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...
Religion
Essays explaining our faith, including stories about church teaching, Vatican documents, canon law, liturgical theology, and other Catholic topics.
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:...
Folks are asking the question: Should we count our Lord among the ranks of refugees? Did the Holy Family qualify for refugee status, given they were forced to...
Do you own a Bible? I don’t mean in the sense of having one gathering dust on a bookshelf but in the commitment sense of the word own. Can you say...
When I was in high school, I wanted to go to a party. I knew that my parents would say no, so I lied and said that I was at a friend’s house and went anyway...
Why does the thought of a circus creep me out? Until recently, I’d experienced only one back in my teens. Unlike folks who report being afraid of clowns, I...
