O my Saviour, make me see How dearly Thou has paid for me; That, lost again, my life may prove, As then in death, so now in love. —Richard Crashaw, “Charitas Nimia; or, the Dear Bargain” I am exhausted, that special kind of deprivation that can come only after being
Although not the first teaching document of his pontificate, Pope Francis’ Apostolic Exhortation Evangelii Gaudium sets forth his programmatic vision for the Church’s mission in its present moment.[1] The pope teaches here that the Church should have a strong missionary character and concern for evangelization. For Francis, these aspects find
When Peter Maurin and Dorothy Day founded the Catholic Worker Movement in 1933, Maurin’s vision was for (1) hospitality houses, (2) cooperative farming, and (3) community discussions for the clarification of thought on social and religious matters. These did have the “objectives” of giving the poor food and shelter, sustainable
Can there be a phenomenology of Sacred Scripture? Haven’t we been told by Dominique Janicaud that phenomenology and theology should never mix, that ever since Husserl phenomenology has rested on a methodological “bracketing” of faith?[1] Moreover, even if one could get past such scruples, would not one yield as many
What follows is about Catholic evangelization, motherhood, the trauma of worldwide pandemics, and the lessons about each that Louisa May Alcott’s beloved nineteenth-century children’s novel Little Women (1868-69) can offer us today. But it starts inside my house, January 2022, in small-town Texas, when my six-year-old daughter stands before me
Americans struggle to understand the nature of Catholicism. In the U.S. context, religion is often understood as a strictly private affair. On Sundays, we go to church (or at least we once did, before many people stopped going to church at all). Such attendance, of course, is an optional dimension of
As a young adult of nineteen—just a few years older than the high school students I teach—Augustine had his first conversion on his pilgrimage towards Christianity. As Augustine recounts in his Confessions, the catalyst for his first conversion was, famously, his reading of Cicero’s Hortensius. A pagan’s apologia for philosophy
It is a fact that theologians and theology departments in Catholic institutions of higher education struggle to justify their existences before their colleagues and before the world. Many a genealogy has been written to trace the blame for our dire circumstances. What follows below is not another one. Instead, I