People say you never forget a first impression, but I honestly couldn’t tell you my first impression of St. Pope Paul VI. At first, I suppose, Paul VI was just...
Our Faith
Essays and reporting on theology and scripture that put our faith in the context of everyday life.
The contemporary crisis of masculinity is often framed in reactionary terms—“men are lost,” “men are under attack,” “bring back real men.” Within Catholic...
When I first started dating my husband, I hated sitting next to him at Mass. His leg was constantly bouncing, shaking the pew and distracting me from what was...
After drafting my first formal memoir, You Lied to Me About God: A Memoir (North Atlantic Books), I shared it with one of my assistants, Katie Dougherty...
Since first grade, my daughter’s best friend has been a boy. They share what Dr. Seuss called “compatible weirdness”—cracking each other up with drawings or...
When my wife and I married, we sang Rory Cooney and Gary Daigle’s “Covenant Hymn.” Based on Ruth’s proclamation to her mother-in-law Naomi, that she would...
“When the day of Pentecost had come, they were all together in one place.” (Acts of the Apostles 2:1) There was a time, long ago, when everyone I knew was a...
Sometime in the summer of 1829, a young Spanish man, Anthony Claret, was walking along a beach in Barcelona. The 20-year-old cloth merchant was suffering from...
Lay-Lay. That’s what my 4-year-old nephew calls me because he has trouble saying my name the way most people say it — Brandon. When he first started...
