Church Life Today

The Christian life is a life of creativity, the creativity to receive the Good News of Jesus Christ and allow him to transform every dimension of who you are, every aspect of how you live, wherever you find yourself in life. That’s the theory, but how does this happen in practice? Most especially, how does this happen in the business world, in the professions, in the life of work where it can be e...

The theology of the Eucharist in St. Thomas Aquinas may seem complex, but that complexity is conformed to the tremendous mystery of Christ’s gift of himself in the sacrament. There is growth ahead for us not primarily in understanding the Eucharist as if we could ever achieve something like conceptual mastery, but especially in growing in love for and devotion to the Son of God who acts in love fo...

St. Augustine’s Eucharistic theology is more controversial than you might think. It is controversial because throughout the Christian tradition, rival theological camps have appealed to Augustine to further their own arguments and Christian practice. It would not be uncommon for Augustine to be arguing against Augustine in these debates––at least in terms of how Augustine is presented and made to...

God is Eucharistic. That is a bold and profound claim. It is different from only saying that God gives the Eucharist or that Christ is made present in the Eucharist. To say that our God is a Eucharistic God has profound consequences for, well, everything… including how we revere and adore the Eucharist now, and how we come to know God through the Eucharist. My guest today wrote an essay under the...

This week we bring you another past episode from June 2019 with Maureen Condic. Do you want to know when human life begins? And how to explain that to other people? That's what I'm going to ask our guest today, Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah Medical School. In 2015, Dr. Condic was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life,...

This week we bring you another past episode from February 2021, with Holly Taylor Coolman.“We have to imagine a people so deeply committed to their neighbors that they would risk their lives for them—and risk their lives perhaps not even to save them, but simply to be present and perhaps to speak to them of another life. As we imagine that, we begin to see the enormity and beauty of our own vocati...

This week we bring you a past episode from December, 2020 with Mary O'Callaghan. Every child is a mystery, but as scientific advances in prenatal testing grow, so does the temptation to know more and more about our unborn children. Will they be healthy? What are the chances they will have a disability? With questions like these comes another question: how much is too much when it comes to try...

This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July, 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 2.Americans do not talk much about abortion, but we can under the right conditions. This is one of the conclusions that Dr. Tricia Bruce and her team of researches posit in the report on their groundbreaking and comprehensive interview study focusing on abortion attitudes in the United States. Dr. Bruce is joini...

This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July of 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 1.American do not talk much about abortion. That’s sounds strange, doesn’t it? We seem to hear a lot about abortion in the news, in politics, in relation to the Supreme Court, but in terms of everyday Americans in their interpersonal conversations, we are actually very quiet about abortion..This is part of wha...

If you attend Mass regularly, maybe you’ve thought that your parish is a little less full than it had been before the pandemic. Or, maybe you’re someone who has noticed that you yourself haven’t been attending Sunday Mass quite as consistently as you did before. Some parish and diocesan leaders have some evidence about their own Mass attendance numbers to confirm the perceived drop in participatio...

In his apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, St. John Paul II wrote that a Catholic university or college is “a living institutional wtiness to Christ and his message, so vitally important in cultures marked by secularism.” He continues by saying that everything in these Catholic institutions should be conducted in harmony with the evangelizing mission of the Church, including offering an “ed...

Christ did not rise from the dead so we could gorge ourselves on marshmallow Peeps. Gorging is an act of singular enjoyment, and it only takes a moment to look around our world to see how disastrous it is when people just fill themselves with what they want… besides, it would be just gross if all we wanted was to be stuffed with marshmallow Peeps. The true measure of Easter joy is the degree to wh...

With the right kind of care, support, and attention, the last days and months of an aging loved one’s life can become a source of new life for those who draw near to them. My guest today witnesses to this splendid, glorious truth in her new book about accompanying her father through death into life. Noreen Madden McInnis is the director of liturgy and spirituality for the Diocese of San Diego and...

When we, as Christians, engage in evangelization that seeks to transform our culture, what metaphor tends to inform our thoughts and actions? Frequently, we land on the metaphor of “war”––we are engaged in a “culture war.” Have we thought, though, about the implications of that metaphor, about what it might do to us and what it might do to “the other” in our eyes? If we do think about that, perhap...

It’s your friends who break your heart. That’s the title of the article by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic. It is an incisive and enlightening piece that also made me laugh out loud. Friendship doesn’t get the kind of attention that other forms of relationship tend to get. It is not studied as much in psychology. It is not examined like family relationships for the sake of explaining the way some...

When you hold a position of authority in Catholic education and you believe that the #1 goal of Catholic schools is to evangelize, then that affects everything you do. It affects who you hire and why, what your priorities are, how you think about curriculum and culture, and what you value in the hard decisions you have to make in times of trial or crisis. You give an account of why the kind of edu...

Do you or someone you know feel burned out by work? Have you questioned the place of work in your life, and how it balances with everything else? Do we work to live? Do we live to work? Do we reach for and sometimes touch value that is in our work and also somehow beyond our work? What is the meaning of work? Here’s another question: Can philosophy help us find meaning and purpose at work? That is...

Missionaries venture to sites unseen, to open up the Gospel in new ways. The hard to get to places are the special province of missionaries, who exercise both creativity and commitment to get where others have not thought to go. We might think of missionaries sailing across seas or hiking across mountains, but a missionary’s vision and aim can take on very different forms than those we see in movi...

Catholic schools extend and make present the life of Christ in his Church. Yes, Catholic education serves the students who are nurtured in its classrooms, but as we know the parents and families of those students are also often nurtured and even newly evangelized through the school. Catholic schools can be one of the most important ways in which the Church responds to the concrete needs and desire...

“A woman who knows she’s loved can do anything.” This fundamental belief animates the ministry of the Sisters of Life, who dedicate themselves to building up a culture of life and who work with the Lord to drive out the contempt for life in our world. It all begins with restoring the belief in one’s own belovedness before God. In collaboration with our McGrath Institute for Church Life and CampCam...

In countries with underfunded health systems, surgical care is often ignored and widely inaccessible to the poor. Local facilities lack appropriate supplies and equipment, medical professionals do not have the benefit of training in the latest techniques, and few can afford the high cost of surgery. An organization responding to this gap in healthcare is One World Surgery. Focusing heavily on form...

Does purgatory matter? Does it matter later, as in after we die? How about now? Does purgatory make a difference to who we are now as Christians, how we live now, what we are responsible for now, and our relationship to the dead now? My guest today has been researching and writing on purgatory for some time. Dr. Brett Salkeld is no stranger to the McGrath Institute for Church Life, where he has co...

When people speak of “gender fluidity,” what is the understanding of the human body that is at play? When a researcher analyzes a dead body, are they seeing a still frame of what the body really is? How do we best conceive of––maybe even wonder about––the human body, and what does that mean for gender theories, feminist concerns, and biological sex? To guide us in thinking about all these things a...

How would an authentically Catholic feminism both dialogue with and meaningfully differ from secular feminism? This is the focus of a new program from The Catholic Woman. The program is called  “Cultivating Catholic Feminism.” It  seeks to establish a framework for Catholic feminism through lesson and story and, from that framework, to engage with secular feminism on a range of important topics. T...

Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am? What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is? These are the two main questions of John’s Swinton’s book on Living in the Memories of God, and these are the kind of questions that Xavier Symon is trying to explore in developing a more robust theology and philosophy of dementia. Xavier Symon is Postdoctoral Research Fellow...