Jesuitical

Catholics love a good nun story. A chainsaw-wielding sister cleans up after Hurricane Irma? Social media gold. Nuns playing soccer? Yes please. And who can forget Sister Jean? (Not Zac). But every day and on every continent women religious are doing life-saving, cutting-edge work in hospitals, research laboratories, refugee camps and prisons. And those are the stories Dawn Araujo-Hawkins tells as...

Vinson Cunningham doesn’t meet many people who believe in hell—but he still does. We sit down with Vinson, who is staff writer at the New Yorker, to discuss his recent essay “How the Idea of Hell Has Shaped the Way We Think.”   We talk about our first memories of hell, how it still impacts our lives and our culture, and why it might be easier to describe hell than heaven.   In Signs of the Times,...

This week, America and Spoke Studios published “Deliver Us,” a new podcast about the sexual abuse crisis in the Catholic Church. Maggi van Dorn is the host and executive producer of “Deliver Us.” Following the release of the Pennslyvania grand jury report last summer, Maggi, like so many Catholics in the United States, found herself asking: How did could happen? And what, if anything, could Cathol...

In recent years, there has been a lot of debate around the word “consent” when it comes to preventing sexual assault on campus. What can Catholic colleges and universities bring to these discussions? To find out, we talk with Brianna Maturi, who leads Loyola Marymount University's consent program, called LMU Cares. We ask Brianna about the hook-up and dating scene on campuses today, what a culture...

This week, Jesuitical is coming to you live from Australia. We’ve mastered driving on the left side of the road (sort of); we got up close and personal with a kangaroo; and even though Ashley tried to leave me to drown in the Great Barrier Reef, we managed to record this week’s episode.   On our first international trip, we headlined the Archdiocese of Adelaide’s World Youth Day celebrations. In a...

In 2004, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa founded New Wave Feminists, a pro-life feminist organization dedicated to changing the divisive language surrounding the abortion debate. New Wave works to give women the support and resources needed to make motherhood a feasible option. Destiny was inspired to form the pro-life feminist organization by her own experience as a young mother. Destiny is one of the...

The Catholic Church, according to this week’s guest, is facing not one but two crises. The first is the sexual abuse of children and its cover-up; the second is a complete break down of trust in church leadership. Kerry Alys Robinson has been working to confront both over a decade as the founding executive director of Leadership Roundtable, a group that brings together clergy, religious and laypeo...

  Sister Helen Prejean has been the face of the anti-death penalty movement for decades. A member of the Congregation of St. Joseph, Sister Helen has been accompanying inmates on death row and lobbying against capital punishment in the United States (and in the church) for decades. She blew up on the national scene for her book Dead Man Walking, which was adapted into an Oscar-winning film, and sh...

“Reflecting on death is not a morbid affair,” believes Sister Theresa Aletheia, “it is a healthy and often healing practice that helps us accept the inevitable with hope.” Sister Theresa is a self-proclaimed #MediaNun with the Daughters of Saint Paul and the founder of the Memento Mori Project, an online revival in which she offers daily reflections about death.   This week, we talk to Sister Ther...

Juan Carlos Cruz was abused by the notorious predator Fernando Karadima, a Chilean Catholic priest. For years, the Catholic Church in Chile disregarded the abuse allegations against the powerful cleric. One cardinal even told Juan Carlos it was hard to believe he was a victim because he is gay and “might have liked it.” When Pope Francis visited Chile earlier this year, he initially dismissed as “...

The Catholic Church is failing to engage Catholic women. A groundbreaking survey of Catholic women published by America earlier this year found that 26 percent rarely or never attend Mass; 27 percent only attend a few times a year; and 67 percent of Catholic women have never served in a parish in any ministry. The GIVEN Institute is trying to fix that. This week we chat with Elise Italiano, the gr...

Stephen P. Millies is the author of Good Intentions: A History of Catholic Voters’ Road from Roe to Trump. In his book, Stephen analyzes the history of the Catholic vote, from the Supreme Court’s decision in Roe v. Wade to the presidential elections of 2016.   We talk to Stephen about the role of Catholics in U.S. politics and why so many Catholics feel politically homeless and the 2018 midterm el...

Family separations, the caravan, birthright citizenship—immigration stories have dominated the headlines in the lead-up to the 2018 midterms. But for Sister Norma Pimentel, who has worked on the U.S.-Mexico border for decades, migration is not a political issue; it is a human issue. As the executive director of Catholic Charities of the Rio Grande Valley, Sister Norma accompanies migrants who cros...

