in the United States seeks to foster a Eucharistic revival, might the beauty of sacred art be a privileged avenue for teaching all the...