Start here.
I have written here since 2010 on evangelization, parish life, Scripture, apologetics, and the moral life. These six are the best place to begin.
Go Home and Live as Missionary Disciples
If your faith feels humdrum, you may not have entered the mission yet. A talk to men on what that asks of you.
Formed By Distraction
Eliot described minds pulled from one distraction to the next. We now carry that in our pockets. What is it forming in us?
What Is a Catholic?
A plain answer: who belongs to the Church Christ founded on the Apostles, and what holds that Church together.
Why You Need Your Men’s Group
Before asking whether men’s groups work, ask what problem they are meant to solve.
Why Protestants Are Becoming Catholic at My Parish
What draws evangelicals and mainline Protestants into the Catholic Church, as they told me in class.
How God Speaks in Human Words
The first of four articles on how the Bible is at once a human book and the Word of God.
Community and Evangelization, part 2
My Little Series Continues...
Here is my second post on the interrelationship between community and evangelization. If you have not read the post on community, go and do so now. It will blow your mind. Or, it will prepare you for this article, at least.
PART TWO: EVANGELIZATION TODAY
I have about 15 articles on this website about evangelization. You can check those out to get a bigger picture of my views on evangelization and what it is all about, but for now, I am going to paint for you a quick portrait of evangelization in order to hasten the point of this most excellent blog series.
First, evangelization is the whole work of the Church, starting from grace and ending in glory. It is also a work of the whole Church, not left up to the priests on the altar, the monks in foreign lands, or the nuns in the inner-city Catholic schools. It is just as much your responsibility as it is mine, and I have a fancy website! So this means that evangelization is why the Church exists, how the Church continues to exist, and is the reason for our existence within the Church.
But what is evangelization?
Community and Evangelization, part 1
My New Little Series on Evangelization and Community.
I've been thinking lately about two things: evangelization and community, and how they are inter-related. Here's some posts that will follow along these thoughts as I have them. As always, any series that I do are sporadic and incomplete. They are intimations and suggestions towards answers, not the answers themselves.
The Idea of Community
Most of my ministry is devoted to the cause of the new evangelization. I am trying to get a sense of where the Spirit is moving the Church today, of how He is transforming things like parish ministries, outreach, the marginalized and forgotten, the active and the devout. The new evangelization seems to suit me because I enjoy the idea of reaching out to Catholics who aren't really all that Catholic. The Mission Ad Gentes is too remote and I'll leave it to better, smarter, holier people to do authentic mystogogy.
Community is more difficult for me because I am a nerd and a bit of a loner when it comes to ministry stuff. Heck, this whole website is somewhat of a testament to that - it's just me typing away in my makeshift office all alone. But community is important, and so I need to focus my energy on developing a sane and helpful approach towards "fostering the Christian community", whatever that means.
Retreat Insights - Theme and Tone
So I figured that I have directed, wrote, and/or contributed to at least 50 retreats in the last six years. Some of those retreats were my own babies from top to bottom, and some were those where I was just plugged in to the speaking role of someone else's baby. To say that I love retreats is an understatement. Retreats are beautiful opportunities to tell the world to shut up so that God's voice can resound in your heart.
I like to tell the teens or young adults that a retreat is a unique time to withdraw from the world in order to hear more clearly three voices: God's voice, your own voice, and the devil's. Too often we confuse the three (usually I think I'm God).
Here are a collection of insights that I came up with for retreat making that I think are pretty important. And most of these are for high school students, which is the majority of retreats that I do. I will post on a variety of topics to keep the blog posts a little bit shorter for your consuming pleasure.