Church Life Today (OSV Podcasts)

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 forming local partnerships and capacity-building, One World Surgery has established a surgery center in Honduras and is developing one in the Dominican Republic. In Honduras, the Honduran staff leads the surgery center that serves patients on a daily basis, while volunteers and medical missionaries provide additional personnel support, education, and an extension into specialty services. Through its partnership with local health professionals and working in tandem with the local health care system, One World Surgery seeks to provide world-class surgical care and strengthen primary care for underserved communities.My guest today is Senior Director of Programs and Operations for One World Surgery. Kate Clitheroe graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and pre-med, before completing a master’s in public health from Washington University in St. Louis. She has served in health care in Honduras for several organizations, and has been with One World Surgery for the past six years, both in Honduras and in the U.S. I first came to know Kate when she served as a Mentor in Faith in our Notre Dame Vision program while she was an undergrad, after she attended the program as a high school student herself. She joins me to talk about her work, the impact of One World Surgery, and what it means to live solidarity in action.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 time and energy in helping parishes realize their mission, especially through forming Catholics for lives of vibrant discipleship. Katherine Coolidge is Director for Parish and Diocesan Services at the Catherine of Siena Institute. She joins me today to talk about where we are in parish life, where we should be, and how we get from one to the other.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“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 hope forcommunion with loved ones who have died, and about their images of Heaven. I’mnot recording all of these conversations, but I am asking a couple (or maybethree) people if they would be willing to record an episode for our show sothat you can listen in, too.Today is the first of those couple or maybe three episodes. My guest is Laura KellyFanucci, a writer and speaker who has worked extensively on grief and longingand hope and vocation. But she’s also got a story you’ve got to hear. Thanksfor listening in.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

C. S. Lewis published the first of the Chronicles of Narnia in 1950, followed by six others. Over the decades since, parents have read these books to their children as bedtime stories, and children have read them for themselves when they got a little older. That is a very profitable way to explore Narnia. But can grown-ups return to Narnia, finding meaning and wonder there for themselves? To this I say, emphatically: YES.That emphatic YES motivates a new book we just released with Ignatius Press called The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis. I am actually the editor of the volume, in which we challenge adult readers to contemplate Lewis’ chronicles as profound, meaningful, and delightful immersions into a pilgrimage toward moral and spiritual growth. In the volume you will find one essay for each of the seven chronicles, with each one written by a different scholar of theology, literature, and the arts. There are also seven original illustrations in the volume––again, one for each chronicle––that present stunning glimpses into the narratives through rich symbolism. These illustrations are accompanied by a sevenfold poem cycle, completely new and original to this book, that draws us toward wondering at the majestic Lion Aslan whom we come to know for a little while in the vast land of Narnia. And before all of that, there is an introductory chapter on “Arriving at Narnia” which helps us prepare to re-engage these chronicles and the journey they beckon us toward, while also teaching us about what Lewis set out to do with his chronicles. The author of that introductory chapter is the guest on today’s episode, which was originally recorded a few years ago for a lecture series we hosted that first explored this whole topic.David Fagerberg is professor of theology at the University of Notre Dame. For years and years, he has taught a hugely popular course on the theme of deification in the literature of C. S. Lewis, in addition another courses on G. K. Chesterton and a whole host of courses in his field of specialization, which is liturgical theology. Among his book publications are On Liturgical Theology, Liturgical Mysticism, and Liturgical Dogmatics. You can find his essay on “Arriving at Narnia” at the beginning of The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis, edited by Leonard DeLorenzo (that’s me) and published by Ignatius Press.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 Organization––she is also a fellow of the Pulte Institute for Global Development. Through a partnership with St. Bakhita’s begun in early 2020, Professor Angst has taught and guided Notre Dame undergraduate students in working with students at St. Bakhita’s and local community members to develop and strengthen this school that helps create opportunities for young girls who otherwise have few opportunities before them.One of the best places to learn about St. Bakhita’s Vocational Training School is on their Facebook page, where you can also link to ways to supporting St. Bakhita students, especially in the form of scholarships.For now, Wendy Angst joins me to talk about the history and mission of the school, the ways in which design thinking is helping her own students serve the St. Bakhita community, and the innovative approach to development that begins with empathy.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 for us. If we can allow St. Thomas to help us raise our minds to the wonders of Christ’s Eucharistic gift, perhaps we can then better raise our hearts into union with him.Our guide to helping us learn from St. Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist is Dr. Michael Hahn, assistant professor of Sacred Scripture at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary. Our conversation today follows from a lecture Dr. Hahn gave at the annual Academy of Catholic Theology conference, where he spoke on the sacraments and sanctification in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 waiting for certainty to take the first step, start taking steps and build toward certainty. This, in a way, is the approach of a new guide to discernment produced by the Archdiocese of Boston, in the form of a series of short videos under the title “Sciavias: Know the Way of the Lord.” The creator of the series is Fr. Michael Zimmerman, assistant vocations director in the archdiocese, who joins me today to discuss discernment, the sanctification of time and place, and discovering true intimacy in the Christian life.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 participation, but many of the rest have hunches or our own unscientific observations. Regardless, for everyone who notices and is concerned about the decrease in Mass attendance, the question of whether or not those who are not there will come back lingers.Thanks to a new report from Vinea Research, we now have survey data to support or challenge our assumptions, and to give us some reliable predictors about future Mass attendance, as well as church giving, faith in God, and prayer. My guest today is Hans Plate, founder and president of Vinea Research, which seeks to support the Church by helping it better understand those it serves through expert market research and insights. He joins me to discuss the findings of his team’s study on “The Impact of COVID-19 on U.S. Catholics.”

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 especially challenging to integrate faith into daily practice, and might lead to loneliness and longing before it yields a sense of communion and fulfillment?Young Catholic Professionals was launched to in 2010 to help young adult Catholics meet these challenges, to help lead one another into a more holistic and vibrant life of faith, especially in consideration of their work and careers. Jennifer Baugh, the founder and executive director of Young Catholic Professionals, joins me today to talk about the restlessness and desire of Catholics in their 20s and 30s, the communities and mentoring that her organization establishes to support and empower these young adults, and the ways in which this service is ultimately ordered to the life of the Church and engagement in local parishes.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly.” The Lord Jesus proclaimed this mission of his in the midst of a mixed crowed, surrounded by both skeptics and his disciples. To know this gift of life that he brings is to encounter in him the fullness of life. It is a life not of convenience nor a life measured strictly by accomplishments, but a life of joy. When Jesus encountered the rich young man who undervalued his own life and the life of others, Jesus looked upon that young man and loved him. That look of love was an invitation to open up to joy. For those who rediscover themselves in the Lord’s look of love, life begins anew, abundantly. My guest today has not only found herself in the Lord’s look of love, but also is hoping to spend her life reflecting that look of love toward others. Maggie Garnett is a 2022 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, who will soon enter postulancy with the Sisters of Life, a religious community that vows to protect and enhance the sacredness of life. The Sisters of Life were founded by the late Cardinal John O’Connor of New York, who felt a strong call to do everything in his power to protect human life after he had a profound and distressing experience while visiting the Dachau concentration camp in Germany in 1975. After numerous frustrating attempts to pursue this calling, Cardinal O’Connor penned an article in the early 1990s in a local Catholic New York paper under the headline: “Help Wanted: Sisters of Life.” That article appeared across the country and hundreds of letters started pouring in in response. In 1991, 8 women gathered in New York as the founding members of this new community, and since then the community has grown to over a hundred sisters from across the globe, with missions across the United States. Maggie is now one of the latest young women who seeks to answer this call to love others into life. Together, we will talk about her discernment, the charism of life, the habits of prayer, and more.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court, and this year was no exception. In the decisions that the Court rendered in summer 2022, there were at least four cases where questions of religious liberty were adjudicated. If you have been listening to our show for some time, you may know that we regularly create episodes about religious liberty cases whenever the Supreme Court decides them, and our resident expert and guide to understanding these cases and the impact of the decisions is Professor Rick Garnett of the Notre Dame Law School, who is the founding director of the Program on Church, State, and Society, as well as a fellow of the Religious Liberty Initiative.This year, Rick has joined me for two consecutive episodes, with this being the second. In the first episode––right before this one––we talked about the decision in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Now we will talk about a host of religious liberty cases concerning state funding for school choice, the right to religious expression for government employees, non-discrimination on the basis of religion for private speech in public spaces, the religious rights of prisoners on death row, and even a “non-case” about religious exemptions to vaccination mandates. I hope you will find this conversation as helpful and educational as I do.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 “education in a faith-context that forms men and women capable of rational and critical judgement and conscious of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” I wonder if you might agree that Catholic colleges and universities that seek to form young adults holistically and intentionally in this manner are perhaps more important today than they ever have been.My guest today carries the responsibility of helping provide just such a Christocentric formation in an intentional college culture. Dr. Joe Wurtz is Dean of Students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where he also serves as Executive Director of the Gregorian Fellows. A graduate of Benedictine himself where he earned a BA in philosophy, he also holds a master’s degree in Higher Ed Administration from the University of Kansas, and a doctorate in Higher Ed Administration from George Washington University. As Dean of Students, he oversees programs and activities involving residence life, student development, intramural programs, student health services, counseling, student activities, and career development at Benedictine. He joins me to talk about the vision of student formation at a Catholic college in our day and age.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“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 author of that essay is Dr. Kati Macaluso. Kati works and teaches at the University of Notre Dame within the Institute for Educational Initiatives, where she forms new teachers and helps to strengthen Catholic schools all across the country. She enables us to see that the experiences of education over the past year now force upon us urgent questions about the meaning and end of education, about the special mission of Catholic education, and about what exactly we hope that our children receive through their education. What Kati has to share would always be relevant, but in our day and age it is not only relevant but timely and even prophetic.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 some authors––some artists––who manage such a feat, and one such figure who stands perhaps above just about any other in the powers and fruits of creation is J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings. So let’s ask our question again: What did it take for Tolkien to create Middle-earth? And that is where today’s episode comes in. Many might think that Tolkien was a stand-alone genius, to whom ideas and images came complete unto themselves and without precedent. We might think his work is something like “pure originality” in that he conjures things up out of nothing, as if he were quite a bit like God who is indeed an uncreated creator. Or we might think that any influences Tolkien had, however dim they might be, are all located in the past, which accorded more with his special area of scholarly expertise. But today, we will consider the modern influences on Tolkien’s creative imagination, and in so doing we will think about what a creative imagination is and how a Catholic like Tolkien exercises his imagination.To guide us on our quest, Dr. Holly Ordway joins us today. Dr. Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, whose recently published book is Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-Earth Beyond the Middle Ages.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 which the disciples of the Risen Lord indulge in the good of others. The celebration of Easter is ordered to communion, so much so that Easter works centrifugally through Christ’s disciples: we move the joy outwards.Using Pope Francis’s beloved term, Easter is the season for “missionary disciples.” The heart of the mission is Christ, the source of the mission is his Resurrection, and the power of the mission is the Holy Spirit he imparts to us. With this mission, we, his disciples, bring him to others and work to unite all in him.This is a special episode of Church Life Today. Only very rarely do I create an episode without a guest, but when I do it is usually to offer a special seasonal episode like this one where I try offer a series of reflections that, I hope, are of some interest or use to you in your prayer, in your life, for your imagination. So today I want to spend this time with you asking, How do we embrace and live out the mission of Easter? The short answer: By heeding the Gospel and then exercising our own “missionary creativity” to become the disciples Christ frees us to be. And what I want is to offer is some in exploring this more fully by talking about four ways to fulfill our Easter mission––one way from each of the four Gospels.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 trying to know who our children will be? My guest is Dr. Mary O’Callaghan, a developmental psychologist who, among other things, studies, writes about, and teaches on “disability selective abortion” and issues of human dignity.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“The Eucharist is the source and summit of the Christian life.” But do we, as Catholics, really understand what the Eucharist is? Let me rephrase that: do we really understand who the Eucharist is? Actually, let me try one more time: Do we fully revere and adore him who meets us in the Eucharist? Maybe we could use some help with all of that.My friend and colleague Tim O’Malley has written a book that will help all of us both to understand the Eucharist better and, especially, to grow in our love of the Eucharist through devotion, prayer, and longing. Tim’s new book is Real Presence: What Does It Mean and Why Does It Matter? The book is part of the new “Engaging Catholicism” series from our McGrath Institute for Church Life through Ave Maria Press, where we explore important but perhaps misunderstood doctrines and devotions of the Catholic faith.In Real Presence, Tim teaches us about the related but distinct doctrines of transubstantiation and of the real presence, but he does more than merely teach us things to know. He shows us how what we come to understand must be joined to how we pray, and how we allow the Lord to transform and illumine our spiritual senses as we meet him in the Eucharist. This is an utterly practical book even as it is an utterly learned book. And today, Tim joins me to talk about the Eucharist, Eucharistic formation, and Eucharistic spirituality.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 with the dead in the Eucharist. Yes, these are theological matters, but they are also matters of devotion, of grieving, of longing, and of hope. I think that what we are about to talk about will matter to you. I think it will matter to me, too.If you’ve been listening to our show for some, you know that I am working on a project between my own McGrath Institute for Church Life and Ave Maria Press about our relationship with our beloved dead. This is part of a book I am writing on this topic. As part of the project, I’ve been talking with people about their memories of and their hopes for their beloved dead. I’ve asked a few of those people if they would be willing to record an episode for our show so you can listen in, too. This episode stands in that line, and there were three previous episodes where I hosted, first, https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=cbab65ed7bc87dfe8ddbbc4c5ad79c7a (Laura Kelly Fanucci), then https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=41036ec763c281f66445a4c88d8be772 (Stephanie DePrez), and finally https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=3bbfed57c695430c36e1ca5729d22b0b (Robert Cording). You may want to check out those episodes on our podcast if you like this one.By the way, John Cavadini is professor of theology and McGrath-Cavadini Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, which makes him my boss.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Would you ever consider moving thousands of miles for the primary purpose of living in a committed and passionate Catholic community? Of course, people move all the time for jobs and other reasons, but to make the pursuit of a Catholic environment the main reason for a major move seems a bit unconventional. Today, we are going to talk about the unconventional with someone who is seeing just this sort of 6thing happen… and who is helping it to happen.My guest is Thomas Curtin, Headmaster at Our Lady of the Rosary Catholic school in Greenville, South Carolina. Tommy joined me on a previous episode to talk about his work of building this particular Catholic school from the ground up, expanding from an elementary school to a K–12 institution that is modeled more on the family than on a university. I am happy to welcome him back to talk about some of the fruits of the kind of school he, his pastor, and the parishioners at Our Lady of the Rosary have been building, specifically in terms of Catholic families from all over the country moving to join their community. 

