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Columns

Instagram envy

By Christina Capecchi
Melina Birchem has uploaded 777 images to her Instagram account over the past two years: sushi, Starbucks, her new tattoo, rosary beads, cowboy boots. Sometimes the juxtaposition is jarring. A glowing monstrance, a chilled margarita. A snapshot from waitressing, a prayer journal documenting her consecration to the Blessed Mother. As a freshman at the University […]
2/3/16
Reading Time 3 min

Catholic intellectual tradition

By Russell Shaw
In one of his informative dispatches from Rome during the Synod on the Family last fall, Robert Royal remarked with regret on the extent to which the synod fathers appeared to have taken their prescriptions for families from a secular playbook instead of from their own Catholic tradition. Most synod participants, Royal wrote, “seemed to […]
2/3/16
Reading Time 3 min

The birth of a vocation

By Fr. Stanley J. Krempa
Out of the pain of childbirth comes new life, so from the difficulties of our life comes our vocation. In our first reading, King Uzziah of Israel had died. During his half-century reign, he had brought Israel prosperity and strength. Then, toward the end of his life, he tried to usurp the role of the […]
2/3/16
Reading Time 3 min

Divine Mercy talk kicks off series

By Ashleigh Buyers
To kick off their celebration of the Year of Mercy, St. Ambrose Church in Annandale is inviting everyone in the diocese to embrace Pope Francis’ call to live mercifully like the Father through a new lecture series. The talks discuss related topics of mercy and the lives of saints who exemplify this virtue. The first […]
2/3/16
Reading Time 2 min

Snow’s spiritual smackdown

By Soren Johnson
On the fifth day home with five young kids five miles down an unplowed gravel road, something broke. Gratefully, it wasn’t my psyche. Or my back from shoveling. We did enjoy some Norman Rockwellian family moments, but in the escalating number of school cancellations, kid-versus-kid skirmishes, garbage bags stacked near the back door, angstyness, etc., […]
2/3/16
Reading Time 3 min

Saying goodbye in the faith

By Zoey Dimauro
After Mass on Sunday mornings, most parishioners pour out of church to shake hands with the priest, socialize with friends and hurry off to brunch. A few, however, slip away from the crowd. One family goes to place flowers on the graves of grandparents, a widower visits the headstone of his late wife. Having a […]
2/2/16
Reading Time 3 min

Is repentance required for forgiveness?

By Fr. Kenneth Doyle
Q. Regarding your recent column on forgiving ISIS: Must forgiveness be predicated on remorse and repentance by the offending party? I am thinking of Christ being crucified and saying, “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing” – or St. Stephen forgiving those who had stoned him. (Greenwich, Conn.) Q. Jesus said […]
2/2/16
Reading Time 4 min

‘Weak-long’ homilies?

By Fr. Matthew H. Zuberbueler
What a difference a week makes. Attentive listeners will recall that the beginning of this Gospel passage is the same as the ending in last Sunday’s. For people who pray liturgically, it might be true that the dramatic revelation Jesus shared last week has been of great benefit in their lives this week. In His […]
1/27/16
Reading Time 3 min

The media’s influence

By Russell Shaw
The potential presidential candidacy of Donald Trump, a media critic when it suits his purposes, is a creature of the media. Trump has a knack for saying outrageous things, and journalists have heaped lavish free coverage on his outrageousness. The result: a candidate who has never held public office and has made the art of […]
1/27/16
Reading Time 3 min

China’s population crisis: An evangelical opportunity?

By George Weigel
State-sponsored cruelty has been a staple of the human condition for millennia. But has there ever been a more wicked policy with more disastrous social consequences than the “one-child policy” China began to implement in the early 1980s – a state-decreed population-control measure that resulted in, among other horrors, untold tens of millions of coerced […]
1/27/16
Reading Time 3 min

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