Category: Columns

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Jean Mueller

Advising senior parents about housing decisions

Question: I think this may have come up before, but I am wondering if there are some guidelines for choosing where to move when being at home is no longer an option.

My father is ready to move out of the family home. He admits he cannot keep up with maintenance and chores and since my mother passed away, he feels he is just occupying an empty space.

My siblings and I are so grateful he feels this way and want to support him as best we can. He does have some health issues and we have wondered if he is depressed or if he might have some memory issues because of some things he has been forgetting.

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Julianne Nornberg

Asking for forgiveness through our humility

Everyday Faith column by Julianne Nornberg

“Kids! Set the table! Finish vacuuming!”

My voice roared through the house as I struggled to complete the task of getting dinner on the table for my family of six. It was 5:55, and Daddy would be home shortly.

Homework was scattered across the table, toys littered the living room floor, the two little ones were bickering downstairs, and the two older ones, lost in books, were reluctant to tackle their chores.

The general chaos of the household suddenly set me on fire as I caved in to the feelings of stress and anger that erupted on the surface.

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Jackson Fonder

One at a time

Fonder Ponders column by Jackson Fonder

Sometimes I feel like I am too small and the problems around the world are so big. I watch the news or read an article and get exhausted from the onslaught of depressing, discouraging, and sometimes crazy news stories. The presidential election. Immigration. Police issues. Racial disparity. The list goes on.

It’s overwhelming. And then I remember how Mother Teresa focused on helping just one person at a time. What a great lesson.

I’ve asked Jerilyn Robinson, our director of family programs, to give an example of how Catholic Charities is doing this with our Behavioral Health in Schools (BHS) program.

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Tony Magliano

We can transform the world

You are the light of the world. Don’t take my word for it, that’s Gospel truth from Jesus himself (Mt 5:14). And it’s a tall order, indeed.

Now on the other hand in John’s Gospel, Jesus says, “I am the light of the world.” Now that at first glance makes far more sense. After all, Jesus — God in the flesh — is obviously “the light of the world.”

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Bishop Robert Barron

Porn and the curse of total sexual freedom

A recent issue of Time Magazine features a fascinating and deeply troubling article on the prevalence of pornography in our culture.

The focus of the piece is on the generation of young men now coming of age, the first generation who grew up with unlimited access to hardcore pornography on the Internet. The statistics on this score are absolutely startling.

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Fr. Tadeusz Pacholczyk

Embryos and the ‘14-day rule’: Mechanism devised to justify experiments on human embryos

Arguments in favor of research on human embryos typically play off our unfamiliarity with the way that we ourselves once appeared and existed as embryos.

Humans in their tiniest stages are indeed unfamiliar to us, and they hardly look anything like “one of us.” Yet the undeniable conclusion, that every one of us was once an embryo, remains an indisputable scientific dogma, causing a “fingernails on the chalkboard” phenomenon for researchers every time they choose to experiment on embryos or destroy them for research.

To enable scientists to get beyond the knowledge that they’re experimenting on or destroying fellow humans, clever stratagems and justifications have had to be devised.

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Bishop Robert Barron

Bill Nye is not the philosophy guy

Reliable sources have informed me that for the millennial generation, Bill Nye is a figure of great importance, due to his widely-watched program from the 1990s called Bill Nye the Science Guy.

Evidently, he taught a large swath of American youth the fundamentals of experimental science and became for them a sort of paragon of reason. Well, I’ll take their word for it.

But judging from a recent video in which Bill Nye discussed the relation between science and philosophy, I can only tell you that he sure is not the “philosophy guy.”

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William McKenna

Is gratitude an antidote to depression?

Guest Column

Question: How does gratitude help me day to day? I have heard a lot about how practicing gratitude helps with depression but I don’t know how to practice it in an effective way.

Response: by William McKenna, M.S. Clinical Psychology Extern at Catholic Charities

Great question! Gratitude is a powerful antidote to depressive thoughts and feelings for a number of reasons, many of which I am sure you know.

Possessing only an abstract understanding of gratitude makes putting it into practice difficult.

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