He was perhaps America’s most beloved film critic, but that is not what Roger Ebert thought he wanted to be. The way Ebert tells it, he imagined a career as a...
Wise Guides
Wise Guides essays explore how saints and holy figures offer wisdom for today. In each reflection, the author connects a historical person’s ministry to our modern spiritual and moral challenges.
In the spring of 1981 my family boarded a plane and took a 15-plus-hour flight from our hometown in Grand Rapids, Michigan to Lisbon, Portugal. I was 7 years...
The people of Capim Grosso, Brazil taught me to dance. Jesuit Father Dean Brackley helped me make sense of the experience. At the time I was a 21-year-old...
I teach graduate students how to teach math and science. On the first day of each semester, I ask, “Who can tell me something about Albertus Magnus, Albert the...
When I think of martyrs, I usually think of people with foreign-sounding names like Perpetua or Attalus, both of whom were thrown to the lions in the Roman...
Twice a week I hopped out of a taxicab between the Coptic Christian church and the blue-domed mosque in a neighborhood called al-Abdali. From there, I walked...
“Know who you really are and how God can use you,” one of my seminary teachers exhorted. Living this injunction, simple albeit powerful in message, has been an...
Each time I read a story about someone running into a burning building to save another person, I ask myself: Would I have the courage to do that? The fact is...
“I’m convinced that my life has to end now, early as it seems, because I have fulfilled my life’s mission. I wouldn’t know what else I have to do on this earth...
I first encountered her in a cold stone church in Périgueux, France. She stood in a corner, a young shepherdess with a plaster lamb looking up at her...