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 joining me for the second of a two-part interview on her report “How Americans Understand Abortion.” Dr. Bruce’s study was conducted in partnership with the McGrath Institute for Church Life and you can download a copy of the report for free at mcgrath.nd.edu/resources.I’m Leonard DeLorenzo, this is Church Life Today, and you can find part 1 of my interview with Dr. Bruce on our Church Life Today podcast.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathND

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“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 come from Robert Cording in an essay he published in the Image journal with the title, “In the Unwalled City.” In this remarkable essay, he puts into words what cannot be contained in words: his grief for the death of his son Daniel, his desire to keep communion alive with his son, and his duty of remembrance that raises his son to life in his own life. I reached out to Professor Cording after reading his essay and he graciously agreed to join me here on our show today.If you’ve been listening to recent episodes of our show, you know that I am working on a project between my own McGrath Institute for Church Life and Ave Maria Press about our relationship with our beloved dead. This is part of a book I am writing on this topic. As part of the project, I’ve been talking with people about their memories of and their hopes for their beloved dead. I’ve asked a few of those people if they would be willing to record an episode for our show so you can listen in, too. This is the third of these episodes––on the previous two I hosted Laura Kelly Fanucci and Stephanie DePrez.My guest today––Robert Cording––is professor emeritus at College of the Holy Cross. His most recent poetry collection is Without My Asking (CavanKerry). You can find some of his other recent work in the Georgia Review, New Ohio Review, Hudson Review, and The Common.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 capacities as radio host, TV series host and creator, and now as the host of “The Gloria Purvis Podcast” from America Media. Gloria was recently named as the inaugural Pastoral Fellow of the Notre Dame Office of Life and Human Dignity, in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. Through this fellowship she will develop resources for classroom teachers, co-create an online course addressing the theology of racial justice, deliver two public lectures on Notre Dame’s campus, and facilitate a workshop series for pastoral leaders equipping them for dialogue and engagement on issues of social justice. Today she joins me to follow up especially on her first public lecture as part of her fellowship, which bore the title “Racial Justice: Solidarity and the Church’s Call to Action.”

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“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’s people? How do we as a Catholic Christian community of believers say that we believe that God is active in our lives, and we want to share the Good News with you?”These are the words of Servant of God, Sr. Thea Bowman. She encountered the Gospel not just in the words but also in the actions of the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration who came from Wisconsin down to Thea’s hometown of Canton, Mississippi and created new opportunities for education, for healthcare, for respect and dignity for Thea and other young black people like her in the segregated south of the early 20th Century. She was so attracted to the Gospel she found in these sisters that she joined them. The Word of God took root in the heart and mind, the imagination and the cultural history of Thea Bowman. Now, more than 30 years after her death, her cause for canonization is underway, and she shows a new generation of Catholics and Americans what it means to be fully alive in the Gospel.As part of the annual Saturdays with the Saints lecture series through the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, Kayla August presented on the life and witness of Sr. Thea. Today, Kayla joins me to talk about this remarkable woman, this servant of God, this witness to Christ’s life in an especially American context. Kayla herself is a doctoral student in theology and ministry at Boston College. Prior to beginning her doctoral studies, she served in Campus Ministry here at the University of Notre Dame, and also as a rector for one of or woman’s residence halls. Kayla is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana. You can find the video of her lecture on Sr. Thea on the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s Youtube page, or simply by googling “Saturday with the Saints, Thea Bowman.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Fr. Michael Ward is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author or editor of several books, including Heresies and How to Avoid Them, The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, and After Humanity: A Guide to C. S. Lewis’ ‘Abolition of Man’. But it was another one of his books that Walter Hooper, the esteemed literary advisor to the Estate of C. S. Lewis, lauded as “unsurpassed in showing a comprehensive knowledge of and depth of insight into C. S. Lewis’ works.” That book is the groundbreaking and persuasive Planet Narnia: The Seven Heavens in the Imagination of C. S. Lewis.Fr. Ward brought his world-class expertise on the works of C. S. Lewis to a new volume recently released from Ignatius Press, for which I myself happened to serve as editor. This book is The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis. In the book we take Narnia seriously as a place where the choices and actions, the desires and dispositions of children affect their own destinies and the fate of the world. It is a place where children learn what it means to grow in maturity, to become responsible and develop character. But it is also a place where adults can always start over in relearning what is all too quickly forgotten, for the sake of their own moral and spiritual transformation. For his part, Fr. Ward authored the chapter on Lewis’s Prince Caspian. In his chapter, Fr. Ward helps us to get acquainted with and be delighted by what it feels like to live inside a chivalric tradition.We first recorded this episode a few years ago when Fr. Ward visited Notre Dame to give a lecture on Prince Caspian. Our conversation moves broadly across and deeply into the imagination of C. S. Lewis.As for me, I’m Leonard DeLorenzo, this is Church Life Today, a production of the McGrath Institute for Church Life. I’m glad you’re here.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 what Dr. Tricia Bruce and her team of researchers discovered in their groundbreaking and comprehensive interview study of abortion attitudes in the United States among “every Americans.” The report of their study was released in mid-July 2020 under the title “How Americans Understand Abortion.” This study was undertaken in partnership with our McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and you can download a copy of this report for free at mcgrath.nd.edu/resources.Today Dr. Bruce joins me, Leonard DeLorenzo, for a two-part interview to discuss her report and to offer us some observations and insights about American attitudes towards abortion. This is part 1 of our interview, while part 2 will air next week on Redeemer radio or, if you are listening on our podcast, part 2 is the very next episode.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadio

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“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 CampCampo film production company, the Sisters of Life have created a new, 12-part original series on accompanying women into life. The series is called “Into Life: Love Changes Everything.” This series will be released, for free, on March 25, 2022, along with accompanying study and discussion guides, that are especially well suited for parishes, schools, and ministry groups. The hope is to reframe the conversations around abortion and the beauty of life through helping people learn how to listen and understand the heart of another, how to rejoice in the beauty of the individual person in an encounter of hope, and how to truly accompany someone into God’s life and freedom. My guests today are two of the co-creators of this series. Sr. Marie Veritas is a Sister of Life, and Michael Campo is the founder of CampCampo and the series’ director.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 same path: giving men a reliable structure of basic spiritual disciplines to grow in freedom. The point is to let the true strength of men become a gift for others.My guest today is the co-founder and CEO of Exodus 90, James Baxter. James has overseen the growth of this program from a handful of men in its first year to now over 50,000 men in over 70 countries around the world, and from hundreds of parishes all across the United States. I want to talk with James about the inspiration for this spiritual program, the fruits that it bears, and why something like this is so needed for men today.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 author of the book Keep at It, Riley! The title of the book is a saying passed down through generations of Noreen’s Irish Catholic family––the Maddens––who never quit in the face of challenges in life and never quit on each other. In her testimony of journeying with her father and her mother toward their deaths and, ultimately, into the love of God, that resolve and resilience is shown to be a profound commitment to the dignity and beauty of the aged, the infirm, and the dying. Noreen’s book is part of the Magenta series from New City Press, which is committed to healing the ills of polarization by uplifting visions that heal and unify, especially for and in the Church.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 new means of evangelization and who revitalize the faithful’s responsibility for proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ.Dr. Matt Smith directs strategic alliances for the OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation, and today he joins me to talk about the tradition of innovation and its timeliness in the life of the Church today, while also highlighting some of the specific initiatives he and his team are working to develop to foster a culture of innovation for the Church.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Each year, the so called “June Court” decisions from the Supreme Court garner quite a lot of attention, but few in recent memory have received close to the same level of attention as Dobbs v. Jackson, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. By this point, everyone knows about this decision, though fewer of us know as much as we might about the actual case that was before the court, why it was decided the way it was, and what this really means for abortion law going forward. To help us grow in our understanding of what has taken place and what is coming next––or what’s not coming next––I am happy to welcome back to the show Professor Rick Garnett of the Notre Dame Law School, who has become our show’s resident expert on the Supreme Court and especially cases relating to religious liberty. While Dobbs was not a religious liberty case, a number of other cases on which the Court ruled in the summer of 2022 were. To give due time to all these cases, my conversation with Professor Garnett will span two episodes. In this first one, we focus on Dobbs, then in the next one we’ll talk about several religious liberty cases.A little more about my guest, who has joined me several times before. In addition to being a Professor of Law here at Notre Dame, Rick Garnett is also the founding director of the Program on Church, State, and Society in the Notre Dame Law School, as well as a fellow of the School’s Religious Liberty Initiative. He has published widely and some of his recent articles on the Supreme Court decisions have appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg Law, City Journal, and the Daily News.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 space, what we find is conduct that is often far from charitable, andcontent that leads more readily to polarization than communion. What is theimpact, then, of digital media and the ways of being that are fashioned indigital space on concrete Catholic communities, like the parish?My guest today is paying close attention to these phenomena and workingto help develop ways and habits of communicating that are more conducive to theGospel. Deacon Matthew Kuna is a transitional deacon in the Diocese ofAllentown, who is finishing up his study and formation for the priesthood atSt. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also a member of theinaugural cohort in the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s ChurchCommunications Ecology Program, where pastors, lay ministers, and educators arecalled to respond to the myriad pastoral challenges raised by life in thedigital age. He joins me to talk about the ways in which our environments shapeus––especially the digital environment––and how we might create betterconditions for disciples to be formed for healthy, responsible, and discerningengagement in our increasingly digital world.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 movies. Sometimes, missionary work means recognizing the obstacles that impede access to the Gospel, or the Church’s tradition, or spiritually edifying resources that enrich people’s lives, and finding ways to lower those barriers to grant access where access was not previously granted.Such is the work and mission of the Xavier Society for the Blind, which came into existence over a century ago in response to a prayer that “God would inspire someone to take pity on the blind of the country for whom there was no Catholic book to be had.” The person who prayed that prayer became a co-founder of the society, and since then the Xavier Society for the Blind has been creating resources for blind and visually impaired persons, now most notably through braille reading materials and audio books.My guest today is the Executive Director of Xavier Society, Mr. Malachy Fallon. He joins me to talk about the mission of the society, the impact of its work, the model for evangelization that it provides, and the collaboration of a great many who help open up the treasures of the faith to those whose access might otherwise be obstructed.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 someone is. It is not fretted over like romantic relationships or marriage. It is not obsessed over for the sake of maximizing productivity like the relationships in work culture. And yet, as Senior writes, “friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow in time.” So Jennifer Senior writes about friendship, but from an unexpected perspective: from their end, the dissolution of friendship.In addition to her work with The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior has written for the New York Times and New York Magazine, among other publications. She is also the author of All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 education you provide matters by what you place as your #1 goal, not just in print or in theory, but in practice.My guest today is shaping one of the largest and oldest Catholic school systems in the United States with precisely that goal in mind. Thomas Carroll is Secretary of Education and Superintendent of Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Boston. A longtime leader in education and in community development, Mr. Carroll has been leading Catholic schools in Boston since 2019.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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, a distinguished group of physicians, scientists, and theologians from the international community whose mission it is to study questions and issues regarding the promotion and defense of human life from an interdisciplinary perspective.Three years later, in 2018, Dr. Condic received a Presidential appointment to the National Board of Science, the oversight body for the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on the development and regeneration of the nervous system, spinal cord repair and regeneration, and embryonic development, while she cultivates a strong commitment to public education and science literacy. In June 2019, she delivered the St. Albert Award Lecture at the annual convention of the Society of Catholic Scientists.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 a question that my guest has been asking, and he is helping college students and other people out there in the world to think about and investigate the meaning and the good of work.Paul Blaschko is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he now also serves as director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society within the College of Arts & Letters. Dr. Blaschko is deeply committed to matters of practical philosophy, and of doing philosophy in public, helping others to engage the world philosophically, as a way of life. In the past couple years, he developed and has been teaching a wildly successful course for undergraduate students on “The Working Life.” He is also now building a program focused on finding meaning in business through the liberal arts. Along with Meghan Sullivan, Dr. Blaschko is the author of The Good Life Method: Reasoning Through the Big Questions of Happiness, Faith, and Meaning. He joins me today to talk about what’s going on with work, how we think about and approach work, and what difference developing a personal philosophy of work would make.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Are priests and bishops in the United States flourishing? How well do priests trusts bishops, or, more to the point, their own bishop? To whom do priests turn for support?––on whom do they rely? What are priests’ views of the policies and procedures surrounding accusations of abuse? Do priests worry about false accusations being brought against them? Are priests burned out? If so, which priests?

