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.
Information or Conversion (part two): Personal Witness
Testimonies As Change-Oriented Talks
In the previous post I talked about a retreat where the enthusiasm of the students pushed me to go deeper with them in my talks. My response was one of two options: either I switch to a more information-dense presentation, or I push them further in conversion. Going with option two, you have to start with testimony, especially your own.
Introduction to Witness: Story Time
There are few things as powerful as a testimony in evangelization. Proclaiming your witness with all of the up's and down's that life has thrown at you, and drawing out those connections to Christ and how He has moved in your life personally has its own gravity. It pulls people in without being preachy or pushy.
Moreover, testimonies are narratives, and everyone loves a good story. People remember stories far more than they do talking points, quotes, jokes, or footnotes. The morals and dangers stand out like billboards. The lessons are felt because they are real. Teachings come alive. Plato used dialogues. Jesus used parables. People love a good story.
But you aren't reading this because you love a good story. You are reading this because you talk to people about Christ.
The Spiritual Danger of Private Revelations
What is Public and Private Revelation?
Hey Catholics, stop reading books and web sites (especially web sites) based upon private revelations that are not approved by the Church. If you are putting stock in these things, and they turn out to be false, you've been building yourself up to a disaster. At best, if they get approved, they are still only private revelation. Private revelations are not meant for the Universal Church, but for a specific time, place, or group. It ain't Gospel and never will be. Yet, often the followers of private revelations try to demand universal assent of faith to these unapproved apparitions and locutions as if they were the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception or something akin to it.
It is not a healthy spiritual practice to dive into these texts or web sites until they are approved. My advice is to stay away until the Church deems them credible. Let the Church guide you. Don't be a jerk, but be cautious, and look out for those red flags that something's fishy with a message.
DAY SIX: THE JOY OF TRIAL
The Desire to Fit In
Let no one tell you that being in high school is easy. There seems to be so much riding on your exams, your grades, your after-school activities, that it produces a lot of stress on its own. There is also the enormous pressure to look, talk, and act a certain way. Some people feel these pressures differently than others, but they are still there. Fitting in, not standing out- for a lot of teens in school, this is priority number one. And it doesn’t go away once you get into college. It is perfectly natural for most people to not want to stand out in the crowd.
Being Catholic does not always make it easy to fit in. There’s Ash Wednesday, when people tell you that you have a smudge on your forehead all day. It makes you stand out. Then you have to explain why you have ashes on your head. The purpose of the Catholic Church is to call everyone into a real relationship with Jesus Christ, and with that relationship comes ways of living and thinking that are increasingly unpopular, and even hated. But the goal of the Church is not to appeal to the majority, but to be faithful to Jesus.
Day Five: Joy of Love
When Jesus said, “pure of heart” he was drawing attention away from the obsession with external purification rituals of the Pharisees. He focuses on the heart, but their external approach kept their hearts from being truly pure. Jesus even called them “white-washed tombs” that are pretty on the outside, but inside, they are full of dead men’s bones!
This was the difference b/t Christ’s attitude to sinners and that of the Pharisees. Jesus associated with sinners in order to radiate upon them and their faults the merciful purity of the love of God, and so to heal them, while the Pharisees feared contamination. (Servais Pinckaers, O.P., Sources of Christian Ethics)
Purity means freedom from compromise, especially with sin. The only way you can do that is by building of the habit of consistently choosing God above all other things, even if it comes at a great personal cost.