Advent is a wonderful season because it’s all about waiting for a baby. Who doesn’t love babies? Religion is sweet when it concerns a tiny bundle of life we...
Religion
Essays explaining our faith, including stories about church teaching, Vatican documents, canon law, liturgical theology, and other Catholic topics.
It’s hard not to play favorites, even with scripture. Many churchgoers accept that the Bible is composed of sacred writings from one end to the other. Still...
Social life is a lot like being on a sports team. Individual players want to be as successful as possible, perhaps by scoring lots of points. The ultimate goal...
Twenty years without a word! That’s how long the early church went without written texts. From the resurrection of Jesus to 50 A.D. there wasn’t a shred of...
After the Virgin Mary, St. Francis of Assisi is probably Catholicism’s most popular saint. Sure, other saints do more practical things: St. Anthony can help...
There are some Bible stories that don’t appear in the Lectionary. Like that of Yael, in the book of Judges, who drives a tent peg through an enemy general’s...
My college roommate Nadine was a Pentecostal Protestant. She read her Bible for an hour faithfully every night after classes and before tackling her other...
The Catholic Church has historically treated suicide as an unforgivable sin. The reasoning, as articulated by St. Thomas Aquinas, was that suicide was not only...
What did Mary have to do with being Catholic in the pre-Vatican II church? I would not know how to begin disentangling her from the religion of my childhood. I...
Bored friends sometimes shoot me emails from their desks at work. They share some trifle that’s going on in their lives, then ask the inevitable question:...