These are all questions which a national survey of over 3500 priests and 160 bishops sought to answer. The National Study of Catholic Priests was conducted by sociologists at the Catholic University of America, and specifically through The Catholic Project: an initiative that seeks to foster effective collaboration between the laity and clergy in the wake of the sexual abuse crisis. My guest today is the Executive Director of The Catholic Project, and he will share with us some of the most important results of their study.

Stephen White has served in his current role leading The Catholic Project at CUA since 2019. Previously, he served as executive producer of the award-winning podcast, Crisis: Clergy Abuse in the Catholic Church. He is a fellow in Catholic Studies at the Ethics and Policy Center in Washington, DC, and the author of Red, White, Blue, and Catholic, published by Liguori in 2016. His articles have appeared in a number of outlets and websites, included The Weekly Standard, First Things, America Magazine, and The Catholic Herald.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

By royal charter, St. Edmund’s College at the University of Cambridge is to take on the mission of advancing education, religion, learning and research in the University of Cambridge and “to promote and facilitate contributions from the Catholic Church and from members of the Catholic Church in carrying out” its endeavors. What is so remarkable about that mission is that St. Edmund’s was the first and still the only college with a Catholic founding since the Reformation. St. Edmund’s is also a global college, with students coming from all across the world and graduates going to serve and lead everywhere. Today I welcome the Master of St. Edmund’s College, who leads this distinctive institution of higher education in its service to the common good.   

Catherine Arnold is the 15th Master of St. Edmund’s College, having assumed the office in October 2019. Prior to her role at St. Edmund’s, she served as the United Kingdom’s Ambassador to Mongolia. Ambassador Arnold’s diplomatic career has also included service in Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, and Oman, with particular focus on a range of issues including human rights, counter terrorism, trade, and public affairs. Her conversation with me comes as she visits the University of Notre as part of a new agreement between the two institutions to encourage and support international collaboration between the respective faculty, scholars, students, and administrators in education, research, and outreach.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Fiat. So spoke the Virgin Mary to the angel Gabriel. This is a word of creation––“let it be”––one that echoes the command of the Creator, who said Fiat lux, “let there be light”. With her fiat, Mary gave all she had to bear and share the Word of God.

In Mary is the mission of the Church––from and for that mission comes a new program here at the McGrath Institute for Church Life with a name given in Mary’s voice. The Fiat Program of Faith and Mental Health seeks to form Catholic leaders to better care for and accompany persons with mental health challenges and their loved ones. This effort comes from the heart of the Church’s mission to bear and share the Body of Christ, caring for each member within the communion of his love.

 In practice, Fiat generates research, teaching, and formation opportunities to inform and strengthen sacramental and pastoral care that uplifts the dignity and goodness of each person. Fiat assists dioceses, parishes, and communities in fostering a culture of communion wherein the whole person is embraced and can experience the grace of Christian friendship and the sacramental life.

The director of this bold and timely initiative is my guest today. Beth Hlabse is director of the Fiat program in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. With degrees in mental health counseling, theology, and peace studies, Beth has provided therapeutic care for adolescents and adults with histories of trauma and adverse child experiences. Her therapeutic approach is integrative, attending to neural-developmental influences and the intersection of spirituality and psychology. She brings not only her experience to the Fiat Program, but also a Catholic vision for the wholeness of the human person and an understanding of the interdisciplinary approaches necessary for developing the best mental health resources and forming Catholic leaders capable of nurturing mental health in the communities they serve.

Follow-up Resources:

• Fiat Program on Faith and Mental Health
• “Integrating Faith and Mental Health, with Pat and Kenna Millea” on Church Life Today
• “Love to the Very End: A Theology of Dementia” in The Church Life Journal, by Xavier Symons
• “Profound Cognitive Impairment, the Virtues, and Life in Christ” in The Church Life Journal, by Miguel Romero

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The first Mexican American Saint may very well end up being the man they called the Bishop of the Barrio. The cause for canonization of Alphonse Gallegos was opened in 2005, and in 2016 Pope Francis authorized the bishops and cardinals of the Congregation of Saints to grant him the title of Venerable. In this special episode of Church Life Today, Meg Hunter-Kilmer introduces us to Venerable Alphonse Gallegos through the memories and stories of people who knew him. 

 Meg Hunter-Kilmer is the inaugural fellow of the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative here in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. This special episode was funded by the Sullivan Family Saints Initiative, which seeks to renew scholarship on the saints and increase devotion to the saints.

Follow up Resources:

●      “Bishop of the Barrio: Venerable Alphonse Gallegos” byMeg Hunter-Kilmerin the Church Life Journal.

●      “Sullivan Family Saints Initiative welcomes inaugural fellow”

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“There is much in life we can’t control, such as when we are born and where––the family, country, and history we inherit as time-and-place-bound beings. We enter the story of the world in media res. We don’t choose our sex or the path of development it takes. We don’t choose our unique amalgam of qualities and traits, those threads that form the tapestry of personality. We cannot choose when illness and trauma will strike; we can only know that they will. Yet there is one thing we can freely choose––free only because the gentle fingers of God have loosed what binds and blinds us. We can choose to receive all these things as gift.”

So begins the very end of the Genesis of Gender, the new book by Professor Abigail Favale. In this book she teases out the hidden assumptions of the gender paradigm and exposes its effects, but only in light of the Christian understanding of reality, which she opens up as a holistic paradigm that proclaims the dignity of the body, the sacramental meaning of sexual difference, and the interconnectedness of creation. In a day and age when the meaning of sex, gender, the human body, and freedom are more and more uncertain, Dr. Favale has given us a theory that is at once substantive, clear, and compassionate.

Follow-up Resources:

●      The Genesis of Gender by Abigail Favale (Ignatius Press)

●      “The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender” in The Church Life Journal by Abigail Favale

●      “The Body as a Formed Stream” in The Church Life Journal by Angela Franks

●      “Cultivating Catholic Feminism,” a free, self-paced educational and experiential program from The Catholic Woman, with contant from Abigail Favale

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Choose life. Building a pro-life culture means, among other things, making it easier for women who are pregnant to choose life. But is it easy to choose life if you are a college student, even a Catholic college student, maybe even at a Catholic school? FemCatholic recently conducted a study around questions just like that. In an article presenting their findings, they ask, “Are Catholic colleges designed for women?” One of the authors of that article is my guest today.

 Renée Roden is a journalist and playwright, who currently lives and serves in a Catholic Worker community in Chicago. She holds a bachelor’s degree in theology and theater, along with a Master of Theological Studies degree from the University of Notre Dame, and a Master of Science dual degree in journalism and religion from Columbia University. Her articles have appeared in publications like America Magazine, Commonweal, and the Church Life Journal. In this report for FemCatholic, she and her co-author don’t ask whether college students should be having sex, nor do they take up pro-choice vs. pro-life arguments; instead, they wanted to see what it is like for young women who get pregnant while in college. It is very likely that a large number of women who get pregnant in college seek abortions. This report tries to figure out what colleges are doing and what they might do to help students choose life.

Follow-up resources:

●     “Are Catholic colleges designed for women?”, a report from FemCatholic, by Renée Roden and Kelly Sankowski

●     “Into Life: Love Changes Everything”, 12-part series with the Sisters of Life, created by CampCampo Films and the McGrath Institute for Church Life

●     “A New Equality” by Jessica Keating in Notre Dame Magazine.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“We had compassion for those left behind but thought that our job was to provide them an opportunity (no matter how small) to get where we were. We didn’t think about changing our definition of success.” Those words come from Chris Arnade. His definition of success had been tied to upward mobility, ascending socially and professionally to the point of becoming a well-compensated Wall Street investor, who happened to pick up PhD in theoretical physics on the way. But eventually he went searching for something else––for other places and indeed for other people. He walked. He walked right into the kinds of towns and abandoned cities that most of successful Americans turned away from, even ridiculed. He paid attention to the people in these places, learned their stories, entered––as much as could––into their lives, discovering the ways in which they searched for meaning or sought community. The result of these immersions is his book, Dignity: Seeking Respect in Back Row America.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In 2011, Steve Pokorny founded Freedom Coaching: a one-to-one mentoring system aimed at helping those with an attraction or compulsion to pornography. This isn’t merely about learning how to avoid pornography; it is even more about reclaiming true health in the mind, the heart, and the body. It is about reclaiming our humanity. Freedom Coaching operates from the conviction that the reason most people with an attachment to pornography don’t experience sustained, lasting freedom is they’ve never learned how to attain healthy forms of intimacy. And attaining healthy forms of intimacy is only possible through receiving a redeemed view of the human body.

In addition to founding and leading Freedom Coaching, Steve is also the author of Redeemed Vision: Setting the Blind Free from the Pornified Culture. He joins me today to not only talk about his work, but especially about the hope for redemption for those for whom new life has seemed otherwise unattainable.

Follow up Resources:

• Learn more about Freedom Coaching website at https://freedom-coaching.net/
• Redeemed Vision: Setting the Blind Free from the Pornified Culture
• Church Life Today episode with Joe Campo on “Being a Father to the Fatherless”
• Learn more about the McGrath Institute for Church Life's Fiat Program for Faith and Mental Health

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Scott Weeman wants to help empower the body of Christ to heal the body of Christ. His organization, Catholic in Recovery, intentionally brings together the Twelve Steps recovery process with the sacramental life of the Catholic Church. This work is an exercise in grace building on nature, where the holistic healing of mind, body, spirit, relationships, and all the rest that is necessary for those who have suffered from addiction and other compulsive behaviors opens up to the fulfillment that only the Lord can provide.

In addition to founding Catholic in Recovery, Scott is also the author of two books: The Twelve Steps and the Sacraments, and more recently, The Catholic in Recovery Workbook, both published by Ave Maria Press.

He joins me today to talk about this mission to foster communities of healing, helping people to find new life out of addiction, and in Christ with one another.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Learn more about Catholic in Recovery
• The Twelve Steps and the Sacraments by Scott Weeman
• The Catholic in Recovery Workbook by Scott Weeman
• Stories of Grace, Episode 14: “I am” by Leah Jacob in the Church Life Journal
• Learn more about the McGrath Institute for Church Life's Fiat Program for Faith and Mental Health

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In his high priestly prayer, Jesus prayed to his Father that “they may all be one.” He meant us, his disciples. As he entered into his passion, Jesus began to offer himself for our unity in him, with him, through him––sharing in his union with the Father by the Holy Spirit. And yet, if we look around the Church today, disunity may be more apparent than unity.

In his new book, acclaimed author and moral theologian Charlie Camosy seeks to help Catholics––especially Catholics in the US––to rediscover our call to unity and to begin engaging with each other in a way that does not cancel out disagreements, but rather allows us to find unity in diversity. The book is One Church: How to Rekindle Trust, Negotiate Difference, and Reclaim Catholic Unity, from Ave Maria Press. Dr. Camosy joins me to talk about the sources of disunion, the pathways toward reunion, and the importance of reclaiming our unity in Christ.

Follow-up Resources:

 ●     One Church: How to Rekindle Trust, Negotiate Difference, and Reclaim Catholic Unity, by Charles C. Camosy

●     Discussion Guide for One Church, from Charles C. Camosy and Ave Maria Press

●     “This Is What You Get When Politics Invades Our Ecclesial Lives,” by Robert G. Christian III in the Church Life Journal

●     “Breaking from the Culture War Mentality,” with Fr. Aaron Wessman on Church Life Today

This episode is supported by NCEA
http://www.ncearise.org/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

You may remember in the last couple years the listening sessions that took place in dioceses and parishes as a first step in the Church’s “synod on synodality.” Maybe you participated in one of these listening sessions, or even helped to host one, as I did. By Fall of 2022, reports from those parish listening sessions were gathered at the diocesan level, then at the national level by bishops’ conferences, and eventually sent to an organizing committee at the Vatican. At that point, a group gathered to review the reports and write a Document on the Continental Phase, which was meant to synthesize the local and national reports, and prepare for the next stage in the synodal process. When my guest today started to look more closely at the methodology of this process, though, he, as a social scientist, started to question the authenticity of the process itself, at least in terms of what it was purported to be. Are we really hearing the voice of the faithful here?

My guest is Mark Regnerus, professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin and author of an article published in early 2023 in Public Discourse, calling the methodology of the synodal process thus far into question. In addition to this article written for a popular audience, Professor Regnerus is the author of more than 40 articles in peer reviewed journals and, additionally, author of four books, including The Future of Christian Marriage. He joins me today to discuss his misgivings about this synodal process, yes, as a Catholic, but more distinctively from his professional perspective as a social scientist.

