Growing up in an evangelical Protestant family, I didn’t hear much about the Christian mystics. My religious background tended to equate mysticism with occult...
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.
“Glory be to God for dappled things.” So begins “Pied Beauty,” a poem by 19th-century Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins. The poem praises God with the...
Thirty years ago, the fine theologian John Shea, teaching a course on redemption, introduced me to Flannery O’Connor’s fiction. I found her stories...
“That’s Jesus, Mama!” shouted my cousin’s exuberant daughter, Claire. Her mother was reading to her not from the gospels, but from the climactic scene of The...
When I walked into the L’Arche home six years ago, I saw the reproduction of Rembrandt’s “The Return of the Prodigal Son” on the wall. L’Arche is an...
As I begin to write this, I’m sitting in the observation car of the California Zephyr. The time approaches 10 p.m., and the endless plains of Nebraska recede...
We can borrow Vincent de Paul’s tough questions about how to best help those most in need. Turn away from the new iPhone and toward your neighbor. This is the...
Ten years ago, when I was a 14-year-old high school student, my religion teacher arranged for me to interview Father Patrick Ahearn, a leading expert on St...
For nearly 2,000 years, the chair of Peter has been occupied by a motley crew of saints and sinners. In the course of teaching church history in a seminary, I...
I had never heard of Father Augustus Tolton until I took a course in black Catholic history at Xavier University in New Orleans. I did not know that he had...
