Category: Columns

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Tony Magliano

Our common home really needs your help!

“A very solid scientific consensus indicates that we are presently witnessing a disturbing warming of the climatic system,” warns Pope Francis in his landmark environmental encyclical Laudato Si’ (“On Care for Our Common Home”).

Indeed, the scientific consensus is very solid. According to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), “97 percent or more of actively publishing climate scientists agree: Climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.” (see: http://climate.nasa.gov/scientific-consen us/).

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Bishop Robert Barron

Pride, humility, and social media

On a recent trip to Sacramento, from my home base in the LA area, I flew Southwest Airlines. In an idle moment, I reached for the magazine in the seatback pocket and commenced to leaf through it.

I came across an article by a woman named Sarah Menkedick entitled “Unfiltered: How Motherhood Interrupted My Relationship with Social Media.” The piece was not only wittily and engagingly written; it also spoke to some pretty profound truths about our cultural situation today and the generation that has come of age under the influence of the Internet.

She argues that to have swum in the sea of Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, and YouTube from the time that one was a child was to live one’s life perpetually in front of an audience. Most millenials never simply had experiences; they were conditioned to record, preserve, and present those experiences to a following who were invited to like what they saw, to comment on it, to respond to it.

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Julianne Nornberg

Honoring our earthly and spiritual mothers

Everyday Faith column by Julianne Nornberg

Whether you are one, have one, or are married to one, mothers affect every person in the world.

My eight siblings and I have been blessed with a very gentle mother who simply and genuinely reflects many of the same characteristics of Our Blessed Mother.

Lasting memories

My earliest memory of my mom was when I was “helping” her bake a cake by moving the small plastic containers of decorative sprinkles from one side of the kitchen to the other.

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Fr. Steve Grunow

Religious Life reveals real possibilities for all lives

Word on Fire
Fr. Steve Grunow

Thomas Hobbes considered human civilization as an endless war of all against all with the only viable solution being the power of the state to regulate, order, and control.

Georg Frederich Hegel postulated that existence was an experience of inescapeable dialectics, a violent collision of opposites and it was only in this state of affairs that new growth and development was possible.

Friedrich Nietzsche insisted that all is “will to power” and that it is the master of power alone that escapes the heavy hand of fate.

These ideas have all had great weight. Whether we know about them or recognize their validity or not, these ideas have shaped, formed, and defined our culture.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Hunkering down with Benedict

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation has certainly emerged as the most talked-about religious book of 2017. Within weeks of its publication, dozens of editorials, reviews, op-eds, and panel discussions were dedicated to it. Practically every friend and contact I have sent me something about the book and urged me to comment on it.

The very intensity of the interest in the text in one way proves Dreher’s central point, namely, that there is a widely-felt instinct that something has gone rather deeply wrong with the culture and that classical Christianity, at least in the West, is in a bit of a mess.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Hunkering down with Benedict

Rod Dreher’s The Benedict Option: A Strategy for Christians in a Post-Christian Nation has certainly emerged as the most talked-about religious book of 2017. Within weeks of its publication, dozens of editorials, reviews, op-eds, and panel discussions were dedicated to it. Practically every friend and contact I have sent me something about the book and urged me to comment on it.

The very intensity of the interest in the text in one way proves Dreher’s central point, namely, that there is a widely-felt instinct that something has gone rather deeply wrong with the culture and that classical Christianity, at least in the West, is in a bit of a mess.

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Bishop Robert Barron

The Case for Christ and evangelization

The Case for Christ is a film adaptation of Lee Strobel’s best-selling book of the same name, one that has made an enormous splash in Evangelical circles and beyond. It is the story of a young, ambitious (and atheist) reporter for the Chicago Tribune, who fell into a psychological and spiritual crisis when his wife became a Christian.

The scenes involving Lee and his spouse, which play out over many months of their married life, struck me as poignant and believable — and I say this with some authority, having worked with a number of couples in a similar situation.

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Fr. Donald Lange

Let’s make every day an Earth Day

We in Wisconsin should especially appreciate Earth Day because it was started by Gaylord Nelson when he was a U.S. senator from Wisconsin.

On April 22, 1970, 20 million Americans crowded streets, parks, and auditoriums to celebrate the first Earth Day. They called for a healthy, sustainable environment. Earth Day’s time had come.

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