Follow-up Resources:

●     “Census Fidei? Methodological Missteps Are Undermining the Catholic Church’s Synod on Synodality” by Mark Regnerus in Public Discourse

●     Document for the Continental Stage (the document Prof. Regnerus questions)

●     “Co-Responsibility: An Antidote to Clericalizing the Laity?” by John Cavadini in the Church Life Journal

●     Called & Co-Responsible: Exploring Co-Responsibility for the Mission of the Church, Conference at the University of Notre Dame (videos of presentations)

●     Recorded seminars on co-responsibility, from the McGrath Institute for Church Life

●     “Will They Return to Mass,” with Hans Plate on Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

After the overturn of Roe v. Wade, a wide array of commentators bemoaned how much more support would now be needed for women who become pregnant when abortion is no longer available, or less readily available. What that implies, of course, is that abortion is a substitute for other supportive measures for pregnant and parenting women, or even more to that point, that those other forms of support are substitutes for the perceived cure-all of abortion. My guest today calls out this implicit assumption in an essay she wrote that specifically focuses on the ways in which institutions of higher education do or do not adequately support women as women, with their distinctive reproductive capacities in view.

Angela Franks is Professor of Theology at St. John’s Seminary in Boston. She is no stranger to our own McGrath Institute for Church Life as she currently serves as a Life and Human Dignity Writing Fellow for our Church Life Journal, and she has joined me on our show before to talk about gender, bodies, and the space of responsiveness. The article that is the basis of our discussion today comes under the title “Why Does Higher Ed Throw Women Under the Bus?”, which appeared in the Church Life Journal in September 2022, not long after the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in the Dobbs case. 

Follow up Resources:

●      Article: “Why Does Higher Ed Throw Women Under the Bus?” by Angela Franks in the Church Life Journal

●      Podcast Episode: “Catholic Colleges and Pregnant Students, with Renée Roden” on Church Life Today

●      Podcast Episode: “Gender, Bodies, and the Space of Responsiveness, with Angela Franks” on Church Life Today

●      Article: “The Body as Totem in the Asexual Revolution” by Angela Franks in the Church Life Journal

●      Video Series: “Into Life: Love Changes Everything” from the Sisters of Life and the McGrath Institute for Church Life: a 12-part original series on accompanying a woman into life.

This episode is supported by NCEA, https://www.ncea.org/NCEA2023/whyattend

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“O God, who in your inexpressible providence were pleased to choose Saint Joseph as spouse of the most holy Mother of your Son, grant, we pray, that we, who revere him as our protector on earth, may be worthy of his heavenly intercession. Through Christ Our Lord. Amen.”

So concludes the litany of Saint Joseph. This litany leads us to contemplate the titles and honors of Joseph, husband of Mary and custodian of the Incarnate Word. To contemplate Joseph requires that we contemplate the mysteries of God, because Joseph, from whom Scripture records no words spoken, is directed by and responsive to the Word who speaks our salvation. But it takes time, attention, and a patient, longing devotion to turn a prayer like the litany of Saint Joseph into something that allows us to contemplate such subtle and sweeping beauties. And so, for today’s episode, especially in honor of the Solemnity of Saint Joseph, I want to offer you some reflections on a few of these titles and honors of Joseph, to help us, together, to marvel at this great saint anew, precisely by marveling at what and who he himself holds most dear and cherishes.

This episode of Church Life Today is different than most since this is an episode without a guest, unless you’d like to count Saint Joseph himself as my guest. The reflections I share with you in this episode are drawn from the book I wrote with Our Sunday Visitor under the title Model of Faith: Reflecting on the Litany of Saint Joseph. That book presents some 25 such reflections, but here today I will only share a handful with you, mostly in pairs. Each reflection seeks to open up one of the titles or honors of Saint Joseph from his litany. I am grateful to Our Sunday Visitor for agreeing to allow me to use portions of the book for our podcast today … and I am grateful to Our Sunday Visitor again for producing this podcast. So thanks all around to Our Sunday Visitor, who is helping us to give thanks to God for and through Saint Joseph. 

Follow up Resources:

●      Model of Faith: Reflecting on the Litany of Saint Joseph by Leonard J. DeLorenzo

●      “Finding God in Saint Joseph” by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, presenting the first two reflections contained in this episode.

●      A Report on American Catholic Religious Parenting from the McGrath Institute for Church Life.

●      Providence College Veritas Conference

This episode is supported by Providence College Humanities Program, https://humanities.providence.edu/veritas/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

We live toward what we assume to be our ends. Some of us hold such assumptions consciously, others do not, but either way the ends we seek shape the lives we live and the societies we build. The Christian eschatological imagination is concerned with the end of all things in the consummate glory of God, in our union with God. The way there is through judgment. And what is judged is, oftentimes, the other ends we have desired and built our worlds around. But to glimpse––just glimpse––the beauty and fullness of the final end God gives even now is a light for hope, while at the same time the bestowal of a mission to return to––rather than flee from––the concrete and historical lives we live now, in this world, such as it is. That is the tension of Christian eschatology, which literature often times powerfully, stunningly, even hauntingly presents to us in images and experiences.

On our episode today we plunge into such considerations with Judith Wolfe, who recently delivered the annual Religion and Literature Lecture at the University of Notre Dame, on the topic of “The Eschatological Imagination in Literature.” Dr. Wolfe is professor of philosophical theology in the School of Divinity at the University of St. Andrew’s. Additionally and among other positions and activities, she serves as general editor of the Journal of Inkling Studies, she has developed or is currently working on a number of large projects such as the Widening Horizons in Philosophical Theology project with funding from the Templeton Religion Trust, and she is the author or editor of a number of books (not to mention her articles), including the Oxford Handbook of Nineteenth-Century Christian Thought, Heidegger and Theology, Heidegger and Eschatology, and C.S. Lewis and His Circle. She joins me today, in person, during her visit to Notre Dame.

 Follow Up Resources:

●      Find out more about Professor Judith Wolfe on her University of St. Andrew’s faculty page

●      “At the Threshold: Begin with the End” – a video with Judith Wolfe speaking about eschatology

●      Books by Judith Wolfe

This episode is supported by Providence College Humanities Program, https://humanities.providence.edu/veritas/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In initiating the Synod on Synodality, which is set to run through 2024, Pope Francis sought to lead the whole Church into a time of prayer, listening, and discernment. His hope is to foster these dispositions and habits within the Church as the regular way of living ecclesial life together. As this particular synodal process moves from the continental stage to universal stage, we wanted to spend some time getting a better sense of what this synod is all about and why it has been called. Our guest today is well-positioned to help us along.

Sr. Marie Kolbe Zamora is currently serving in the Vatican’s General Secretariat of the Synod. She is a Franciscan Sister of Christian Charity, who completed her advanced degrees in theology at the Pontifical Gregorian University in Rome, writing her dissertation on the “Ecclesiological Elements in the Early Theology of St. Bonaventure.” She joins us from Rome, where she has been living most recently since 2021 upon her appointment to help plan the current synod.

Follow-up Resources:

• “Co-Responsibility: An Antidote to Clericalizing the Laity?” by John Cavadini in Church Life Journal.
• Called & Co-Responsible: Exploring Co-Responsibility for the Mission of the Church, Conference at the University of Notre Dame (videos of presentations)
• Recorded seminars on co-responsibility, from the McGrath Institute for Church Life

“Questioning the Authenticity of the Synod on Synodality,” with Mark Regnerus on Church Life Today

This episode is supported by  Holyart.com is Europe’s largest Catholic e-commerce, offering more than 65k items, made in Italy. Holyart has created a strong network of local artisans and helps support their traditional manufacturing techniques. You can find a wide range of products for individuals and churches, ranging from life size religious statues, crosses, priest vestments, sacred art, jewelry, and Catholic favors/gifts for all special occasions. Discounts are available for all religious organizations, fast shipping all over the world. Visit www.holyart.com and use discount code OSV20 for 20% off an order today! 

For more information regarding church discounts and promotions, please contact JasminGarcia@holyart.com. 

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The desire for the deathless extension of existence. The desire for autonomy without impediments. The desire for consciousness without bounds, for self-determination without exhaustion, for individual benefits without costs. Desires such as these seem very much at home in the transhumanist project, which seeks to push back against human limits, especially via technological means. But have we rightly assessed the true costs of what many hail as “progress”? Should we continue to try to outwit the boundaries of our humanity, or, moreover, can we actually do so even if we want to?

These questions and more like them come to the fore on Church Life Today, as I welcome Mary Harrington to our show. Mary is a contributing editor at UnHerd, and our conversation today follows an event hosted by UnHerd in which Mary debated Elise Bohan on the latter’s book Future Superhuman: Our Transhuman Lives in a Make-or-Break Century. Mary’s opening remarks were published under the title “Transhumanism is already here” and you can find a link to the video of their debate in this episode’s show notes. Mary herself has just released a new book, Feminism Against Progress, in which she builds up many of the arguments she introduced in the debate and which she is sure to introduce to us today.

 Resources:

• Feminism Against Progress by Mary Harrington
• Video of “UnHerd Club - Mary Harrington & Elise Bohan: The transhumanism debate”
• “Why progress isn’t feminist” by Mary Harrington for UnHerd

“We Need a Class Politics of Biotech” by Mary Harrington for Compact

This episode is supported by Providence College Humanities Program, https://humanities.providence.edu/veritas/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The impact of Jesus: he changes everything, he changes us. The first to receive him were his mother and those disciples who walked with him in Galilee and Judea. They were there when he entered Jerusalem the final time. The twelve were there when gave his body and his blood in the Upper Room, they went with him to Gethsemane, then, one by one, they left his side. Mary and John were nearby when he was crucified, the others were distant. He was buried, and they were alone. On Holy Saturday, they remained in a space of sorrow and shame, of shock and of trauma. The crucifixion was behind them, the Resurrection yet to come. What did they think, how did they feel, what and how did they remember in that liminal space between memory and hope? That is the setting of an original composition of the Notre Dame Folk Choir called The Passion. 

The composer of this astounding work is my guest today. J.J. Wright is the director of the Notre Dame Folk Choir. He holds a doctoral degree in conducting from Notre Dame’s sacred music program, prior to which he studied at the Pontifical Institute of Sacred Music and interned with the Sistine Chapel Choir. He started working on The Passion with the Notre Dame Children’s Choir and carried that work into the Notre Dame Folk Choir a few years ago. The final work of The Passion emerged from a broad collaboration with other artists and, perhaps most important of all, with his own students, the members of the Notre Dame Folk Choir. The Passion is now available on Spotify, Apple Music, and other audio outlets, as well as on the Notre Dame Folk Choir’s YouTube channel, where there is a recording of the live performance of The Passion from Notre Dame on Good Friday, 2023. J.J. joins me to talk about the space of memory that this work draws us into, the creative process of music and prayer and pilgrimage, and the way in which the impact of Jesus never ceases, as the Paschal Mystery is the center of our lives as Christians, today and always. 

Follow-up Resources:

●     “Creating the Passion,” article with interviews.

●     “The Making of ‘The Passion’” (video) about the Notre Dame Folk Choir in Jerusalem

●     The Passion live from Notre Dame on Good Friday, 2023 (video)

●     The Notre Dame Folk Choir YouTube Channel

●     The Passion on Spotify

●     Website for the Notre Dame Folk Choir

This episode is sponsored by the University of Saint Francis, https://www.sf.edu/about/camps-and-community-programs/#camp7

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“Sacred art is true and beautiful when its form corresponds to its particular vocation: evoking and glorifying, in faith and adoration, the transcendent mystery of God – the surpassing invisible beauty of truth and love visible in Christ” (CCC 2052). As the Church in the United States seeks to foster a Eucharistic revival, might the beauty of sacred art be a privileged avenue for teaching all the faithful––along with those estranged from the Church––to discover anew the resplendent beauty of our Eucharistic Lord? In a new book organized around 12 works of sacred art with Eucharistic themes, my guest today has laid out a path for us to journey together to the beauty of God.

 Jem Sullivan is the author of Way of Beauty: Rekindling Eucharistic Amazement through Visio Divina, which is out now from Our Sunday Visitor. Dr. Sullivan is Associate Professor of Catechetics in the School of Theology and Religious Studies at the Catholic University of America. In addition to Way of Beauty, she is also the author of several other books, including The Beauty of Faith: Using Sacred Art to Spread the Good News and Believe, Celebrate, Live, Pray: A Weekly Walk with the Catechism. She joins me today to talk about Eucharistic Amazement, sacred art, the practice of visio divina, and our transformation as Christians through the presence and the calling of Jesus Christ.

Follow up Resources:

• Way of Beauty: Rekindling Eucharistic Amazement through Visio Divina, by Jem Sullivan (OSV 2023)
• “Our Eucharistic God, with Jonathan Ciraulo” via Church Life Today
• “The Past, Present, and Future of the Eucharist, with Michael Hahn” via Church Life Today
• “Redeeming Vision from Pornography, with Steve Pokorny” via Church Life Today

This episode is sponsored by Religious Freedom Week 2023, http://www.usccb.org/ReligiousFreedomWeek

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Parental Notice: Adult language quoted in the episode.

