… or, The Gentle Art of Keeping Your Prayers to Yourself Jesus’ best known advice on prayer is to keep it to yourself. He told his disciples, “Beware of practicing your piety before others in order to be seen by them; for then you have no reward from your Father in heaven…. Whenever you pray, go into your room and shut the door and pray to your Father who is in secret; and your Father who sees in secret will... Read more
My patient content manager here at Patheos gently reminded me recently that it has been a while since I last dropped in some content. I’d been experiencing some life events over the last six months that severely impacted my creative output, which was why I hadn’t been working. When I got to thinking about it though, I realized that not “working” isn’t the same thing as not “writing.” I write all the time, to be honest (with myself). I write... Read more
Years ago, at Advent, I wrote an essay for Catholic Answers on St. Matthew’s account of St. Joseph’s choice: what to do about finding his betrothed pregnant with a child he knew couldn’t be his own. For the most part, the essay was well-received and remains a favorite of mine. I’d share a link with you, but it’s *cough* no longer available online. *cough* In any event, most people who commented on the essay had either compliments or constructive criticism... Read more
In the decade or so I’ve been on Facebook, I’ve made it a point to avoid building for myself a self-affirming social media bubble. Scrolling through my newsfeed on any given day is likely to yield all kinds of reactions to current events, and all kinds of perspectives on matters of faith and life. I credit listening to people outside the conservative worldview I largely still held in 2009 (when I joined Facebook) as one very large reason why I... Read more
In a recent Dark Devotional for Sick Pilgrim, I commented on how Catholic Answers, where I worked for two decades as a staff apologist, seems to be busying itself with re-creating all of the content I’d contributed over the years I worked there and that they have since chosen to scrub from their site. After that devotional was published, I wondered if I had perhaps overreacted. Perhaps I was reading too much into an innocent string of entirely isolated coincidences,... Read more
I really don’t have the mental energy right now to dive deep into the cluster—, um, “mess,” that is the Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization decision that was released last Friday, June 24. For a snapshot of my mental space right now in the wake of this decision, I’ll share with you a brief post I wrote on my personal Facebook page on the day of the decision. Against a blue background and flying snow, I wrote, “For most... Read more
A friend, I’ll call him Chad,* once told me how his sister, Kayla, finally made the decision to become Catholic. Chad and his family had all chosen to convert to Catholicism over the course of a decade, starting with Chad. Kayla was a tough nut though, not willing to dive into the Tiber to swim over to Rome. Chad was frustrated. He’d been so successful in helping the rest of his family convert, but his dream of seeing his entire... Read more
Perhaps the most poignant conversion story I’ve read was that of Rabbi Israel Zolli (1881–1956), the Chief Rabbi of Rome during World War II. In his book, Before the Dawn, Rabbi Zolli (who took the name Eugenio as his baptismal name in honor of Pius XII) told of his lifelong fascination with Christianity. One of his earliest memories was of sitting beneath a crucifix with a Christian school friend as they studied together. In the mid-1930s, a full decade before... Read more
“There are no bad questions” is one of those collected pearls of wisdom that sounds good on the surface. Questions encourage thought, we’re told, and encouraging thought is always a good thing. Right? Well, perhaps we should examine the premises here. Do questions encourage thought? They certainly can do so. After all, if inventors didn’t ask questions about how a task might be done more efficiently, a lot of the conveniences we depend on today might never have been invented.... Read more
When the rapper Clifford Harris Jr. (also known as T.I.) told the world during a podcast episode aired in November 2019 that he has had his daughter’s physician check her hymen during annual exams, to assure himself his daughter hadn’t been engaging in sexual activity, I was appalled and decided to write about it in my next essay for Catholic Answers’ online magazine. My editor was skeptical about the appropriateness of the topic for a family-oriented web site, but I... Read more
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