The Forgiving Father

In my first post at New Evangelizers, I used the analogy of fatherhood to understand why God may allow pain and tolerate bad behavior. God is the source of fatherhood, so human fatherhood tells us something about God, and God’s…

Don’t Believe Everything You Read

You shouldn’t believe everything you read in the Bible… At least if you’re reading without considering the speaker or the context, that is. Perhaps you’ve been troubled by a passage you read, or, while spreading the good news, been confronted…

Our Mother the Church

In my first post for New Evangelizers, I wrote the Analogy of Fatherhood – how fatherhood has taught me something about God. In Lumen Fidei, the Holy Father wrote that “The Church is a mother…”. There is another analogy! What can motherhood…

Losing the Mission

The word “mass” comes from the same route as “mission”. At each Mass, we are sent forthwith a mission. What is that mission? What is our primary mission as Catholics? The words I remember concluding most Masses in my life were “go forth,…

We Are the 1%

We have a problem, you and I. We too often take for granted what we have. We have come into personal wealth that the world, as a whole, is impoverished of. Most of us have never even earned it. We’re…

What You Say, What They Hear

In my article “Let Freedom Ring“, I asked “What does it mean to be free?” How can we do that? How can we ask what a word means? The answer is simple — that words have meanings. Those meanings can…

The Power of Story: An Interview with Joseph Pearce

I recently had the pleasure of talking with Joseph Pearce about the power of personal stories, especially as a means of evangelism. He’s uniquely well-suited to the topic: he has taught and written on fictional characters’ journeys, and he has shared others’ stories…

Let Freedom Ring

In the United States, we’ve just celebrated the Fourth of July, or Independence Day.  It’s a day celebrating the freedoms for which our forebearers fought and died.  Around the world, peoples are protesting, fighting, praying, and working for greater freedom….

Resolving Contradictions

John Paul the Great said the Church is a “sign of contradiction,” after the warning of Simeon in Luke 2:34. We, as the Body of Christ, must stand in visible, tangible opposition to anything wrong in the spirit of the…

Learning 21 Ways to Worship (& a Giveaway)

In a brief review of Vinny Flynn’s 7 Secrets of the Eucharist, I wrote that it is a “conversational and easy read that is in no way light in weight,” one that “feels like a passionate conversation… rather than a theology…

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2019/11/09 By

Growth Beneath the Snow

“The plants were hidden under the snow. And the farmer…remarked with satisfaction: ‘Now they’re growing on the inside.’ I thought of…your forced inactivity…Tell me, are you also growing on the inside?” St. Josemaria Escriva, The Way, #294 The plants cannot…

2019/01/11 By

Physical minimalism, spiritual excess

Almost a year ago, I wrote about Seasons of Change and how, in the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis tells us that “(t)he horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable possessions we have produced in the…

2018/12/14 By

Faith in Receiving the Word

God asked faith of Abraham and Isaac. He asked it of St. John of the Cross, of Mother Theresa, and others. Sometimes their extreme examples seem just that — extreme. They seem to be on the edges of what’s possible,…

2018/11/09 By

Cowardice to Shame to Anger: A Lesson from Screwtape

“But hatred is best combined with Fear. Cowardice, alone of all the vices, is purely painful–horrible to anticipate, horrible to feal, horrible to remember; Hatred has its pleasures. It is therefore often the compensation by which a frightened man reimburses…

2018/10/12 By

There is No Third Way

Tertium non datur. That’s the law of the excluded middle. It is used in philosophy, especially logic, but there is a lot of other “middle” that we can exclude besides philosophy. In my last post, There is a Third Way,…

2018/06/08 By

There is a Third Way

A while back, I had an exchange with a disheartened young man. He said that he keeps encountering 5 types: “(o)ld, rambling and cynical men; bored, cliquey housewives; clueless and hard-headed men; disinterested and troubled women; and unhelpful, indifferent men…

2018/04/13 By

On Pride and Christian Privilege

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape educates a lesser demon on using a new Christian’s pride: “He must be made to feel (he’d better not put it in to words) ‘how different we Christians are’; and by ‘we Christians’…

2018/03/09 By

Seasons of Change

In the Screwtape Letters, C.S. Lewis tells us that “(t)he horror of the Same Old Thing is one of the most valuable possessions we have produced in the human heart…” We hate monotony, sameness. Some of us constantly ask “what’s…

2018/02/09 By

Proof and Belief

In my last two posts, we’ve thought about the words “absolute” and “relative”, as well as “objective” and “subjective”. Another word that gets thrown around lightly is “proof”. “Set forth your case, says the Lord; bring your proofs, says the…

2017/10/13 By

Absolute Truth and Relativism

Last time, we thought about objective and subjective statements. Let’s look at a similar (and sometimes confused) pair of words: absolute and relative. Why do we care about these words? In 1884, Pope Leo XIII wrote against the relativistic philosophy…