The study of moral choice, character, and identity in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul was unprecedented in TV drama. Many experienced the two TV series as a journey through Dante’s underworld, even through to his Purgatorio. In a recent conference at the University of Notre Dame, five scholars of theology and philosophy analyzed various dimension of the moral and spiritual imagination in these two dramas. The name of the conference, as play on the name of the show’s creator Vince Gilligan, was “Gilligan’s Archipelago: Justice and Mercy in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul.”

 My guest today is the convener of the conference, who also delivered a conference lecture on “Men and Women in Gilligan’s Archipelago.” Francesca Murphy is professor of theology here at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of many books and articles. She is one of my favorite lecturers and someone I’ve had the joy of working with in a number of lecture series and conferences, including one on C. S. Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia, which became a book we both contributed to called Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis (Ignatius, 2022). Today we’ll talk about the question of manhood in Breaking Bad, womanhood in Better Call Saul, and what makes one show an infernal comedy and the other a purgatorial comedy.

Follow up Resources:

• Webpage for “Gilligan’s Archipelago” conference, where videos from each of the five lectures will be posted when available.
•  “The Macbeth of Meth,” essay on Walter White in Breaking Bad by Paul Cantor
• “Evangelizing through Film and Television, with Doug Tooke” podcast episode via Church Life Today

This episode is sponsored by The CatholicTV Network on YouTube, https://www.youtube.com/CatholicTV

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Once when my eldest son was about five years old, we happened to be reading the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel when we came upon the account of a man with an unclean spirit. My son asked me what that meant. I didn’t know how to answer so I said: “What do you think?” He didn’t know. So we read it again. He noticed that the unclean spirit did not want to be near Jesus, and he knew that Jesus was God with us. I asked my son, “well, what do you think an unclean spirit is now?” And he replied: “I guess it is wanting to live in the world without God.”

My guest today on the show is not a five year old child, but rather Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. We are going to talk about his read of the show Breaking Bad and its central character, Walter White, whom Professor Anderson sees as a profile in the determined resolution to live in the world without God. But unlike the unclean spirit in Mark’s Gospel, Walter White doesn’t even acknowledge God or recognize the possibility of his presence. For him, “there is nothing but chemistry here.”

My conversation with Professor Anderson follows a lecture that he delivered for a conference on the shows Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul that was hosted at Notre Dame in May of 2023. His lecture at the conference bore the title “Science and Marriage in the Life of Walter White.”

Follow up Resources:

●     Webpage for “Gilligan’s Archipelago” conference, where videos from each of the five lectures will be posted when available.

●     “Men and Women in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, with Francesca Murphy” podcast episode via Church Life Today

●     “God Doesn’t Break Bad in the Old Testament,” essay by Gary Anderson in Church Life Journal

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

It probably comes as a surprise to no one that cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court. What might surprise many, however, is that there is a lot of agreement if not unanimity among justices when they decide such cases. In 2023, the justices returned a 9-0 decision in a religious liberty case regarding a US Postal Service worker who sought a religious accommodation to abstain from work on Sundays. The court sided with the postal worker. There were of course other cases decided this summer that received a good deal of attention, especially ones pertaining to affirmative action, student loan debt forgiveness, and the freedom of expression of a web designer. As has become our custom here on Church Life Today, we are hosting Notre Dame Law Professor Rick Garnett to walk us through some of these decisions, especially in regard to questions of religious liberty.

This is the sixth episode that Professor Garnett has recorded with us, which puts him in the lead as our top contributor. When he is not appearing on Church Life Today, Rick is the Paul J. Schierl/Fort Howard Corporation Professor of Law in the Notre Dame Law School. He is also Concurrent Professor of Political Science and Director of the Program on Church, State & Society. He teaches and writes in the areas of constitutional law, criminal law, the First Amendment, and law and religion.

Follow-up Resources:

●     “Refreshing Unity on Religious Liberty,” essay by Rick Garnett in Law & Liberty

●     “Rick Garnett on Religious Liberty,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

●     “2020 SCOTUS Decisions, Part 1, with Rick Garnett,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

●     “2020 SCOTUS Decisions, Part 2, with Rick Garnett,” podcast episode via Church Life today

●     “2022 SCOTUS: Dobbs, Roe, and Abortion Law, with Rick Garnett,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

●     “2022 SCOTUS: Religious Liberty Cases, with Rick Garnett,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

To deceive yourself is easy, but to stop deceiving yourself is hard. This truth is more apparent to each of us when we look to other people than it is when we look to ourselves. Why? Because we tend to believe the lies we have told ourselves, so much so that they really aren’t lies anymore for we have forgotten the truth. One of the gifts of excellent drama––especially tragic drama but even the right kind of comedic drama––is that we are given the chance to see dynamics like this in play in the lives and worlds of characters on the stage or on the screen. If we are brave and honest enough, we may even be willing to see partial reflections of ourselves.

 We’ve been spending a few episodes now diving into the masterful television dramas Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, following a lecture series we hosted here at the McGrath Institute for Church Life on the two shows. Today, we will continue that exploration, turning our attention now to the themes of self-deception, transparency, and redemption, or lack thereof. My guest today will guide us through these considerations, based on the lecture he delivered on this topic for our lecture series. 

Kenneth Craycraft is the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology, the seminary for the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He writes a monthly syndicated column for OSV News, a weekly column for Our Sunday Visitor (“Grace is Everywhere”), and monthly columns for The Catholic Telegraph and the U.K.-based Catholic Herald. Dr. Craycraft is the author of The American Myth of Religious Freedom. His forthcoming book, Neither Left nor Right: How Catholic Moral Theology Transcends Partisan Politics, will be published by OSV Press in the Spring of 2024. He is a licensed attorney in Ohio, who holds a Ph.D. in theology from Boston College and a J.D. from Duke University School of Law.

Follow-up Resources:

• “Men and Women in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, with Francesca Murphy,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Meth, Money, and Marriage in Breaking Bad, with Gary Anderson,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• Webpage for “Gilligan’s Archipelago” conference, where videos from each of the five lectures on Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul are posted.
• The collection Kenneth Craycraft’s articles for Our Sunday Visitor.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In 1965, in an NBC News documentary, J. Robert Oppenheimer reflected on his role in leading the Manhattan Project that yielded the first nuclear weapons by saying this:

“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.’ I suppose we all thought that, one way or another.” 

The new blockbuster film, Oppenheimer, chronicles the race to develop the means of mass destruction, and focuses on the man who led that effort. We take up a discussion of the film in today’s show, and I welcome in two guests to join this discussion with me. Both my guests are from the Univresity of Notre Dame. Dr. Ted Barron is executive director of the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center as well as the Judd and Mary Lou Leighton Director of Performing Arts; he also teaches in the Department of Film, Television, and Theater. Dr. Phil Sakimoto is one of my longtime collaborators on a science and religion planetarium project who has joined me on Church Life Today once before to talk about our presentation, “All Creation Gives Praise”. He is an astrophysicist, a professional astronomer, and the Director of the Minor in Sustainability at Notre Dame.

Our episode today is produced in partnership with the Notre Dame Alumni Association, and specifically the FiresideND podcast from ThinkND, which brings the experience and expertise of Notre Dame to you, whenever, wherever. From STEM and art, to religion and health, FiresideND allows you to listen and learn with ND on the go. I want to thank our friends at ThinkND for bringing the idea for this episode to us and for helping it to come to fruition.

Follow-up Resources:

• “All Creation Gives Praise, with Phil Sakimoto,” podcast episode via Church Life Today.
• “Oppenheimer and the Lesson of Fat Man,” journal article via Church Life Journal
• FiresideND podcast from ThinkND

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In a 2019 study, the Pew Research Center found that just one-third of U.S. Catholics Agree that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. That is a sobering statistic. Even if we account for the way in which the survey question may have been imprecisely formed, it still seems that the overwhelming majority of Catholics surveyed espoused belief in a more symbolic meaning of the bread and wine on the altar, as opposed to the sacramental, real presence of Jesus Christ.

The Eucharistic Revival in the United States seeks to respond to issues like this, to help increase both belief in and devotion to the Eucharist. One area that I have become especially attentive to is the formation of children for First Communion. Of all those Catholics who were surveyed and said that they believed only that the bread and wine of the altar were symbolic, most if not all of them had been formed for their First Communion and have likely received the Eucharist numerous times throughout their life. We could think that a Eucharistic Revival is about correcting and reforming the belief of adults, and enkindling their devotion, but I say that we ought to think deeply about Eucharistic formation from the very beginning, which means the period of preparation for First Communion.

I am also interested in that issue because I am a parent, and four of my own children have been formed for First Communion, with two more to go. More than anything else, I want them to know and to believe that the love of God does not stay far away, but draws near. The love of God is near enough for us to touch, near enough to taste. The Eucharist is the love of God Incarnate, given for us: the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ.

Follow-up Resources:

●     Fed by the Lord: At-Home Scriptural Formation to Prepare Children for First Communion (Liturgical Press, 2023), by Leonard J. DeLorenzo

●     Article on the 2019 Pew Study on U.S. Catholics belief in the Eucharist

Sponsored link: The Catholic Theology Show

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

One of the surest ways to incite wonder and love for the Lord in our children is for us to rekindle wonder and love for the Lord in ourselves. As mature Christians, we have a responsibility to instruct our children––to model and share our faith with them. For many of us, this begins as a daunting and uncertain task: we might question our own faith, or feel awkward in our wording or mannerisms in sharing faith, or recognize our own lack of knowledge when it comes to Scripture or the particularities of Catholic doctrine. I felt all those things myself when it was time for me to begin forming my children to reverence our Eucharistic Lord and welcome him in the Blessed Sacrament. But starting some years ago, I took on this precious and challenging responsibility in a new way, when I began reading Scripture with my then six-year-old son to help him prepare for his First Communion. In particular, we read and wondered at 12 biblical episodes of God feeding his people: six from the Old Testament and six from the gospels, when Jesus fulfills what has been prefigured. From all our time spent together, including my son’s work in illustrating each of those 12 biblical scenes, I came to see that paying attention to these particular actions through Scripture created one firm, clear, and beautiful memory for my son, which was this: the Lord feeds his people. Even more, when he stepped forward to receive his First Communion in May of that year, he rejoiced at the wonder that now he himself was being fed by the Lord.

I think this way of sacramental preparation is more important now than ever, especially as belief in the real presence of Jesus Christ in the Eucharist continues to wane among Catholics. In the Catholic Church in the U.S., we are hoping for a Eucharistic revival, and I want to think together about how to form our children better for First Communion, to set the best foundation for a sacramental, Eucharistic life.

 This is the second of two episodes where I share some of the teachings on the biblical episodes of God feeding his people. These teachings are drawn from my book Fed by the Lord: At-Home Scriptural Formation to Prepare Children for First Communion, from Liturgical Press. Fed by the Lord is written especially for parents, godparents, teachers, and catechists with two primary goals: first, to help enrich and renew the adults’ understanding of and wonder at the way in which God feeds his people throughout Scripture, and second, to offer guidance to adults as they seek to form their children and students for First Communion.

In the last episode, I shared my teachings on one Old Testament episode and the corresponding Gospel episode that fulfills it. From 2 Kings 4, we focused on the prophet Elisha and the abundant bread, then from Mark 6 we contemplated Jesus feeding the five thousand. In this episode, I want to add two more: from the Old Testament, we will turn our attention to the Passover in Exodus, and then from Luke 22, the Institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.

 Follow-up Resources:

●     Fed by the Lord: At-Home Scriptural Formation to Prepare Children for First Communion (Liturgical Press, 2023), by Leonard J. DeLorenzo

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Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

To love your neighbor, you must know your neighbor. And to know your neighbor, you often times have to go beyond the mind you have. The Greek word for conversion, metanoia, means just that: “to go beyond the mind you have”, so that loving your neighbor usually requires some kind of conversion. Conversions are often uncomfortable and even painful. It can be hard but it can also be liberating and healing to let go of what you assumed to be true so as to accept a little more of what is actually true, especially what has been and is actually true for someone else––namely, your neighbor.

A new narrative podcast series called The Ark and the Dove seeks to allow listeners to grow in knowledge of their neighbors in the Catholic Church and in the United States. The way it does that is by investigating the complex dynamics of race and religion in America through the lens of the Black Catholic Church. It holds together both broad issues of race and religion with local, particular stories of specific communities, parishes, and schools, especially within the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Our episode today focuses on The Ark and the Dove, with my guest and the podcast’s co-creator, Edward Herrera.

In addition to his work on The Ark and the Dove, Edward Herrera is the Executive Director of the Institute for Evangelization in the Archdiocese of Baltimore.

Follow-up Resources:

• The Ark and the Dove podcast series
• “The Catholic Response to the Sin of Racism, with Gloria Purvis,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Black Lives and the Preferential Option for the Poor” by John Cavadini, via Church Life Journal

This episode is sponsored by: Dr. Michael Dauphinais, https://catholic-theology-show.castos.com/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Jessica Mannen Kimmet was searching for spiritual resources in the Church that would guide her and strengthen her during her early years of motherhood. She was experiencing significant struggles and was confronting unmet expectations. But other than a few scattered blog posts here and there, she really couldn’t find anything that would respond to her need and desire. So several years later, she wrote the book she was looking for, a book where the Word of God is brought close to the experiences of new mothers, and to many more of us besides.

