Church Life Today

It was the strength of the Israelites that scared the Pharaoh. You learn that in the first several verses of the Book of Exodus. The rest of the Book is about the journey to freedom: first the liberation from Egypt, then the training in freedom through the years in the desert. The whole journey concerns Israel’s growth as God’s own people. Since 2016, the Exodus 90 program has been following this...

If you wait for certainty before acting, you will rarely ever act. More often, it is action that leads to certainty. We might expect to find a saying like that on an inspirational poster or as the takeaway from a motivational talk. But we might be surprised, challenged, and invigorated to consider such wisdom when approaching discernment, especially discernment of the priesthood. Rather than waiti...

More than 8,000 miles separate students at the University of Notre Dame from students at St. Bakhita Vocational Training School in Northern Uganda, but a course in innovation and design thinking brings them together. The creator of that course is Wendy Angst, teaching professor in the Medoza College of Business at Notre Dame, where she also serves as assistant department chair in Management and Or...

On more than a few occasions on this show, we have hosted experts in media and technology, or education and family life, to talk about young people and the effects of digital and social media on their relationships and development. Today, I want to do something a little different, not in terms of content but in terms of conversation partner. That’s because my guest today is not someone talking abo...

Today I’m doing a different kind of show to bridge Advent and Christmas. I’m calling this episode, “The Three Wisemen”. My three guests are not here in the studio, nor are they joining me by phone. Instead, they are with us in their preaching. This episode is built around Advent and Christmas Sermons of the Saints. My guests will be the great British intellectual and churchman St. John Henry Newma...

There is nothing not to like about today’s episode. Advent music, Christmas movies, and obsessive concern with “progressive solemnity,” with both well-reasoned and unfounded opinions mixed in. Joining me today is Carolyn Pirtle, program director of the Notre Dame Center for Liturgy. She’s going to take us through the sounds Advents, the films of Christmas, and more besides. Church Life Today is a...

The sin of racism disfigures and hides the truth of the human person. The healthy response to sin is conversion, and conversion begins with begging the Lord for healing. That healing, though, provokes and necessitates change. My guest today is committed to helping to develop a Catholic response to the sin of racism, along these very lines. Gloria Purvis is well-known for in Catholic media in her c...

“Catholic Christans came into my community and they helped us with education, they helped us with healthcare, they helped us to find our self-respect and to realize our capabilities when the world had told us for so long that we were nothing and would amount to nothing. And I wanted to be part of that effort. That’s radical Christianity, that’s radical Catholicism. How do we find the needs of God’...

It is Thanksgiving week and we want to celebrate that here on Church Life Today. I am going to do different kind of episode to mark the occasion. This episode is called “Eucharist Means Thanksgiving” and what I want to do is share with you quotes, passages, even a poem that invite us to deepen our appreciation for and wonder about the gift of Christ in the Eucharist as an exchange of thanksgiving....

Praying for the dead. This is a spiritual work of mercy, but does it really do anything? Do our prayers matter to the dead? Do the dead matter to us? I wanted to find us some help in understanding this practice of the Christian faith, and so I have invited Prof. John Cavadini to talk with us about his own practice of praying for the dead, the love of Christ poured out for us, and our communion wit...

It is easy to bemoan the problems in the Church; it is harder to take the initiative to heal and renew the life of the Church, and to sacrifice for that renewal with all your own creativity and passion. But that is exactly what the Our Sunday Visitor Institute for Catholic Innovation is calling forth from leaders in the Church today. They want to help visionaries become the innovators who discover...

Meg Hunter-Kilmer has no time for bland, stale stories of saints. She is too busy reveling in the wild and diverse beauty of holy people. When their stories have not been told well, she seeks after the heart of their story and waits to see the drama, the glory, the full-fledged humanity that others have missed. And then she tells their stories. Meg tells the stories of the saints with passion, wit...

