Jesuitical

The Oscars are this Sunday, so Zac and Ashley welcome John Dougherty, the moderator of America’s Catholic Movie Club, to unpack the state of play—and the Catholic themes—in some of this year’s Best Picture nominees. John, who is also the director of campus ministry at St. Joseph’s Prep in Philadelphia, is an expert in finding God in all films. He guides the hosts through a fun-filled conversation...

It’s the question every college senior dreads when they’re back home for Christmas break: What are you going to do after graduation? At a live recording of Jesuitical at Loyola University Chicago, Zac and Ashley talk with Paddy Gilger, S.J., about how students (and the rest of us) can use the tools of Ignatian discernment when making more life decisions. They discuss: Whether college is a bubble—a...

This week on Jesuitical, Zac and Ashley welcome Meg Kissinger, a Pulitzer Prize finalist and author of While You Were Out: An Intimate Family Portrait of Mental Illness in an Era of Silence. Meg’s memoir employs her journalistic skills to tell a tale of a Catholic family navigating mental illness. It serves as a great foundation for a profound, personal conversation about faith, tragedy, and trust...

To ring in the Lenten season, “Jesuitical” is talking Exodus 90, a 90-day ascetic spiritual practice for men centered around three pillars: prayer, fasting and fraternity. Terence Sweeney, an assistant teaching professor in the Honors Program and Humanities Department at Villanova University, joins Zac and Ashley to chat about the hugely popular program—why people love it, what it leaves out and w...

If you’re still Catholic, there are presumably things you love about the church. But it can be tempting to focus on the negatives: the scandals, the boring homilies, the lackluster music. This week, Zac and Ashley are doing something a little different: talking about why they love the church with Bishop Donald Hying of Madison, Wis. at a special live recording at St. Thomas Aquinas parish, they di...

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley are joined by Matthew Cressler, a scholar of Catholicism and race. Matthew created “Bad Catholics, Good Trouble,” a webcomic series about anti-racism and struggles for justice across American Catholic history, which frames an enlightening discussion about racial justice in the Catholic Church. They discuss: - Institutional and individual Catholic responses...

Amy-Jill “AJ” Levine, a Jewish scholar of the New Testament and author of The Misunderstood Jew: The Church and the Scandal of the Jewish Jesus, sits down with Zac and Ashley at the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, an Anglican Cathedral in New York City. It’s a dynamic interfaith conversation in an ecumenical setting, and AJ helps break open Jesus’ Jewish identity and context for the hosts...

On December 18, the Vatican’s doctrinal office released “Fiducia Supplicans,” a declaration that allowed priests to give simple or pastoral blessings to couples in irregular situations, including those in same-sex relationships. This week on “Jesuitical,” Father Alex Santora, pastor of Our Lady of Grace and St. Joseph parish in Hoboken, N.J., joins Zac and Ashley to explain how “Fiducia Supplicans...

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley welcome John Martens, a professor of theology and director of the Centre for Christian Engagement at St. Mark’s College at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver to shine a light on the Bible passages that have shaped Pope Francis’ papacy. They discuss: - How the Call of Matthew and the Parable of the Good Samaritan shape the pope’s view of a chur...

Christmas is a time for traditions. From the quirky to the classic, every family has a favorite holiday movie, dish or custom. This week on Jesuitical, Zac and Ashley talk to four of their colleagues about their Advent and Christmas traditions—some old, some aspirational, some completely made up but all filled with the joy and anticipation of the season. This is Jesuitical’s last episode of 2023—u...

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley interview Stephanie Saldaña, the author of What We Remember Will Be Saved: A Story of Refugees and The Things They Carry. Stephanie lives with her family in Bethlehem, where the economy has long relied on tourism around Christmas time as Christian pilgrims flock to the site of Jesus’ birth. But as one might imagine with the war raging in Gaza, Advent in Be...

On this week’s “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley are honored to welcome Rachel Goldberg, the mother of Hersh Goldberg-Polin, one of the hostages taken into Gaza following Hamas’s massacre at the Nova music festival in Southern Israel on Oct. 7. In the weeks since Hersh and 240 other hostages were brutally kidnapped, Rachel has met with a host of people, including the pope and the president, to share he...

