Some people are naturally funny and good storytellers. I wish I were one of them. I have to speak in public often, and at times I have no choice but to wing it. I’m not funny or especially quick-witted. So when I’m called on to speak extemporaneously, it’s a bit scary. I launch into sentences like a man walking down a blind alley, not knowing quite how he’ll get out the other end.
JERUSALEM – Walking through the narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem’s Old City on my first visit here in 15 years, I was powerfully struck once again by the grittiness of Christianity, the palpable connection between the faith and the quotidian realities of life. For here – as in no other place – the believer, the skeptic and the “searcher” are confronted with a fact: Christianity began, not with a pious story or “narrative,” but with the reality of transformed lives. Real things happened to real people at real places in real time – and the transformation wrought in those real people by those “real things” transformed the world.
A NEW STUDY ON MEDIA usage by children, ages 8-18, shows that teenagers, ages 13-18, use entertainment media an average of nearly nine hours a day. And “tweens,” children ages 8-12, use close to six hours a day on average. This includes screen time, listening to music and reading print outside of class requirements. This excludes time used with media for school or homework purposes.
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, Father Raymond de Souza, one of my fellow faculty members at an annual Kraków-based summer seminar on Catholic social doctrine, made a trenchant observation about the city John Paul II used to call “my beloved Kraków.” Kraków, Father de Souza observed, was the city where the 20th century happened in a singular way.
For most people, the month of November means colored leaves, bonfires and entirely too many pumpkin spice lattes. For writers like me, November means getting down to business. It’s National Novel Writing Month!
The latest self-help craze is all about getting rid of the stuff that overwhelms us. Why this obsession with simplifying? And does the movement hold larger significance for our spiritual lives? One hardly needs to be a certified hoarder to know that stuff can overwhelm our spirits.
Over 40 years of teaching and writing about Catholic social doctrine, George Weigel has known three men who had the opportunity to embody the Church’s social teaching for a national audience. Two of them couldn’t pull it off, for different reasons.
AT THIS TIME of year, falling leaves and flaming foliage come to those parts of the country where climates favor cold snaps, shorter days and deciduous, or leaf-shedding, trees.
ROME – Amidst all the Sturm und Drang of Synod 2015, something genuinely new in the life of the Church began, and it shouldn’t escape our notice.
There is a touching image at the beginning of Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor’s autobiography. As a little girl living in the projects in the Bronx, she recalls joining her cousins in her grandmother’s bedroom to make faces at passengers speeding by on the elevated train that ran at the height of the window.
