Rohan Healy We are reminded daily of the many social ills that the internet, and social media in particular, perpetuate. The increased sense of social isolation, despite early promises to bring people closer together, the negative effects on self-worth as we are constantly bombarded with exaggerated examples of others success, the ever-present temptation to get…
Sr Hosea Rupprecht When I was a kid, my main form of media consumption was books. I used to go to the library and check out four or five ‘Hardy Boys’ books at a time. I don’t know why I never got into Nancy Drew (I am a girl, after all), but I think it’s…
Jayme Stuart Wolfe Every sincere Catholic hope for a revival of the faith – even if we don’t all agree about what that should look like. But now that the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage has begun, and the National Eucharistic Congress being held in Indianapolis is only six weeks away, I expect that the inside baseball…
Roman Cabay To those who knew me then, the idea of my conversion was an absurd prospect. I was raised non-denominationally protestant, variously attending Anglican and Methodist services as well as Sunday school. Church, to me, was an interminable lecture where I fruitlessly attempted to achieve apostasy. Faith was a private certainty of my damnation…
Deacon Dominic Cerrato The issue of admitting women to the diaconate has been, over the past decade, a subject of intense theological debate. In a recent interview with CBS News, Pope Francis unequivocally stated that women cannot be ordained as deacons. This stance, delivered during a ‘60 Minutes’ interview, has significant implications for ongoing discussions…
Charlie Camosy Every convert’s path to the Catholic faith is unique, and some come to the Church through more winding paths than others. Jeffrey L. Morrow, currently a professor of theology at Seton Hall University’s Immaculate Conception Seminary School of Theology (ICSST), recently spoke about his journey from Judaism to Christianity to Catholicism and what…
Emily Zanotti There is little needed to set fire to the world of online Catholics -and the recent commencement speech from Kansas City Chiefs kicker, Harrison Butker to an audience of Benedictine College graduates seemed to riddle Catholic social media with fractures, as traditionalists and liberals, Catholics and non-Catholics, and even men and women came…
Teresa Pitt Green My work with clergy is a long way from the old days. Then, when I spotted a Roman collar on a random passerby mixed in the throng of a Manhattan Avenue, I would crumble into the nearest doorway with a mix of anxiety and grief known as ‘beginning to remember’. Now, I…
Elizabeth Scalia We all have them, those desperate times, particularly in the wee small hours of the morning, when illness or anxiety pulls us up from our beds and down to our knees, or keeps us on our feet, pacing the floor as we seek relief from physical or mental or spiritual aches and ailments.…
Letter from India John Dayal India’s Narendra Modi seems to have decided that he can win a third five-year term as prime minister only through campaign rhetoric targeting the Muslim religious minority as a threat not just to national security, but to the 80% Hindu majority among the country’s 1.40 billion people. Muslims, in the…