In her concluding chapter, she writes, “finding my way into motherhood has been a long, convoluted road. Progress through my pain was never as linear as I would have chosen. There were better days and worse days, improvements and relapses. There were moments of hope and energy, followed all too quickly by moments of anguish and despair. … [But] God makes all things new. Even me. Even you. God has the power to end all death and mourning and pain, and God promises to do so. In the meantime, God acknowledges our suffering and sits with us in it.”

Jessica’s book is for those times in between, when there is suffering and struggle, and therefore the real need for hope and companionship. The book is called Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope: Scripture Reflections for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood. As an early reader of this book myself, I can assure you that many other people besides those in early motherhood will benefit from this book, including men, whether single, married, fathers, or even priests.

Follow up Resources:

●     Groaning in Labor, Growing in Hope: Scripture Reflections for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood by Jessica Mannen Kimmet

●     “Some Human Beings Carry Remnants of Other Human Beings in Their Bodies,” essay in Church Life Journal by Dr. Kristin Collier

●     “The Theobiology of a Mother’s Voice,” essay in Church Life Journal by Dr. Kristin Collier

●     “Forming Catholic Leaders for Mental Health, with Beth Hlabse,” podcast episode on Church Life Today 

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Many of us browsing social media have had the experience of seeing horrendous images and videos from armed conflicts. Sometimes those dehumanizing acts are featured widely even before conflict fully breaks out. Seeing these things gives us a sense of rage or sorrow or concern or all of the above. It is not uncommon for our sympathies to be swayed by the suffering that we see, or the dehumanizing acts that are brought before us .Actually, that is often the point of showing these scenes and images in the first place.

Computer science research shows that in the lead-up to hostilities, as well as after the outbreak of hostilities, there is a notable increase in dehumanizing political imagery that is often doctored or accentuated in some way and then reshared in digital space to evoke an emotional response. As media consumers, we may find ourselves swimming in a sea of images, not knowing what or whom we can trust. Or some of us might even focus in on the kinds of images and narratives that confirm our predetermined biases, and wed us more closely to our preferred group or tribe.

My guest on the show today is a computer scientist whose research reveals how social media is regularly used as a conduit for conflict. Tim Weninger is the Frank M. Freimann Associate Professor of Engineering at the University of Notre Dame, where he also serves as the Director of Graduate Studies for Computer Science and Engineering. His research is in artificial intelligence, machine learning, and social media (and artificial intelligence on social media). Recently, Professor Weninger and his team have been studying how coordinated social media campaigns have been used to incite violence and discord, destabilize democratic processes, and disseminate propaganda. He is an advocate for increasing media literacy who recognizes the urgent need for moral formation for engaging and using media well. He joins me today to talk about his fascinating and important work, especially in light of recent world events.

Follow-up Resources: 

●      News and other information about Prof. Weninger and his work

●      “ND Expert Tim Weninger: Using social media to dehumanize is part of the conflict playbook,” article in ND Works by Jessica Sieff

●      “Media, Polarization, and the Gospel, with Deacon Matthew Kuna,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

What is the belief of ordinary Catholics around the Eucharist? That is a harder question to answer that it might at first seem. You could put forward two options and ask a respondent if they believe this or that. But it is not easy to phrase those options correctly, nor is it easy to ensure that your respondent understands what you are trying to ask. Belief in the Eucharist is not easy, and neither is asking about it.

A new study commissioned by the McGrath Institute for Church Life and conducted by CARA at Georgetown University attempts to get closer to the real Eucharistic beliefs of ordinary Catholics. More precision was put into the questions and possible answers, an opportunity was given for open-ended responses, and sustained reflection on all the responses yielded some more textured findings than previous national studies produced. Today, I talk with my colleague, Dr. Tim O’Malley, about this new study, its findings and their significance for renewing Eucharistic belief in the Church. Tim published an article on this study in the Church Life Journal under the title“The Theological Foundations of Eucharistic Beliefs: A New National Study.”

Follow-up Resources:

 ●     “Eucharist Beliefs: A National Survey of Adult Catholics,” study by CARA at Georgetown University, commissioned by the McGrath Institute for Church Life

●     “The Theological Foundations of Eucharistic Beliefs: A New National Study”, article in Church Life Journal by Timothy O’Malley

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Sometimes you have to leave what’s familiar to discover what is most beautiful, most profound, and most meaningful precisely in your ordinary life. A pilgrimage is one of the best means for doing just that: departing from what you know in order to return anew. But pilgrimage is not just any kind of trip or travel, it is instead an intentional journey made to encounter Christ, or rather, to allow him to encounter you. Being open to that encounter can be hard work, it takes time and preparation and a willingness of spirit. Christ is always a courteous guest––he may confront you but he never forces his way into your life or into your heart. He waits for you to welcome him in. To be formed well for pilgrimage means, among other things, learning how to welcome Christ when he comes to you, learning how to seek him more willing, and learning how to love him who always loves you first.

 My guest today has dedicated herself to the ministry of helping form people for pilgrimages, which means that she is committed to helping others encounter Christ well. Joan Watson is Pilgrim Formation Manager for Verso Ministries, a Catholic pilgrimage company that specializes in not just the logistics of pilgrimage travel but also the spiritual and communal formation that makes encounters with Christ more meaningful and lasting. Joan came to Verso Ministries after years of serving the Church in catechetical and other formation ministries, as well as engaging in her own work as a speaker and writer who focuses on raising up saints in ordinary time. She joins me today to talk about the spirituality of pilgrimage, the forms of formation, and the transition from the extraordinary experiences abroad to enriching everyday life back home.

  Follow-up Resources:

●     Learn more about Verso Ministries at versoministries.com

●     Listen to Joan Watson’s pilgrimage podcast, “In Via”, at https://versoministries.com/in-via/

●     “By Sea and By Air: The Journey of the Gospel,” essay by Leonard DeLorenzo about pilgrimage in Church Life Journal

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The question at Christmas is not about whether God will act for us. The babe born of Mary is the answer: God has given everything. The question is really about us. Will we receive Christ?

 This is a most magnificent reversal, and a most perilous one. He in whom all things are created––in whom we live and move and have our being––is given into our hands. The Host has become the guest, and we, who depend on God for all things, are called upon to become His host.

 Christmas is not only a time of great consolation, but the beginning of the great decision. God is all in: do we accept Him? Everything depends on our answer.

 In this special episode of our show, I will lead us through a series of reflections upon the mysteries of Christmas. These reflections were initially part of an article I wrote for Our Sunday Visitor, who is also, as you know, our podcasting partner here at Church Life Today. I don’t have a guest in studio with me today; instead, I hope that, together, we can welcome the Word of God as our guest, pondering the depth, beauty, and even the risk of God coming among us, in the flesh.

Follow-up Resources:

• “The Joy of Christmas (and the danger),” article at Our Sunday Visitor by Leonard DeLorenzo
• “What it means to wait for the Lord,” article at Our Sunday Visitor by Leonard DeLorenzo
• “How the O Antiphons direct our gaze toward the coming of our Savior,” article at Our Sunday Visitor by Leonard DeLorenzo
• “The Three Wisemen,” podcast episode at Church Life Journal
• Into the Heart of the Father: Learning from and Giving Yourself through Christ in Prayer (Word Among Us, 2021), by Leonard DeLorenzo
• Model of Faith: Reflecting on the Litany of Saint Joseph (Our Sunday Visitor, 2022), by Leonard DeLorenzo
• A God Who Questions (Our Sunday Visitor, 2019), by Leonard DeLorenzo

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Born from a vision to fuse rapid scientific and technological advancement with the wisdom of the Catholic faith, Catholic Institute of Technology forms scientists, engineers and mathematicians who are dedicated to upholding the Catholic faith. This brand new university will welcome students for the first time in Fall 2024 to its campus in Castel Gandolfo, Italy.

 This university is the first-ever Catholic institution created exclusively for research advancements in the fields of the sciences, engineering, technology and mathematics, and is pursuing the elite title of an R1 school. The initial vision for CatholicTech was first conceptualized in the minds of Alexis and Bill Haughey, the husband-and-wife team whose own experience drove them to desire a new paradigm in academia where Catholic ethics thrive. Bill is an accomplished entrepreneur, and Alexis’ background is in academic research with an emphasis on technology, innovation, and entrepreneurship. They join us today, along with my colleague Brett Robinson, who is co-hosting this episode with me.

Follow-up Resources:

• Learn more about Catholic Institute of Technology
• “How the Sciences Train You for Faith, Part 1, with Sofia Carozza,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “How the Sciences Train You for Faith, Part 2, with Sofia Carozza,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

This episode is sponsored by the U.S. bishops' 9 Days for Life Novena
Join the U.S. bishops’ pro-life novena from January 16 through January 24
www.9daysforlife.com

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Black Catholics and Catholic Social Teaching, with Deacon James Summers

Why do so many Black Catholics leave the Church and why do so few new members enter the Church? This is the twofold question that Deacon James Summers along with his wife Wendy and others sought to understand when they were appointed to the Black Catholic Advisory Board for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The answer redounds to his own experience as a Black Catholic in the Church, and to his approach to and appreciation for Catholic Social Teaching. Today Deacon James talks with me about the Lord’s call to seek to understand, empathize with, and actively love one another.

 Follow-up Resources:

 “The Ark and the Dove, with Edward Herrera,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

“The Embodied Holiness of Sr. Thea Bowman, with Kayla August,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
“Black Live and the Preferential Option for the Poor,” by John Cavadini, essay at Church Life Journal
"Hope Stories with Black Catholics with Sr. Josephine Garrett, CSFN" An OSV Original Podcast

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

We profess belief in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with such regularity that we likely fail to contemplate the profundity of what we declare. Josh McManaway of the McGrath Institute for Church Life is working on a book to spark new wonder and open up new depths for us about the Apostles’ Creed. In helping us learn the theology and history of our creed, Josh hopes to aid priests enrich their preaching just as other interested Christians come to a stronger and more lively understanding of the faith we profess. 

This is the first episode of several where Josh will join us to discuss the creed. In this episode, we talk about the creed in general and then spend a good bit of time breaking open the first part of the creed: “I believe in God, the Father Almighty, Creator of heaven and earth.” 

Follow-up Resources:

●      “Giving up Descartes for Lent,” essay in Church Life Journal by Josh McManaway

●      “Introduction to the New Testament,” online course by Josh McManaway (next session starts February 26, 2024)

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

It is really peculiar that Pontius Pilate’s name appears in the creed. Aside from Jesus and Mary, no other historical figures are mentioned. How did he make it into the creed? That is a question that Josh McManaway helps us to figure out.

This is the second episode of several where Josh joins us to discuss the creed. He is currently working on a book on the Apostles’ Creed to help seminarians, priests, catechists, and other interested Catholics to growi in understanding and wonder about the theology and history of the creed we profess.

Follow-up Resources:

●  “The Depth of the Creed, with Josh McManaway,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

This episode is sponsored by the National Catholic Educational Association 2024 Convention. To learn more visit https://ncea.org/NCEA2024 

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Suffering is universal. But how do we understand suffering? Does it have meaning? Can it have meaning? And most of all, what is the meaning of suffering in Christian life? Questions like these inform the work of my guest today, Dr. Mark Giszczak, author of the new book Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know. Dr. Giszczak is Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology, where he teaches a course on the Theology of Suffering that gave rise to this new book. In our discussion today we will talk about whether and how God suffers, how Christians might suffer well, obstacles to suffering well, and the importance of confronting rather than perpetually running from death.

Follow-up Resources:

• Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know, by Mark Gisczak
• Salvici Doloris, Apostolic Letter by John Paul II
• “The Mystery of Love and the Redemption of Suffering,” by Lorenzo Albacete, essay in Church Life Journal

This episode is sponsored by Saint Meinrad Seminary: Register for the Saint Meinrad Summer Chant Workshop and find other workshops, concerts, and programs at the Institute for Sacred Music by scrolling down under “Events” at www.saintmeinrad.edu/ism.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Because of Christ, the spiritual life is practical, and the practical life is spiritual. The Incarnation guarantees that. In this special episode, Leonard DeLorenzo shares some of the fruits of his newly published work, In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide. This book is especially well suited for young adults, perhaps upon Confirmation or graduation from high school or college. It also bears promise for those who are unsure about their spiritual life, who are seeking direction and bearings. It is also useful for not-so-young-anymore-adults, who are either involved in mentoring younger people, or who are looking for new bearings or fresh perspectives for their own lives.

Follow-up Resources:

In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide (OSV 2024) by Leonard DeLorenzo

This episode is sponsored by Saint Meinrad Seminary.
Register for the Saint Meinrad Summer Chant Workshop and find other workshops, concerts, and programs at the Institute for Sacred Music by scrolling down under “Events” at www.saintmeinrad.edu/ism.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

You can’t take a souvenir from Hell into Heaven; likewise, you can’t fit the realities of Heaven into Hell. That is Gospel truth for C. S. Lewis, especially as he imagines the separation between Heaven and Hell, vice and virtue, corrupt loves and the fullness of joy in his brief, brilliant eschatological novel, The Great Divorce. 

As we make the turn from Lent and Passion Week to the glory of Easter, Josh McManaway returns to the program to share a conversation with Leonard DeLorenzo about a book they both love.

