Some years back, I watched a discussion unfold on social media about the devil. A Catholic woman anxiously asked her friends for prayers that could be used to...
Religion
Essays explaining our faith, including stories about church teaching, Vatican documents, canon law, liturgical theology, and other Catholic topics.
I typed the question into the search engine with sincere curiosity: What does the word “O” mean? This wasn’t work avoidance—although I’m a master at that...
Whenever the prophet Malachi pops up at Mass, I think of a dark comedy from 1992 called Death Becomes Her. The former is a bleak prophet with nothing good to...
On a brisk winter day in the Kingdom of Sicily, around the year 1250, two young men made a journey to the Shrine of Montevergine. The local villagers, seeing...
In Fratelli Tutti (On Fraternity and Social Friendship) Pope Francis calls Christians “to recognize Christ himself in each of our abandoned or excluded...
Marisela, a young Mexican-American woman, was going through a period of debilitating anxiety and depression. “I was in such a bad state,” she said. “I kept on...
Giants, ghosts, and sea monsters. Demons and terrifying hybrid guardians. The Bible is teeming with monsters of all sorts, both those who live on Earth and...
A popular theme in horror films is the practice of exorcism. From the 1973 classic The Exorcist to the 2023 film The Pope’s Exorcist, this genre raises...
One night, I came home late from work and took off my shoes at the door, as is my family’s custom. Walking in barefoot, I stepped on my son’s Legos that had...
Catholic tradition likes the number seven. There are seven deadly sins, seven seals in the Book of Revelation, seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, seven days of...
