When my five-year-old daughter came home from school proclaiming excitedly that there is a saint who is still alive, she was indignant when I gently explained that all saints are in heaven. Her face lit up a few days later, however, when I brought home Word on Fire Spark’s Saintly …

By Jonah McKeown CNA Staff, Sep 26, 2023 / 14:50 pm Most people are likely aware — at least vaguely — that J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of “The Hobbit” and “The Lord of the Rings,” was Catholic. Fewer, perhaps, know how seriously he took his faith, in a time and place …

To appreciate Larry Chapp’s new book, Confession of a Catholic Worker: Our Current Moment of Christian Witness, one must understand what he means by “confession.” The book’s central claim is “that as modern Western Christians our cultural situation has flushed us out of our neutral corner and forced us to …

If you’ve never been to a Buc-ee’s before, there’s really no way to comprehend the experience: 120 gas pumps, 80 fountain drink dispensers, 31 cash registers. Returning from my annual retreat with a few brother priests, the car ran low on gas, so we stopped at Buc-ee’s. I thought we …

Every human and community experiences social maladies. American culture has long displayed symptoms of these pathologies—and American Christianity along with it. From susceptibility to conspiracy theories, vulgar aesthetic taste, avarice, smugness, partisanship, indifference to human suffering: Christians often showed themselves as spiritually unprepared as everyone else. Our imaginations need rescue, …

If the myth of Narnia has suffered from anything since The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe published in 1950, it’s that adult Christian readers who love Narnia tend to draw out the analogies, lessons and “morals” of its stories. But as Father Michael Ward warns early in the recent …

The saints are alive and present to us; they desire to be with us and to accompany us on our pilgrimage through this vale of tears. Yet they often feel distant, in part because we have lost that sense of mystery in our world. As a friend often says, when …

When I homeschooled my children, I came across proposals for curricula that indicated boys could pursue ideas (abstract thinking, maybe STEM and carpentry), while girls should only be trained up for domestic roles (the domestic arts and devotional religion). I always asked myself: Don’t women have minds too, and shouldn’t …

Rick Brandell, a member of St. Maximilian Kolbe parish in Liberty Township, was inspired to write a children’s book about faith while praying the Rosary one day. He mulled over that seed of inspiration for six months before deciding it was time to act. “The idea was that I should …

I’m usually allergic to titles like “Becoming Eucharistic People.” While the title is beautiful, as with a nice spring flower, I have an instinctual adverse reaction against it. Why? Because I’ve often seen such titles on shelves headlining handfuls of dust. What in the world does the adjective “Eucharistic” even …