In 1937, Abel Meeropol, a teacher in New York City, wrote a poem and a song that echoed through the country: Southern trees bear a strange fruit: Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, Black bodies swingin' in the Southern breeze, St...
"As I thought more about that prison pudding cup, I began to realize something important. Me, sobbing in front of that vending machine? That isn’t the whole story." EDITORIAL…
A few years ago the McGrath Institute for Church Life welcomed Donald Jackson, the visionary calligrapher commissioned by St. John’s University in Collegeville to create a hand-written illuminated Bible using techniques that date b...
Continuing our five-part follow-up to the essay "Forming Adults in Faith Through Fiction," here are the next ten recommended books for use in adult faith formation. 31) C. S. Lewis, The…
When I was in grade school, the whole idea of having a vocation seemed rather clear to me: I learned that I had a vocation either to the priesthood or to marriage, and that was it. Anyone not choosing to be a priest (or brother) or a nun...
John Courtney Murray referred to the development of doctrine as the “issue under the issues” at Vatican II.[1] Whether the Council Fathers considered changing the practice of liturgy, the teaching on religious freedom, or the...
Continuing our five-part follow-up to the essay "Forming Adults in Faith Through Fiction," here are the next ten recommended books for use in adult faith formation. 21) Patricia Hample, Virgin…
Saints throughout the ages have lived lives of heroic virtue in every imaginable context, as martyrs, missionaries, and mystics; doctors, lawyers, and teachers; workers, cloistered contemplatives, and itinerant beggars. There are also pl...
Continuing our five-part follow-up to the essay "Forming Adults in Faith Through Fiction," here are the next ten recommended books for use in adult faith formation. 11) Dorothy…
The Church on earth is the visible manifestation of Christ’s love that is enfleshed between each of her members. St. Jerome described this incarnation of love in his famous phrase Corpus Christi ecclesia est, quae vinculo stringitu...
As an adopting father, I have a unique relationship with my child. While many babies bond with their mother through late night breastfeeding, as adopting parents, my wife and I split this nightly vigil. From his earliest days in the...
"I started to think about how often I had told others I would pray for them. I used it as a meaningless phrase to convey that they were in my mind. But had I ever really prayed for them? Really prayed?"…