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.
Discipline is Treason in the Kingdom of Comfort
I had a conversation with a hurting mom recently. We were bemoaning certain aspects of youth culture and how broken it has become, and how damaged it makes our young people in return. She was seeing how the wider culture was robbing her son of dignity and innocence. Even more startling, she told me how he was seeing it too and felt overwhelmed by his inability to escape it.
It was then that a comment I had heard a month or so ago took on new light.
I was listening to a podcast recently that was on website development, which usually leads to personal topics about life, work and happiness. The woman being interviewed made a powerful statement that has stuck with me, even though I can't find that particular podcast anymore. In response to the interviewer's comment on how many achievements she made and how strong of a work ethic she has, she responded with this comment.
"I don't know when, but somewhere along the line in recent history we decided to substitute Comfort for Happiness."
The Cross Over Washington, D.C.
It is a grave sadness in our day that Truth is obscured behind such powerful labels as "Conservative" and "Liberal", or "Republican" and "Democrat". Once these names have been fixed to a view or idea, the person behind it is lost. When people become labeled, it becomes easier to dismiss them. When we Christians start dismissing human persons, especially with secular, politically charged labels, then we have emptied the cross of its power. We encourage the party spirit that St. Paul warned us about.
The greatest tool of Satan in America is the use of the Left/Right political system to prevent people- even people with a million dear things held in common- from ever uniting, from ever becoming friends or allies. Our system of democratic elections, steered as it is by those already in power, never seem to care about Truth, only label fidelity. Persons are supposed to be lost, that is how the system works.
The Apostolic Church, Reinterpreted Today
What does it mean to live as Christ lived in present day America? I have no idea. The new evangelization requires us as Christians to live differently in the world today. We cannot walk around with this pre-Enlightenment European air of entitlement, spouting sayings about "Christian nations" and all that nonsense. This is not a Christian nation. Other than Vatican City, there are no more Christian nations. "Christendom is dead. Long live Christianity!" as Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to say.
I have been reading Acts of the Apostles lately with an ongoing irritation that I cannot seem to shake. The way they lived was not a once-only event. It needs to be revisited and reinterpreted in the light of today. I am not living the way that I think I should be, the way that I think my neighbor needs me to live so that they might have life. Here are three major things that stand out to me about the Apostolic Church.