Even though Pope Francis recently canceled his trip to Dubai for COP28 on doctor’s orders, the meeting still represents a huge initiative in Francis’ papacy; in “Laudate Deum,” Francis writes that the meeting has the potential to be “a historic event that honors and ennobles us as human beings” (“Laudate Deum,” No. 59). So Ashley and Zac welcomed Jose Aguto, the executive director of Catholic Clim...

Ten years ago, Pope Francis released his first papal document, “Evangelii Gaudium,” which lays out his vision for the church in the 21st century. To help break down this inaugural document of Francis’ papacy, Zac and Ashley welcome Rafael Luciani, an associate professor of practice at the School of Theology and Ministry at Boston College. They discuss: Pope Francis’ call to “pastoral conversion” a...

This week on Jesuitical, Zac and Ashley welcome Lee C. Camp, a professor of theology and ethics at Lipscomb University, the author of Scandalous Witness: A Little Political Manifesto for Christians and the host of “No Small Endeavor,” a podcast that explores what it means to live a good life. They discuss: Lee’s upbringing as a Protestant Christian in Alabama, and how his studies at the University...

How does a 25-year-old woman from Salt Lake City end up facilitating peace negotiations during a civil war in South Sudan? This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley are joined by Elizabeth Boyle, an International Relations Officer in the Community of Sant’Egidio, a lay social movement of the Catholic Church whose mission focuses on three “P”s: “prayer, peace, and the poor.” Zac and Ashley talk to...

On this special crossover episode of Jesuitical and Inside the Vatican, Zac Davis speaks with his colleagues Gerard O’Connell, Sam Sawyer, S.J., and synod member James Martin, S.J., about the concluding document of the recent synod on synodality in Rome. They discuss: The open debate about women’s ordination to the diaconate Why reference to L.G.B.T. Catholics was not included in the synthesis doc...

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley discuss a, if not the, big question hanging over the synod: Can it change church teaching? They unpack the place of authority, doctrinal development and the synod with Richard Gaillardetz, the Joseph Professor of Catholic Systematic Theology at Boston College and the author of a foundational text on the levels of church teaching: By What Authority?: A Prim...

As a young adult, José Manuel de Urquidi had a lot of questions about faith but couldn’t find satisfying answers. He went to law school, opened a craft brewery and started a family, but it wasn’t until he started podcasting that he found his purpose as a digital missionary. José is a voting member in the synod on synodality at the Vatican this month and his advocacy for evangelizing–or rather list...

This week on “Jesuitical,” Zac and Ashley turn their attention to the Middle East. Their guest is Olivier Poquillon, O.P., a French Dominican priest who, until recently, served as the pastor of a Catholic Church in Mosul, Iraq. That church was almost completely destroyed by ISIS in 2014 when the terrorist group took over one of the few remaining religiously diverse communities in the country. Afte...

Listen to this full bonus episode on Patreon! Ashley and Zac are joined by their colleagues, Sebastian Gomes and Colleen Dulle to break down the curious media strategy around the Vatican's synod on synodality. Synod members are "fasting" from public speaking after Pope Francis decried what he perceived to be distorted media narratives around previous synods. But this media blackout strategy brings...

Ashley and Zac get schooled in social justice from a Latin American perspective. Emilce Cuda, the Secretary of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America and the highest ranking lay woman working in the Vatican, joins the podcast to explain how “el pueblo”—ordinary, working class people—are at the forefront of a burgeoning synodal church. They also discuss: Populism in Latin America versus North...

The synod on synodality learned a lot from the young people who attended the youth synod in 2018, says Julian Paparella, who was 25 years old when he addressed hundreds of bishops in that assembly. Now studying in Rome, he joins Zac and Ashley to shed light on the dynamic at work inside synods and how the process has evolved over the past five years to truly listen to lay—and especially younger—pe...

Hello from Rome! Ashley and Zac are joined by their colleague Gerard O’Connell, a journalist who has covered the Vatican since 1985. They bring questions from listeners about the Synod on Synodality, which began this week: How will the discussions inside the synod hall work? How will the synod deal with internal polarization? What will determine the success of this synod? They also discuss: The ch...

This week on Jesuitical, Zac and Ashley are joined by Chris Hadley, S.J., to talk about the oft-overshadowed third person of the Trinity: the Holy Spirit. Father Hadley, an associate professor of systematic theology at Santa Clara University, uses his expertise in pneumatology to guide us through a great discussion about: How Catholics understand the Spirit, from biblical times to today Signs of t...