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.
Saint Kateri Tekakwitha
The first time I heard that name, I immediately fell in love with it and knew that, wife willing, my first daughter would be so called. It is unique without being crazy, and has deep traditional ties to it. My wife agreed to the name, and so our first born child, my first daughter was named Kateri.
Kateri Tekakwitha was the child of a Mohawk chief who captured his Algonquin bride in a raid. Kateri's mom had a deep spiritual life and was a Catholic. Her father kept the old ways, but both of them died when she was a young child by a small pox epidemic that ruined many in her town. She survived, but with scars all over her face and greatly diminished eye sight.
Though rejection of the Catholic French Jesuit missionaries was common by the rightfully suspicious Mohawks, Kateri was able to seek out the Jesuit instruction and become a Catholic herself. She was one of those rare people who so give themselves over to the Lord that they never stop growing and progressing in the spiritual life.
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.
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.
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.