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Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner.
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The Lord gives us what we cannot make or do for ourselves. Our first task in life is to receive. And from what we receive, we are to be changed. The mystery of the Eucharist abides in that exchange: receiving, becoming.In a new book titled Eucharist: The Real Presence of Christ, my longtime friend Tania Geist presents twelve substantive Eucharistic reflections that help small groups discover, discuss, prepare for, and respond to the gift and mission of the Eucharist. Our conversation today wi...
Jessica Bross helps people find their stories, craft their stories, and tell their stories. In fact, she usually writes out other people’s stories in their own voice. Jessica ghostwrites memoirs. She listens to people, she listens more, she helps them find the desire that shapes a story or theme in their lives, then she writes that story for them and with them, creating a memoir that contains that story for themselves and others. You could say that she is in the business of helping people gra...
It’s hard—and getting harder—to discern the proper relationship between our Catholic faith and American political life. Perhaps it is time to reset the framework for how we engage politics as Catholics, even by broadening our understanding of our duty to public life beyond merely politics. In his new book, Citizens Yet Strangers, Kenneth Craycraft challenges Catholics to move away from individual liberal impulses of American political identity. He seeks to set out a vision for how we orient o...
You can’t take a souvenir from Hell into Heaven; likewise, you can’t fit the realities of Heaven into Hell. That is Gospel truth for C. S. Lewis, especially as he imagines the separation between Heaven and Hell, vice and virtue, corrupt loves and the fullness of joy in his brief, brilliant eschatological novel, The Great Divorce. As we make the turn from Lent and Passion Week to the glory of Easter, Josh McManaway returns to the program to share a conversation with Leonard DeLorenzo about a b...
Because of Christ, the spiritual life is practical, and the practical life is spiritual. The Incarnation guarantees that. In this special episode, Leonard DeLorenzo shares some of the fruits of his newly published work, In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide. This book is especially well suited for young adults, perhaps upon Confirmation or graduation from high school or college. It also bears promise for those who are unsure about their spiritual life, who are seeking dire...
Suffering is universal. But how do we understand suffering? Does it have meaning? Can it have meaning? And most of all, what is the meaning of suffering in Christian life? Questions like these inform the work of my guest today, Dr. Mark Giszczak, author of the new book Suffering: What Every Catholic Should Know. Dr. Giszczak is Professor of Sacred Scripture at the Augustine Institute Graduate School of Theology, where he teaches a course on the Theology of Suffering that gave rise to this new...
It is really peculiar that Pontius Pilate’s name appears in the creed. Aside from Jesus and Mary, no other historical figures are mentioned. How did he make it into the creed? That is a question that Josh McManaway helps us to figure out.This is the second episode of several where Josh joins us to discuss the creed. He is currently working on a book on the Apostles’ Creed to help seminarians, priests, catechists, and other interested Catholics to growi in understanding and wonder about the th...
We profess belief in God the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit with such regularity that we likely fail to contemplate the profundity of what we declare. Josh McManaway of the McGrath Institute for Church Life is working on a book to spark new wonder and open up new depths for us about the Apostles’ Creed. In helping us learn the theology and history of our creed, Josh hopes to aid priests enrich their preaching just as other interested Christians come to a stronger and more lively understanding o...
Black Catholics and Catholic Social Teaching, with Deacon James SummersWhy do so many Black Catholics leave the Church and why do so few new members enter the Church? This is the twofold question that Deacon James Summers along with his wife Wendy and others sought to understand when they were appointed to the Black Catholic Advisory Board for the Diocese of Fort Wayne-South Bend. The answer redounds to his own experience as a Black Catholic in the Church, and to his approach to and appreciat...
Born from a vision to fuse rapid scientific and technological advancement with the wisdom of the Catholic faith, Catholic Institute of Technology forms scientists, engineers and mathematicians who are dedicated to upholding the Catholic faith. This brand new university will welcome students for the first time in Fall 2024 to its campus in Castel Gandolfo, Italy. This university is the first-ever Catholic institution created exclusively for research advancements in the fields of the scien...
