Pentimento Podcast

How do you recognize a calling that doesn't look the way you pictured it?Father Carlos Lopez is a Benedictine monk at St. Andrew's Abbey in Valyermo, California, where he has lived for thirty years. Born in Tucson to parents from Mexico, he first felt drawn to the priesthood at a young age, stepped away from seminary for a time to work in customer service, then returned. And much to his surprise, a monastery was never part of the plan.In this episode, Fr. Carlos describes monastic life as a way of stepping back from the world and seeing it differently. He speaks about the daily work of conversion, the quiet value of every human life, and an enduring book he returns to every year.

What happens when a businessman realizes he's been dormant?Yusif Al-hatlani grew up in Saudi Arabia, studied in England, and arrived at a university in Spokane, Washington, knowing almost nothing about it — including what a Jesuit was. As an undergraduate, a request from his community led him to ask a priest for a room on campus, and then a house.Years into a career in family business, he returned to study leadership, and the experience opened his eyes. Literature, film, philosophy, and a very creative professor revealed interests he hadn't known he had, and the work came to feel less like earning a degree and more like a continuation of who he was becoming.

How far does one act of conscience travel?Jim McGarry spent nearly four decades teaching in Catholic high schools in the Bay Area and beyond, where he became known for a particular kind of teaching: bringing Holocaust survivors into the classroom to speak directly to students, a practice he started after his first training as a Holocaust educator in 1992.At the center of the conversation is a story Jim returns to often — about the person who refuses to serve something they perceive as harmful, and is willing to lose everything to hold that line. It’s not a portrait of solitary heroism. It’s something far more connected: the quiet, essential presence of the people who make that courage possible in the first place.

What does it feel like when you just know?Elsa Elbert built a career without ever quite meaning to — fifteen years in healthcare administration, a leap into data center operations, and then a brief and painful (though informative) stint at a financial institution that put her off corporate ladders… perhaps for good. She’s now the founder of Composed Living, a professional organizing business she’s run for a decade and that’s grown from a solo operation into a team of fifteen, complete with a retail storefront in Woodland Hills. She also has her own podcast on the side.Elsa is a deliberate, careful thinker by nature — she reads, studies, and doesn’t rush decisions. But she traces nearly every major turn in her life back to something else: a handful of moments that arrived as sudden, whole-body certainty, moments she believes were only possible because of all that quieter groundwork. She talks about what that kind of intuition asks of a person, and a well-worn book of hers that keeps handing her something new depending on where she is in life.

What happens when the story you've told about yourself turns out to be wrong?Joe Albert spent his early years labeled a slow kid — tracked out of college prep as a freshman and found himself on a vocational track with a group of boys who nicknamed themselves accordingly. A single class at a Jesuit college in Philadelphia changed that, launching him into decades of work in peace and justice ministry, education, and eventually the founding of a storytelling movement that's still running strong today.Years later, in the same stretch of time that brought the loss of his wife and a cardiac arrest that nearly killed him, two old friends — independently, months apart — told him something about himself he had never let himself consider. The story he'd carried his entire life turned out to be one he'd gotten wrong.