​​There was a time before the Second Vatican Council, and there is a time after. The time before is old, outdated, stodgy, stale, and lifeless. The time after is modern, progressive, adaptive, active, and alive. Out with the old and in with the new. That, at least, is the way Vatican II has often been portrayed, as a breaking point between liberals and traditionalists, between those who want to be...

A good number of the students I have taught in theology courses at Notre Dame have gone on to medical school. Many of these students feel called to the practice of medicine, and would even speak of their professional pursuits as a vocation. But I often hear from the graduates a grave sense of disappointment in what they encounter in medical school. These are the kind of people who are most committ...

What happens online does not stay online. The borders between the digital world andthe flesh and blood world have become rather porous. The ways we think, speak,and act in the digital environment bears meaning for how we think, speak, andact offline, and vice versa, at least to some extent. When we search around inmedia for Catholic voices, or for how Catholics engage with each other in thedigital...

​​“O God, smash the teeth in their mouths!”“Make their eyes so dim they cannot see.”“May his children be fatherless, his wife, a widow.”Who prays like that? Well, we do: Christians. Those petitions––those curses––that I justrecited come from Psalm 58, Psalm 69, and Psalm 109. But we don’t hear themvery often: not in the public liturgy as at Mass, not in the liturgy of thehours that we might pray a...

What does it take to create a world? Well, you might think it requires you to be God. So why don’t we ask the question about a literary world, but nevertheless a complete world, with a comprehensive vision, an atmosphere and a history and languages, customs, and traditions. We might think few people are capable of creating such things, and we are definitely right in thinking that. Yet there are so...

When a Catholic parish is being what is called to be, what does that look like? What are the marks of healthy and vibrant parish life? If we really tended to questions like these, we might find ourselves changing our perceptions of what it is we want from our parishes. And that, my friends, may very well mean that we have to change what we ourselves give to our parishes. My guest today invests her...

“Nothing new can happen between my son and me. And while I have taught the parable of the prodigal son many times, these days I feel not just why, when the lost is found, there is great cause for celebration, but how truly the zest goes out of life with such a loss. There is no word for the pairings of emotions one feels in grief—the enormity of love mixed with the enormity of sorrow.”Those words...

We are developing a mini-series here on Church Life Today about the relationship with our beloved dead. We’re talking about death, grief, longing, hope, and a lot more. This is connected to a project I myself am working on between the McGrath Institute for Church Life, where I work, and Ave Maria Press, which is a book on this topic. Animating that project are questions like “Where do our beloved...

“Where do our beloved dead go? How do they live? And what does this all mean for us,who remain?”Those questions are animating a project I’m working on between the McGrath Institutefor Church Life, where I work, and Ave Maria Press as part of the EngagingCatholicism series. To help with this project, I have asked a few people ifthey would talk with me about their experiences of grief, about their h...

What do you want? We get asked a question like that often: when you order at a restaurant, when generating a Christmas list, when at a crossroads in a dating relationship. But of course, there are differing levels of seriousness to that question: sometimes it is what do you prefer or what strikes your fancy, and sometimes it is what do you really want. In other words, what do you desire? It is har...

“While the shift to at-home learning has underscored the ubiquity of learning, [especially since March 2020, it has also cast into sharp relief [a crucial but suddenly imperiled dimension of education, which is] the distinct gift of teachers and artful teaching.” Those words appeared in the Church Life Journal as part of an essay titled, “New Pathways for Catholic Schools After the Pandemic.” The...

What if your decisions about how to use technology were based on your fundamental beliefs about what it means to be a human being, and what human flourishing is? Now, what if your children also made their decisions about technology in that way? I know that sounds like a doubly-tall task, like a fantastic sort of idealism. But what if I told you that this is not only doable, but utterly practical a...

When we educate our children, what are we educating them for? In the Catholic tradition, the end of education has always been sanctity: to form truly free, wise, virtuous disciples who love God and their neighbor. This kind of education concerns the cultivation of the whole person: mind and body, heart and imagination, especially in terms of the habits developed, the affections nurtured, and the a...