Someone churchy thought a girl’s outfit was more important than her presence at church. Religion offers many excuses for emotional predation; we have to call it out
The need for abortion is evidence of our broken humanity, but our current response also shows our Church’s inability to respond fully to the female experience.
Thomas Merton taught me to value self-denial, but a bout of depression forced me to question whether asceticism was the healthiest response to my life.
Soviet novelist Vasily Grossman is not often thought of as a religious thinker. But his Armenian travelogue shows a different, more numinous side of his work.
Easy Rider is a lasting work of art not only because it reflects the “spirit of the Sixties,” but because it depicts a bona fide tragedy that transcends its time.
Evangelicals have embraced Donald Trump, despite his obvious moral deficiencies. They do so not so much out of hypocrisy, as out of a sense of being under siege.
For me prayer is concrete, a form of work. Politicians, though, have a different job, and in the wake of mass shootings, they have a duty to take action.
The veneration of relics is a hard thing for many Catholics of this time and culture to wrap their minds around. But the practice is humanizing, not superstitious.
A protest outside a Texas detention center featured speeches and songs, but also revealed something more: God’s commitment to accompany those making their way north.
In this installment, we take a back-to-the-earth approach, reading a Japanese treatise on natural farming alongside an Italian film about rural peasant life.
It took me just over three years to become a Catholic. I came because there was no other place to hold the conversation about why I’m here and what I am to do.
Pope Francis’s gift of St. Peter’s relics to the Orthodox patriarch is remarkable. Rather than righting a previous wrong, it constitutes a genuine self-emptying.
A city is noisy, dirty, sometimes cruel, sometimes surprisingly kind, always restless, constantly building over its own past. Like all things, it needs prayer.
My brother Robert, always in and out of treatment, was a gift. He taught me to accept my own frustrations, and to curb the envy of others I sometimes felt.
The thread running Michael Brendan Dougherty’s book is the author’s spiritual development, which culminates in the discovery of his own vocation as a father.
In the debates about democratic socialism, we need a new idea of utopia. The life and work of nineteenth-century socialist William Morris is a good place to start.
It can be appealing to think of the Bible as a stable, fixed text. But paleography is not an exact science, even in the hands of the best practitioners.
Abel Ferrara’s new biopic about Pier Paolo Pasolini evinces a highly personal, anti-institutional strain of Catholicism—where grace abounds in squalor and scandal.
I agree with the values of sacrifice and care, and I often find Briallen Hopper’s writing tenacious and lovely. So why did her book leave me not quite satisfied?
Most of the films in competition at Cannes were quieter, more richly textured meditations on love, loss, and identity. But the specter of Trump loomed large.
In the second season of ‘Fleabag,’ the titular character begins a sexual relationship with a priest. What follows is a heady tale of guilt, loneliness, and pain.
Drawing on the mystery of Christ in the liturgy to nourish one’s own life of faith is not always a self-evident or easy thing to do. We need to become mystagogues.
The church is a liminal space I’m lingering in: a space of transition, of walking along boundaries, of being neither in nor out, of neither staying nor leaving.
Tibetan art can be a challenge for non-initiates to decipher. But once you pierce its iconography, you find a moving testimony of faith lived against oppression.
By the time I arrived at Harvard, the school was secular, yet haunted by faith. I’d been a practicing Christian for years, but had never been baptized.
Jacopo Tintoretto has been considered by many, including John Ruskin and Henry James, to be the greatest artist of the Italian Renaissance. His work astounds.
Is all flesh really beloved by God? Or is Christianity just another sect, with a new elite kind of flesh that belongs, unambiguously, to no one except its members?
Despite his full, long life, the death of Jean Vanier is still sad. And as Christians, we must not skip grief nor automatically reach for a happy narrative.