The nuns are back (on the bus). Headed by Sister Simone Campbell, the executive director of NETWORK Lobby for Catholic Social Justice, the almost-annual campaign (they’ve traveled six of the last seven years), is traveling across the country to raise awareness about the 2017 Tax Cut and Jobs Act and its impact on social services and local communities.   The nuns stopped at the Church of the Redeem...

Kevin Clarke is the chief correspondent at America. Recently, he traveled to Iraq for 12 days where he met with Iraqi Christians and other religious minorities. We talk to Kevin about why he decided to take this trip and the future of Christianity in that region. (You can check out Kevin’s reporting here.) In Signs of the Times, we discuss the canonization of Saint Óscar Romero, the resignation of...

I’m sure I am not the only city dweller who sometimes fantasizes about putting in my two-weeks notice and escaping to a dude ranch in Wyoming or an organic pumpkin farm in Nebraska (or wherever they grow pumpkins). The ever-increasing rent, the dirty, dysfunctional subway, the nonstop noise and pressure to not just keep up but get ahead—it all makes me question why I moved to New York. Well this w...

“My hope is that we can learn that we can be indigenous and all these other things: Catholic, worldly, a diplomat, a scientist, etc. My hope is that being indigenous is not limited,” said Maka Clifford in the pages of America last year. Maka is the director of curriculum and assessment at the Red Cloud Indian School, a Catholic school led by the Jesuits and the Lakota people. Maka was born on the...

“[The sex abuse crisis is] not something that I think can be fixed by our priests alone,” Amanda Zamora told us this week. “The pain and the harm has been caused by the church and the solution will need to come from the church—and that includes all of us.” Amanda is the chief audience officer at the Texas Tribune, which she joined in 2016. Previously, she spent 13 years on the East Coast working f...

He was a French novice living in a desert monastery in Syria. She was a journalist from Texas who wanted to become a nun. Then, they fell in love. I know, it sounds like a rom-com. But that is, in fact, how this week’s guest, Stephanie Saldaña, met her husband—and it’s not even the most fascinating part of her story. Today, Stephanie lives with her family in Jerusalem where she writes and teaches....

Next month, the Vatican will hold the Synod of bishops on young people. Earlier this year, in preparation for the October gathering, the Vatican hosted 300 delegates from around the world. These delegates met in Rome and produced an 11-page document, titled “Young People, The Faith and Vocational Discernment.” One of the delegates selected by the U.S.C.C.B. was Katie Prejean McGrady. She is a writ...

Michael Arceneaux has stopped going to church. After growing up as a gay black Catholic in the South, he eventually decided that he could not find a way to integrate his identities into the Catholicism he grew up with. In his new memoir: I Can’t Date Jesus: Love, Sex, Family, Race, and Other Reasons I’ve Put My Faith in Beoncé, Michael describes how coming out as gay led to tension and conflict wi...

When was the last time you talked about faith with a friend? If you’re listening to this podcast, maybe you don’t mind dropping words like “sin,” “grace” and “confession” in casual conversations. But most Americans, according to Jonathan Merritt, have forgotten or never learned how to “speak God”—and that’s bad news for people who care about the future of the church. We ask Jonathan, an award-winn...

“Being the only Latino means that while the white men get to disagree with each other and develop idiosyncratic or counterintuitive arguments, you can never just say how you feel or what you think about a story,” wrote Julio Ricardo Varela in America. “Instead, you always have to frame your comments in a way that responds to the needs of the 56.5 million people who share some part of your identity...

Did you miss us? Jesuitical is BACK from its summer break and we are sunsprayed, rested and ready to hit the studio for a new season. We also have some pretty big personal news to share, so tune in for some life updates. We also loved getting to spend some more time talking with listeners during the break, both on- and offline. Our online communities like Patreon, Twitter and our Facebook groupcon...

This week, we talk with Gilbert Sunghera, S.J. He is an architectural consultant and associate professor of architecture at the University of Detroit Mercy. Gilbert has worked on projects such as the Jesuit community at Fairfield, the parish of St. Joseph the Worker in Wyoming and the Jesuit high school chapel in Sacramento. We talk with Gilbert about architecture, how he balances his dual passion...