Originally posted at Frassati Reflections. This week, I helped facilitate the confession line for a group of middle schoolers. Many were nervous; several had not gone to confession in years. I tried to help settle their nerves and calm their fears before going in, assuring them of God’s great mercy and that there was nothing… Read More Frassati Reflection: A Posture of Humility
Meg Hunter-Kilmer, Held By His Pierced Hands, “A Novena of Saints for a Church in Crisis”: With all the news out of Washington and Pennsylvania, with the continued revelations of unimaginable horrors perpetrated by priests and bishops, we the laity have work to do. We must demand accountability and transparency. We must work for reform.… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 10
Chelsea Anne, Holy Sparkle, “On Faith, Masculinity, and Vulnerability”: However, I have gone and complicated my life (immensely) in that I am not only a feminist but also a Catholic. Reading this as article as a Catholic, I found myself scratching my head. Have Catholic theologians, along with Christian thinkers from other trinitarian traditions, failed… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 9
David Brooks, New York Times, “Personalism: The Philosophy We Need”: Moreover, most actual human beings are filled with ambivalences. Most political activists I know love parts of their party and despise parts of their party. A whole lifetime of experience, joy and pain goes into that complexity, and it insults their lives to try to… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 8
Reposted from Mercatornet. After half a decade fighting a government contraception mandate, the University of Notre Dame took advantage of a new exemption policy at the end of October and announced it would end contraceptive coverage in health plans for its staff and students. A week later, to the consternation of others opposing the HHS mandate on religious freedom… Read More Over at Mercatornet: Notre Dame’s contraceptive cave-in
Thomas J. Neal, Neal Obstat Theological Pining, “A harsh and dreadful thing”: Sometimes, he said, it’s heroic to simply honestly acknowledge to myself how messed up my family of origin is; or to speak to my sibling in a civil tone; or speak the words “I forgive you” to my dead uncle for his past crimes… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 7
Bill McCormick, S.J., America, “Bannon and Feinstein remind us that anti-Catholic bigotry is a bipartisan problem”: You cannot make this stuff up. Completely unplanned, two figures as different as Steve Bannon and Dianne Feinstein—a Trump-supporting Breitbart writer and a progressive California hero—inadvertently teamed up to remind Catholics that anti-Catholic bigotry is alive and well in both political… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 6
Simcha Fisher, Catholic Weekly, “Blessed are the ungifted. Everything’s a gift”: Each one of us, every single one of us, is born with the genius, the miraculous, unearned, inborn talent of sainthood within us; and every single one of us is also called to a life of hard work, discipline, and the persistent development of our… Read More Thought-Provoking Reads, vol. 5
On this Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, I have come across several articles that have sparked in me a sense of hope for a future that is truly pro-life and pro-woman—and as Catholics, we believe that you can’t have one without the other. Respecting women means respecting all human life,… Read More Frassati Reflection: Pro-Life, Pro-Woman
work in progress 