Church Life Today

The impact of Jesus: he changes everything, he changes us. The first to receive him were his mother and those disciples who walked with him in Galilee and Judea. They were there when he entered Jerusalem the final time. The twelve were there when gave his body and his blood in the Upper Room, they went with him to Gethsemane, then, one by one, they left his side. Mary and John were nearby when he...

In initiating the Synod on Synodality, which is set to run through 2024, Pope Francis sought to lead the whole Church into a time of prayer, listening, and discernment. His hope is to foster these dispositions and habits within the Church as the regular way of living ecclesial life together. As this particular synodal process moves from the continental stage to universal stage, we wanted to spend...

The desire for the deathless extension of existence. The desire for autonomy without impediments. The desire for consciousness without bounds, for self-determination without exhaustion, for individual benefits without costs. Desires such as these seem very much at home in the transhumanist project, which seeks to push back against human limits, especially via technological means. But have we right...

We live toward what we assume to be our ends. Some of us hold such assumptions consciously, others do not, but either way the ends we seek shape the lives we live and the societies we build. The Christian eschatological imagination is concerned with the end of all things in the consummate glory of God, in our union with God. The way there is through judgment. And what is judged is, oftentimes, the...

“O God, who in your inexpressible providence were pleased to choose Saint Joseph as spouse of the most holy Mother of your Son, grant, we pray, that we, who revere him as our protector on earth, may be worthy of his heavenly intercession. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.” So concludes the litany of Saint Joseph. This litany leads us to contemplate the titles and honors of Joseph, husband of Mary and...

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, a wide array of commentators bemoaned how much more support would now be needed for women who become pregnant when abortion is no longer available, or less readily available. What that implies, of course, is that abortion is a substitute for other supportive measures for pregnant and parenting women, or even more to that point, that those other forms of support a...

You may remember in the last couple years the listening sessions that took place in dioceses and parishes as a first step in the Church’s “synod on synodality.” Maybe you participated in one of these listening sessions, or even helped to host one, as I did. By Fall of 2022, reports from those parish listening sessions were gathered at the diocesan level, then at the national level by bishops’ conf...

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus prayed to his Father that “they may all be one.” He meant us, his disciples. As he entered into his passion, Jesus began to offer himself for our unity in him, with him, through him––sharing in his union with the Father by the Holy Spirit. And yet, if we look around the Church today, disunity may be more apparent than unity. In his new book, acclaimed author and...

Scott Weeman wants to help empower the body of Christ to heal the body of Christ. His organization, Catholic in Recovery , intentionally brings together the Twelve Steps recovery process with the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. This work is an exercise in grace building on nature, where the holistic healing of mind, body, spirit, relationships, and all the rest that is necessary for those...

In 2011, Steve Pokorny founded Freedom Coaching : a one-to-one mentoring system aimed at helping those with an attraction or compulsion to pornography. This isn’t merely about learning how to avoid pornography; it is even more about reclaiming true health in the mind, the heart, and the body. It is about reclaiming our humanity. Freedom Coaching operates from the conviction that the reason most pe...

“We had compassion for those left behind but thought that our job was to provide them an opportunity (no matter how small) to get where we were. We didn’t think about changing our definition of success.” Those words come from Chris Arnade. His definition of success had been tied to upward mobility, ascending socially and professionally to the point of becoming a well-compensated Wall Street invest...

Choose life. Building a pro-life culture means, among other things, making it easier for women who are pregnant to choose life. But is it easy to choose life if you are a college student, even a Catholic college student, maybe even at a Catholic school? FemCatholic recently conducted a study around questions just like that. In an article presenting their findings, they ask, “Are Catholic colleges...

“There is much in life we can’t control, such as when we are born and where––the family, country, and history we inherit as time-and-place-bound beings. We enter the story of the world in media res . We don’t choose our sex or the path of development it takes. We don’t choose our unique amalgam of qualities and traits, those threads that form the tapestry of personality. We cannot choose when illn...

The first Mexican American Saint may very well end up being the man they called the Bishop of the Barrio. The cause for canonization of Alphonse Gallegos was opened in 2005, and in 2016 Pope Francis authorized the bishops and cardinals of the Congregation of Saints to grant him the title of Venerable. In this special episode of Church Life Today, Meg Hunter-Kilmer introduces us to Venerable Alphon...

Fiat . So spoke the Virgin Mary to the angel Gabriel. This is a word of creation––“let it be”––one that echoes the command of the Creator, who said Fiat lux , “let there be light”. With her fiat , Mary gave all she had to bear and share the Word of God. In Mary is the mission of the Church––from and for that mission comes a new program here at the McGrath Institute for Church Life with a name give...

By royal charter, St. Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge is to take on the mission of advancing education, religion, learning and research in the University of Cambridge and “to promote and facilitate contributions from the Catholic Church and from members of the Catholic Church in carrying out” its endeavors. What is so remarkable about that mission is that St. Edmund’s was the first...

Are priests and bishops in the United States flourishing? How well do priests trusts bishops, or, more to the point, their own bishop? To whom do priests turn for support?––on whom do they rely? What are priests’ views of the policies and procedures surrounding accusations of abuse? Do priests worry about false accusations being brought against them? Are priests burned out? If so, which priests? T...

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” The Lord Jesus proclaimed this mission of his in the midst of a mixed crowed, surrounded by both skeptics and his disciples. To know this gift of life that he brings is to encounter in him the fullness of life. It is a life not of convenience nor a life measured strictly by accomplishments, but a life of joy. When Jesus encountered the rich...

As you may have heard on recent episodes of Church Life Today, Ignatius Press just released a new volume called The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis. I am the editor of that volume, for which seven other scholars in theology, literature, and the arts joined me to write contemplative, spiritual essays on Lewis’ Chronicles. We also brought in the original illustrati...

What you read goes a long way toward shaping the kind of person you become. At the same time, the kind of person you have become goes a long way toward determining how you read what you read, what you think about and how, and the ways in which you interpret the world around you. This mutual shaping of what and how you read, and the kind of person you become is fundamental to C. S. Lewis’ theory of...

Fr. Michael Ward is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author or editor of several books, including Heresies and How to Avoid Them, The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, and After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’ ‘Abolition of Man’. But it was another one of his books that Walter Hooper, the esteemed literary advisor to the Estate of C. S. Le...

C. S. Lewis published the first of the Chronicles of Narnia in 1950, followed by six others. Over the decades since, parents have read these books to their children as bedtime stories, and children have read them for themselves when they got a little older. That is a very profitable way to explore Narnia. But can grown-ups return to Narnia, finding meaning and wonder there for themselves? To this...

Salvation comes from the Latin word “salus”, which means “health” and “well-being”. Illness and sin are therefore both, in different ways, a lack of the health and well-being that is intended for us. We might even say that we are created for wholeness just as we are created for holiness, and that growing in one means growing in the other. Salvation is both a matter of wholeness and holiness. The M...

Cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court, and this year was no exception. In the decisions that the Court rendered in summer 2022, there were at least four cases where questions of religious liberty were adjudicated. If you have been listening to our show for some time, you may know that we regularly create episodes about religious liberty cases when...

Each year, the so called “June Court” decisions from the Supreme Court garner quite a lot of attention, but few in recent memory have received close to the same level of attention as Dobbs v. Jackson, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. By this point, everyone knows about this decision, though fewer of us know as much as we might about the actual case that was before the court, why it was de...