Follow-up Resources:

• Learn more about The Inklings Project, a new intercollegiate initiative that invites people to pursue meaning and joy by entering the world of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings at inklingsproject.org.
• “Giving Up Descartes for Lent,” by Josh McManaway, essay in Church Life Journal
• The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis, edited by Leonard J. DeLorenzo (Ignatius Press, 2022)
  
  This episode is sponsored by the NCEA: Find out more about NCEA Rise at www.ncearise.org

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

It’s hard—and getting harder—to discern the proper relationship between our Catholic faith and American political life. Perhaps it is time to reset the framework for how we engage politics as Catholics, even by broadening our understanding of our duty to public life beyond merely politics. In his new book, Citizens Yet Strangers, Kenneth Craycraft challenges Catholics to move away from individual liberal impulses of American political identity. He seeks to set out a vision for how we orient our moral and civic lives based on the dignity of the human person, through the practices of solidarity and subsidiarity, and toward a true and worthy vision of the common good.

Kenneth Craycraft is the James J. Gardner Family Chair of Moral Theology at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary & School of Theology, the seminary for the Catholic Archdiocese of Cincinnati. He writes a monthly syndicated column for OSV News, a weekly column for Our Sunday Visitor (“Grace is Everywhere”), and monthly columns for The Catholic Telegraph and the U.K.-based Catholic Herald. Dr. Craycraft is also the author of The American Myth of Religious Freedom. He is a licensed attorney in Ohio, who holds a Ph.D. in theology from Boston College and a J.D. from Duke University School of Law.

Follow-up Resources:

• Citizens Yet Stranger: Living Authentically Catholic in a Divided America (OSV, 2024), by Kenneth Craycraft
• “‘Say my name’: Self-Deception, Transparency, and Redemption in Breaking Bad and Better Call Saul, with Ken Craycraft,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Jessica Bross helps people find their stories, craft their stories, and tell their stories. In fact, she usually writes out other people’s stories in their own voice. Jessica ghostwrites memoirs. She listens to people, she listens more, she helps them find the desire that shapes a story or theme in their lives, then she writes that story for them and with them, creating a memoir that contains that story for themselves and others. You could say that she is in the business of helping people grasp and communicate the meaning, uniqueness, and importance of their own lives’ stories.

 Jessica is the founder and owner of Cider Spoons Stories, an Austin-based company that specializes in ghostwriting, editing, teaching, and coaching. Today Jessica joins me to talk about the memoir writing process, the impact it has on the memoirist, her skill and responsibilities as the ghostwriter, and the effect deep listening can have for all of us.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Cider Spoons Stories online at ciderspoonstories.com.
• Follow Jessica Bross on LinkedIn

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The Lord gives us what we cannot make or do for ourselves. Our first task in life is to receive. And from what we receive, we are to be changed. The mystery of the Eucharist abides in that exchange: receiving, becoming.

In a new book titled Eucharist: The Real Presence of Christ, my longtime friend Tania Geist presents twelve substantive Eucharistic reflections that help small groups discover, discuss, prepare for, and respond to the gift and mission of the Eucharist. Our conversation today will touch on the meaning of the Eucharist, the gift of peace, God sustaining us with simplicity and joy, and the movement from possessiveness to gratitude.

About today's guest: Tania M. Geist has worked as an editor and writer of Catholic books, newspapers, journals, and other media. Her reflections in these pages have been especially shaped by her time studying theology and philosophy at Blackfriars of Oxford University; her years translating and editing Pope Benedict XVI’s preaching for L’Osservatore Romano newspaper inside Vatican City, and the decade during which her young family was part of the community at the University of Notre Dame. There, she received a master’s degree in systematic theology and served as an editor for Church Life Journal.

Geist currently resides in Providence, Rhode Island, with her scripture-scholar husband and their four spunky young children. As a small business owner, she runs Book Pocket, LLC, which provides editorial and audio event services.

Follow-up Resources:

• Eucharist: The Real Presence of Christ by Tania Geist
• “The Folly of Mine” by Tania Geist, article in the Church Life Journal
• “Matter Matters: One the Need for a Pastoral Theology of Radical Particularity” by Tania Geist, article in the Church Life Journal
• “Motherhood and the Paschal Mystery” by Tania Geist, article in the Church Life Journal
• “Eucharist Beliefs Among Adult Catholics, with Tim O’Malley,” podcast episode on Church Life Today
• “Augustine on the Eucharist, with Elizabeth Klein,” podcast episode on Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit” (John 15:5).

Disciples are Christ’s branches. We grow from him. His life courses through us. The fruit we bear is the sign of his love.

As the Eucharistic Revival in the United States reaches its culmination this summer, we at Notre Dame are marking the occasion in a special way, with the performance of an original, three-act musical called “Behold God’s Love.” The first of the three acts is “Root”, which draw us into the Book of Exodus, where we encounter the Passover and the Manna in the Desert. The second act is “Vine,” which focuses on the Last Supper and Jesus’ meal ministry. And the third act is “Branches,” where we join the early Christian community at Corinth to receive the Eucharistic teaching and gift.

Today, the creator and composer of this new musical joins me to talk about what we can expect and how we will benefit, in our faith and reverence, from enjoying this work of art. Carolyn Pirtle is Program Director of the Center for Liturgy, here in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. She and her cast are preparing this musical now, which will be performed twice on July 6, 2024, both at 1pm and at 7pm in the O’Laughlin Auditorium at Saint Mary’s College. It is a free but ticketed event, and you can get your tickets before they run out at the link in our show notes.

Follow-up Resources:

• Find more information about and tickets for “Behold God’s Love” 
• “Eucharistic Beliefs among Adult Catholics, with Tim O’Malley,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Preparing for First Communion, Part 2: The Passover and the Last Supper,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Rekindling Eucharistic Amazement, with Jem Sullivan,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “The Passion, with J.J. Wright,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

This episode is sponsored by Catholic Charities USA.  Help Catholic Charities serve your neighbors in need. Join us at www.WeAreThere.US

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“Seek first the Kingdom of God, and all these other things will be given to you besides.” When the Lord speaks to his disciples about anxieties, about busyness, about the hustle and bustle of the world, he does not lead them to abandon everything and run away; rather, he leads them to put the first thing first, and allow everything to come into the proper place thereafter. The life of integration, of wholeness, indeed of true holiness is rooted in putting God first and giving Him the authority to form you, guide you, and send you on mission. The monastic tradition has long offered pathways to this ordered, harmonious, rightly prioritized life, building communities where God is pursued first and in all things, while work and play and rest and learning and daily needs are organized with this first and truly necessary thing. But for those of us who do not enter monastic life, who live in the midst of the world with worldly anxieties and busyness and the hustle and bustle, we might think ourselves cut off from that wisdom.

Enter my guest today: John Cannon. He knows his way around the world, but he was significantly and definitively formed in a Carmelite monastery, where he was a monk for seven years. His mission now is to bring the order and harmony of the monastery, the fruits of that integrated life lived for and with the Lord, into the world. In particular, he serves and works with Catholic CEOs, founders, and investors to help them grow their ventures and their faith. He also launched Monk Mindset, which offers all of us, regardless of our jobs or stations in life, the opportunity to incorporate the simplicity, order, and harmony of the monastic life into our everyday lives.

Follow-up Resources:

• Learn about SENT Ventures, which helps you lead your business with the collective wisdom of a faith-aligned community.
• Find information about the SENT Summit 2024, which will take place September 3–6, 2024, in Dallas-Fort Worth.
• Visit Monk Mindset, where you can sign up for a weekly newsletter, find a guide for building your daily and weekly schedule in alignment with monastic wisdom, and begin to seek greater order, harmony, and simplicity.
• “Monastic Life and Human Ecology, with Abbot Austin Murphy, OSB,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “You Gotta Confront Who You Are!” by Travis Lacy, article in Church Life Journal

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In this special episode, we share nine practical tips for how to prioritize faith when you go off to college. This is different than just trying to “keep your faith,” which is itself possibly a losing proposition. Rather than trying to “keep” something you are afraid of losing, focus on stretching, enriching, and building on what you already have, just like you stretch, enrich, and build on what you learned in high school classes when you go into college classes. 

While this episode is directed specifically to young adults who may be going off to college (either for the first time or returning for a new year), it is also beneficial for young adults who are doing something other than college, or for not-so-young-adults who live in the world in other ways.

Follow-up Resources:

• “Nine Ways to Kickstart Your Faith in College,” by Leonard DeLorenzo. This is the essay on which this episode is built, which also includes interviews with college students and alums.
• In Search of a Full Life: A Spiritual and Practical Guide, by Leonard DeLorenzo. 
• “Forming an Intentional College Culture, with Joe Wurtz,” podcast episode via Church Life Today.
• “Becoming the Adult in the Room, with Sarah Pelrine,” podcast episode via Church Life Today.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

“The call to parenting will never be an easy one. To have your heart walk around outside your body means that your heart will be bumped and bruised along the way. It is not a vocation to be pursued in isolation. What parents need is a network of support, a village.” So begins the epilogue of Holly Taylor Coolman’s new book, Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children. What she presents in her wise, practical, and spiritually enriching work is a vision for cherishing children as a gift and guest. To do this, we must learn how to depend on and draw life from others, while creating a community where we share in the responsibility for one another’s wellbeing. Holly joins me today to talk about this call to parenting, the ongoing discernment necessary for responding to that call, and the challenges and blessings of raising children and caring for other peoples’ children in today’s day and age.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Parenting: The Complex and Beautiful Vocation of Raising Children, by Holly Taylor Coolman.
• “The Church’s Call to Foster Care, with Holly Taylor Coolman,” podcast episode via Church Life Today.
• “Amid Plagues: The Church’s Call to Foster Care and More,” by Holly Taylor Coolman, article in Church Life Journal.
• “The Invention of Parenting,” by Holly Taylor Coolman, article in Church Life Journal.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Wouldn’t it be fascinating if the most current social science research discovered not some new and unheard-of things but rather ancient and even biblical truths? The nonprofit organization Communio is reporting that this is indeed what is happening. Through their Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, they have found that family structure is the most important indicator for the religious commitment of those raised in that home. Alongside that, of course, we regularly find people who do better in school, who are more successful in work, who are healthier, and who can manage relationships better on their own. It is as if we humans were created for stable, committed relationships and called to procreate from this marital commitment.

J.P. De Gance, the founder and president of Communio, joins me today to discuss the work he and his team have been doing and how their work can help equip churches to evangelize through healthy relationships and marriage. J.P. is also the co-author of the book, Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America. You can find out more about J.P. and Communio at their website, communio.org.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationship from Communio
• Endgame: The Church’s Strategic Move to Save Faith and Family in America by John Van Epp and J.P. De Gance.
• “The State of the Family in America, with Brad Wilcox,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Purpose and meaning, healing and growth, community and fellowship—these values have traditionally been found in church. Though they are leaving the pews in droves, young adults are still seeking these spiritual benefits. Based on five years of qualitative and quantitative research,Defiant Hope, Active Love offers practical recommendations for making faith communities more hospitable to the next generation. The editor of the book and lead researcher in the project joins me today to talk about his team’s findings and where to go from here.

Jeff Keuss is a professor of Christian ministry, theology, and culture at Seattle Pacific University, where he also previously served as director of the University Scholars Honors Program and associate dean of graduate studies for the seminary.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Defiant Hope, Active Love: What Young Adults Are Seeking in Places of Work, Faith, and Community, edited by Jeff Keuss
• Pivot NW Research, where you can find more about the study, the book, and additional resources.
• “In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Rethinking Work, with Paul Blaschko,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Becoming the Adult in the Room, with Sarah Pelrine,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationship, with J.P. De Gance,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

College students really love The End of the Affair by Graham Greene. Both Josh McManaway and I have taught this book in undergraduate courses, with great success. Josh has used this book in a theology course on “Conversion,” and I have used it in a course on “The Catholic Imagination.” Since Josh and I really enjoyed creating an episode earlier this year about C. S. Lewis’s The Great Divorce, we wanted to create this episode about another book we both love, and our students love, too. So here’s our discussion on The End of the Affair.

Follow-up Resources:

• “C.S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’: a discussion with Josh McManaway,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Quantity and the Politics of Prayer,” by Chase Padusniak, essay via Church Life Journal (dealing, in part, with The End of the Affair)

The End of the Affair by Graham Greene (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition), which Josh and Lenny cite in this episode.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

The Vigil Project is a nonprofit Catholic apostolate and collective of musical artists dedicated to leading people to an encounter with God through music. Their work stretches from the liturgy to everyday life, from Sunday worship and Feast Days to Tuesday afternoons waiting in a carpool line. Their goal is to offer and support excellence and reverence in music in all of these moments. The Vigil Project has ten albums available, they create communities for Catholic musicians, and they offer retreats and courses for musicians and music leaders.

 Today the Vigil Project’s Director of Mission Advancement joins me to talk about the work of their apostolate and the people they serve. Andrew Goldstein is himself a Catholic musician who, for ten years, served as a church music director. Before coming to the Vigil Project, he co-founded Seattle’s critically acclaimed chamber music series, Emerald City Music. He has also led chamber music festivals, and worked to guide orchestras and opera houses.

After our conversation today, stick around till the very end of this episode so you can hear one of the devotional songs that Andrew shared with us from The Vigil Project, one which appears on their album “True Presence.”