The question at Christmas is not about whether God will act for us. The babe born of Mary is the answer: God has given everything. The question is really about us. Will we receive Christ? This is a most magnificent reversal, and a most perilous one. He in whom all things are created––in whom we live and move and have our being––is given into our hands. The Host has become the guest, and we, who depend on God for all things, are called upon to become His host. Christmas is not only a...
Sometimes you have to leave what’s familiar to discover what is most beautiful, most profound, and most meaningful precisely in your ordinary life. A pilgrimage is one of the best means for doing just that: departing from what you know in order to return anew. But pilgrimage is not just any kind of trip or travel, it is instead an intentional journey made to encounter Christ, or rather, to allow him to encounter you. Being open to that encounter can be hard work, it takes time and preparation...
What is the belief of ordinary Catholics around the Eucharist? That is a harder question to answer that it might at first seem. You could put forward two options and ask a respondent if they believe this or that. But it is not easy to phrase those options correctly, nor is it easy to ensure that your respondent understands what you are trying to ask. Belief in the Eucharist is not easy, and neither is asking about it.A new study commissioned by the McGrath Institute for Church Life and conduc...
Many of us browsing social media have had the experience of seeing horrendous images and videos from armed conflicts. Sometimes those dehumanizing acts are featured widely even before conflict fully breaks out. Seeing these things gives us a sense of rage or sorrow or concern or all of the above. It is not uncommon for our sympathies to be swayed by the suffering that we see, or the dehumanizing acts that are brought before us .Actually, that is often the point of showing these scenes and ima...
Jessica Mannen Kimmet was searching for spiritual resources in the Church that would guide her and strengthen her during her early years of motherhood. She was experiencing significant struggles and was confronting unmet expectations. But other than a few scattered blog posts here and there, she really couldn’t find anything that would respond to her need and desire. So several years later, she wrote the book she was looking for, a book where the Word of God is brought close to the experience...
To love your neighbor, you must know your neighbor. And to know your neighbor, you often times have to go beyond the mind you have. The Greek word for conversion, metanoia, means just that: “to go beyond the mind you have”, so that loving your neighbor usually requires some kind of conversion. Conversions are often uncomfortable and even painful. It can be hard but it can also be liberating and healing to let go of what you assumed to be true so as to accept a little more of what is actually ...
One of the surest ways to incite wonder and love for the Lord in our children is for us to rekindle wonder and love for the Lord in ourselves. As mature Christians, we have a responsibility to instruct our children––to model and share our faith with them. For many of us, this begins as a daunting and uncertain task: we might question our own faith, or feel awkward in our wording or mannerisms in sharing faith, or recognize our own lack of knowledge when it comes to Scripture or the particular...
In a 2019 study, the Pew Research Center found that just one-third of U.S. Catholics Agree that the Eucharist is the Body and Blood of Christ. That is a sobering statistic. Even if we account for the way in which the survey question may have been imprecisely formed, it still seems that the overwhelming majority of Catholics surveyed espoused belief in a more symbolic meaning of the bread and wine on the altar, as opposed to the sacramental, real presence of Jesus Christ.The Eucharistic Reviva...
In 1965, in an NBC News documentary, J. Robert Oppenheimer reflected on his role in leading the Manhattan Project that yielded the first nuclear weapons by saying this:“We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed; a few people cried. Most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita; Vishnu is trying to persuade the prince that he should do his duty, and to impress him, takes on his multiarmed form and says, ‘Now I am become Death, th...
To deceive yourself is easy, but to stop deceiving yourself is hard. This truth is more apparent to each of us when we look to other people than it is when we look to ourselves. Why? Because we tend to believe the lies we have told ourselves, so much so that they really aren’t lies anymore for we have forgotten the truth. One of the gifts of excellent drama––especially tragic drama but even the right kind of comedic drama––is that we are given the chance to see dynamics like this in play in t...
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