 Follow-up Resources:

• Visit The Vigil Project online at thevigilproject.com.
• The Vigil Project’s monthly newsletter is available at thevigilproject.com/subscribe
• Learn about the Catholic Musician Community at catholicmusician.org.
• The song at the end of this episode comes from the album, “True Presence.” Stream that album on any service, here. Their full catalog of music is available at thevigilproject.com/listen
• Learn more about the Catholic Musician Retreat at thevigilproject.com/catholic-musician-retreat
• Learn more about the Meaning of Music film project at thevigilproject.com/meaningofmusic

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

In her 1936 book, The Secret of Childhood, Maria Montessori writes that “We must wake up to the great reality that children have a psychic life whose delicate manifestations escape notice and whose pattern of activity can be unconsciously disrupted by adults.” The approach to education that Montessori established sought to remove such unnecessary disruptions while cultivating a fruitful environment wherein children could discover the world, grow toward the maturation of their God-given capacities, and experience the wonder and responsibility of real freedom.

 Montessori schools have since been established all across the United States and indeed across the world, including here in my own hometown of South Bend, Indiana. The conversation on our episode today will focus on one such school, Saint Joseph Montessori, which is in fact a Catholic Montessori school for children ages 2.5 to 6. 

My guest is Dr. Elizabeth Capdevielle, who is a board member of Saint Joseph Montessori, and who, as a trained Montessori educator, will help us learn more about the Montessori approach, the anthropological underpinnings of this education, and the correspondence of Montessori education to a Catholic vision of the world and the human person.

In addition to serving on the board at Saint Joseph Montessori, Beth is an assistant teaching professor at the University of Notre Dame, where she teaches in the University Writing Program.

 Follow-up Resources:

• Saint Joseph Montessori, South Bend, IN
• “Joy and Parenting,” by Claire Fyrvquist, Co-founder of St. Joseph Montessori, journal article in Church Life Journal
• The Secret of Childhood, by Maria Montessori
• The Absorbent Mind: A Classic Education and Child Development for Educators and Parents, by Maria Montessori
• “Catechesis of the Good Shepherd, with Mary Mirrione,” podcast episode via Church Life Today

The episode is sponsored by Saints Mary’s Press, smp.org/bibles.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Notre Dame professors Melissa Moschella and Joshua McManaway join me today to talk about Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ. The encyclical is a call to renew our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and, thereby, to become more fully, more completely, more authentically human, especially in our love for God and love of neighbor. This conversation is the first of two that we will host on our show with my faculty colleagues in the McGrath Institute for Church Life, each of whom has a distinct area of expertise.

Melissa Moschella is the newest member of our McGrath Institute for Church Life faculty, where she is Professor of the Practice. She is a philosopher whose work spans the fields of ethics, political philosophy, and law, as well as natural law theory, biomedical ethics, and the family.

 Josh McManaway has joined me on several episodes before. He is Assistant Professor of the Practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life, where he is also the program director of the Savoring the Mystery preaching program, and academic director of the “Take a Second Look” initiative, which helps young adults rediscover the beauty and riches of Catholicism. A theologian, Josh is an expert on the Early Church and is currently finishing up a book on the Apostles’ Creed.

Follow-up Resources:

• Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ
• "The Sacred Heart of the New Encyclical," by Leonard DeLorenzo, essay in Church Life Journal
• “Praying into the Sacred Heart of Jesus, with Fr. Joe Laramie,” podcast episode via Church Life Today 
• Five-part series on the Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by Leonard DeLorenzo, via Our Sunday Visitor
  • Part 1: “Contemplating the Mysteries of the Sacred Heart of Jesus”
  • Part 2: “Five Ways to Foster Devotion...”
  • Part 3: “How to Conform to the Love of Jesus”
  • Part 4: “Meet the Saints Devoted to...”
  • Part 5: “What Is Behind the Theology of the Sacred Heart?”
• “Are Jansenists Among Us?” by Sean Blanchard in Church Life Journal
• On the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the Sisters of Carmel

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Notre Dame professors Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson join me today to talk about Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ. This is the second of two conversations on the encyclical that we are featuring on Church Life Today, each with faculty colleagues of mine from the McGrath Institute for Church Life. In this episode, we will talk about poetry and symbolism, artificial intelligence and algorithms, the importance of memory, the human person as a living union, and more.

 Abigail Favale is Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame, where her academic expertise brings her to the intersection of theology, literature, and women’s studies. 

Brett Robinson is Associate Director of Outreach and Associate Professor of the Practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. He leads a number of initiatives in our institute, especially ones related to Catholic media studies.

Follow-up Resources:

• Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ
• Part 1 of the conversation on the new encyclical, with Melissa Moschella and Joshua McManaway, podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “The Sacred Heart of the New Encyclical,” by Leonard DeLorenzo, essay in Church Life Journal
•  “Some Human Beings Carry Remnants of Other Human Beings in Their Bodies,” by Kristin Collier, essay in Church Life Journal
• On the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the Sisters of Carmel

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Flying is impossible. Well, not strictly impossible, because we fly in airplanes and hot air balloons, but you know what I mean: human beings can’t fly. It’s impossible. 

Except here’s the thing: a good number of people –– hundreds, maybe thousands –– have sworn, upon penalty of damnation, that they have witnessed people flying, or at least levitating. People like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino. About saints like these, a nearly overwhelming number of testimonies say the same thing over and over: “they flew”.

 If flying is impossible, then the history of saints who flew is a history of the impossible. And that is the book my guest wrote. The book is They Flew: A History of the Impossible. The author and my guest is the esteemed scholar Dr. Carlos Eire, the T. L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University. In addition to They Flew, Professor Eire is the author of several other important and award-winning books, including Waiting for Snow in Havana, which won the National Book Award, War Against Idols, A Very Brief History of Eternity, and Reformations: The Early Modern World, 1450–1560. 

Professor Eire joined us at the University of Notre Dame to deliver a lecture in our Saturdays with the Saintsseries, and a link to the recording of that lecture is included in this episode’s show notes.

Follow-up Resources:

• They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire
• “The Trouble with Levitation and Bilocation,” by Carlos Eire, journal article in Church Life Journal

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 fit into the theological and spiritual program of those who seek to inherit his legacy.So what is Augustine’s Eucharistic theology and how does it accommodate this breadth of expression? On today’s show we want to try to understand what the Eucharist really means for Augustine. And I’ve got just the person to help us understand.Elizabeth Klein is Assistant Professor of Theology at the Augustine Institute. She is the author of God: What Every Catholic Should Know, and of Augustine’s Theology of Angels. She recently delivered a paper at the annual conference for the Academy of Catholic Theology on the topic of “Augustine on the Eucharist as Sacrament of Unity.” Our conversation today will build off of what she developed for that lecture.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 dead go? How do they live? And what does this all mean for us, who remain?”I have been talking with people about their experiences of the death of loved ones and their desire for communion with them. I’m not recording all of these conversations, but I have asked a couple people—and maybe I’ll ask more––if they would be willing to record an episode for our show so that you can listen in, too. This is the second of those episodes, the first of which appeared under the title “Heaven in the Midst of Death.”My guest today is my friend Stephanie DePrez, a professional opera singer, a comedian, a voice coach, an artist. I’m so grateful to her for her willingness to talk with us today about her mom, Susie DePrez, and her own grief, desire, and hope.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

​​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 relevant and those who want to be ancient.But maybe by interpreting Vatican II that way, we are seeing something that isn’t true. We are perhaps seeing a false image of the council, rather than seeing the council itself. That, in part, is what my guest on today’s show has to say to us, and he wants to help the Church and the world to rediscover the Second Vatican Council for what it truly is, not for what we have been led to think about it, one way or another.Fr. Blake Britton is the author of Reclaiming Vatican II: What It (Really) Said, What It Means, and How It Calls Us to Renew the Church. Fr. Blake is a priest of the Diocese of Orlando, frequent writer for the Evangelization & Culture blog and journal, and cohost of the The Burrowshire Podcast.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 abilities fostered and ultimately perfected.Over the past year on this show, I have spoken with a number of leaders across the country in Catholic education, including some who are reclaiming and reproposing classical, liberal arts education as distinctively conducive to the aims of Catholic formation and the holistic education of young people. If you have been listening to our show for a while, you may remember an interview with Elisabeth Sullivan of the Institute for Catholic Liberal Education, as well as a pair of interviews with Thomas Curtin, Head of School at Our Lady of the Rosary in Greeneville, South Carolina. If you don’t remember those, you can find those episodes on our podcast––and I recommend them to you.In line with those episodes, today’s conversation will also focus classical, liberal arts education in the Catholic tradition, except this time, it is all a bit closer to home… at least to my home, in South Bend, Indiana. My guest is Dr. Margaret Blume Freddoso, Head of School and board member of the St. Thomas More Academy in South Bend, which is a private, independent classical liberal arts school in the Catholic tradition, opening its doors with full enrollment in August 2021. Margaret holds a PhD in theology from the University of Notre Dame, as well as a BA from Yale University. Along with President of the Board at St. Thomas More Academy, Dr. Kirk Doran, and others, Margaret has been laying the foundation for and is now building this new classical, liberal arts school to pursue the ideals of a robust Catholic education, with a view to the full dignity and splendor of the human person in Christ.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 and more, Dr. Angela Franks joins me for a discussion today, building off of one of her recent essays which bears the title “The Body is a Formed Stream.” That essay appeared in the Church Life Journal. Dr. Franks is professor of theology at St. John’s seminary in Boston and Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge. I’m excited about this conversation today because I think that what Dr. Franks both lays out and proposes can help all of us to think more clearly and in a richer way about the questions of embodiment, sex, and gender that are so difficult to think through today.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 title “The Key to Understanding God” in which he brings forward the Eucharistic thought of the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov and the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. In both, we find the concerted effort to apprehend the entire Christian life, including the intellectual life, from and toward the Eucharist. The Eucharist, in other words, is the key to understanding all things, including and especially who God is and how God is. These are deep matters with surprising relevance, which together we are going to seek to understand and consider better.Our guide and my guest is Jonathan Ciraulo, assistant professor of theology at Saint Meinrad Seminary and School of Theology. His essay, “The Key to Understanding God,” appeared in the Church Life Journal in April 2022, and his new book with the University of Notre Dame Press is The Eucharistic Form of God: Hans Urs von Balthasar’s Sacramental Theology.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 vocation as Christians.” This at the very heart of what it means to be “pro-life”Those are the words of Holly Taylor Coolman, who invites and challenges us, as Christians, to heed the central call of the Gospel to provide care to the suffering, to offer hospitality to those who need, and to build communities that are indeed “pro-life”, through and through. Dr. Taylor Coolman is assistant professor of theology at Providence College, where she also serves as chair of the department of theology. She is here to talk with me about foster care, in particular, which was the subject of an essay she published in our Church Life Journal, and a call she has heeded in her own life.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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, with care, with personality, with joy.Friends, I have read a lot of books about sanctity. I have read a lot of stories about saints. I have read a lot of books of stories about saints. But the book that Meg Hunter-Kilmer wrote stands apart. It is an education in true holiness, which depends on a willingness to see and accept the whole human condition. Her stories of saints are filled with piety and grace, but also with the afflictions, failures, abuses, and unrespectability of these very flesh and blood people who received and responded to the love of God in Christ.The book is Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness. The author, Meg Hunter-Kilmer, joins me today in the studio from her travels around the country where she speaks and teaches everywhere as a full-time missionary evangelist. Believe me, you’re in for a treat in listening to her.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 desires of a given community, and by doing so, draws people into intimacy and communion with Jesus Christ.Today I welcome to the show Dr. Matthew Vereecke, Superintendent of Catholic Schools for the Diocese of Dallas, who will share with us not only his vision for Catholic education, but also the way in which his growing and diverse diocese activates the Church’s evangelizing mission through its schools. Dr. Vereecke is in his seventh year as superintendent in Dallas, a role which he assumed after nearly a decade as a Catholic school director and as a principal.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Salvation comes from the Latin word “salus”, which means “health” and “well-being”. Illness and sin are therefore both, in different ways, a lack of the health and well-being that is intended for us. We might even say that we are created for wholeness just as we are created for holiness, and that growing in one means growing in the other. Salvation is both a matter of wholeness and holiness. The Martin Center for Integration seeks to bring together what is all too often kept apart: mental health and faith development. It is common for either one or the other of those two to be emphasized, but far too rare for both sanity and sanctity to be cared for and promoted together, in their own distinctive but coordinate ways. Today I welcome the husband and wife founders of the Martin Center to talk with us about this mission of integration, the needs that they are responding to, and how we become really whole, really healthy, really holy. Pat Millea is Formation and Operations Director for the Martin Center for Integration, while Kenna Millea is Clinical Director for the Center. Both have extensive experience in Church ministry, with advanced degrees in theology and formation in ministry from the University of Notre Dame, while Kenna is also a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapy. To learn more, go to martincenterforintegration.com

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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 at Australia Catholic University’s Plunkett Centre for Ethics and currently scholar in residence at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics. In an essay he published with our Church Life Journal, he proposes that Christian personalism offers promising avenues for pursuing a theology and philosophy of dementia, since Christian personalism leads us toward seeing and caring for whole persons. Today we will talk about conceptions of the self, the deconstruction of the ego, the loss and the dignity of those who suffer from dementia, and even the radical reversal of our commonplace understanding of personhood.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.