Church Life Today

Cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court, and this year was no exception. In the decisions that the Court rendered in summer 2022, there were at least four cases where questions of religious liberty were adjudicated. If you have been listening to our show for some time, you may know that we regularly create episodes about religious liberty cases whenever the Supreme Court decides them, and our resident expert and guide to understanding these cases and the impact of the decisions is Professor Rick Garnett of the Notre Dame Law School, who is the founding director of the Program on Church, State, and Society, as well as a fellow of the Religious Liberty Initiative.This year, Rick has joined me for two consecutive episodes, with this being the second. In the first episode––right before this one––we talked about the decision in the Dobbs case, which overturned Roe v. Wade. Now we will talk about a host of religious liberty cases concerning state funding for school c

Each year, the so called “June Court” decisions from the Supreme Court garner quite a lot of attention, but few in recent memory have received close to the same level of attention as Dobbs v. Jackson, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. By this point, everyone knows about this decision, though fewer of us know as much as we might about the actual case that was before the court, why it was decided the way it was, and what this really means for abortion law going forward. To help us grow in our understanding of what has taken place and what is coming next––or what’s not coming next––I am happy to welcome back to the show Professor Rick Garnett of the Notre Dame Law School, who has become our show’s resident expert on the Supreme Court and especially cases relating to religious liberty. While Dobbs was not a religious liberty case, a number of other cases on which the Court ruled in the summer of 2022 were. To give due time to all these cases, my conversation with Professor Garnett will span two episodes.

The Christian life is a life of creativity, the creativity to receive the Good News of Jesus Christ and allow him to transform every dimension of who you are, every aspect of how you live, wherever you find yourself in life. That’s the theory, but how does this happen in practice? Most especially, how does this happen in the business world, in the professions, in the life of work where it can be especially challenging to integrate faith into daily practice, and might lead to loneliness and longing before it yields a sense of communion and fulfillment?Young Catholic Professionals was launched to in 2010 to help young adult Catholics meet these challenges, to help lead one another into a more holistic and vibrant life of faith, especially in consideration of their work and careers. Jennifer Baugh, the founder and executive director of Young Catholic Professionals, joins me today to talk about the restlessness and desire of Catholics in their 20s and 30s, the communities and mentoring that her organization estab

The theology of the Eucharist in St. Thomas Aquinas may seem complex, but that complexity is conformed to the tremendous mystery of Christ’s gift of himself in the sacrament. There is growth ahead for us not primarily in understanding the Eucharist as if we could ever achieve something like conceptual mastery, but especially in growing in love for and devotion to the Son of God who acts in love for us. If we can allow St. Thomas to help us raise our minds to the wonders of Christ’s Eucharistic gift, perhaps we can then better raise our hearts into union with him.Our guide to helping us learn from St. Thomas’s theology of the Eucharist is Dr. Michael Hahn, assistant professor of Sacred Scripture at Mount St. Mary’s Seminary. Our conversation today follows from a lecture Dr. Hahn gave at the annual Academy of Catholic Theology conference, where he spoke on the sacraments and sanctification in the theology of Thomas Aquinas.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the U

St. Augustine’s Eucharistic theology is more controversial than you might think. It is controversial because throughout the Christian tradition, rival theological camps have appealed to Augustine to further their own arguments and Christian practice. It would not be uncommon for Augustine to be arguing against Augustine in these debates––at least in terms of how Augustine is presented and made to fit into the theological and spiritual program of those who seek to inherit his legacy.So what is Augustine’s Eucharistic theology and how does it accommodate this breadth of expression? On today’s show we want to try to understand what the Eucharist really means for Augustine. And I’ve got just the person to help us understand.Elizabeth Klein is Assistant Professor of Theology at the Augustine Institute. She is the author of God: What Every Catholic Should Know, and of Augustine’s Theology of Angels. She recently delivered a paper at the annual conference for the Academy of Catholic Theology on the topic of “Augusti

God is Eucharistic. That is a bold and profound claim. It is different from only saying that God gives the Eucharist or that Christ is made present in the Eucharist. To say that our God is a Eucharistic God has profound consequences for, well, everything… including how we revere and adore the Eucharist now, and how we come to know God through the Eucharist.My guest today wrote an essay under the title “The Key to Understanding God” in which he brings forward the Eucharistic thought of the Russian Orthodox theologian Sergius Bulgakov and the Roman Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar. In both, we find the concerted effort to apprehend the entire Christian life, including the intellectual life, from and toward the Eucharist. The Eucharist, in other words, is the key to understanding all things, including and especially who God is and how God is. These are deep matters with surprising relevance, which together we are going to seek to understand and consider better.Our guide and my guest is Jonathan Ciraulo

This week we bring you another past episode from June 2019 with Maureen Condic.Do you want to know when human life begins? And how to explain that to other people? That's what I'm going to ask our guest today, Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Professor of Neurobiology and Anatomy at the University of Utah Medical School. In 2015, Dr. Condic was appointed to the Pontifical Academy for Life, a distinguished group of physicians, scientists, and theologians from the international community whose mission it is to study questions and issues regarding the promotion and defense of human life from an interdisciplinary perspective.Three years later, in 2018, Dr. Condic received a Presidential appointment to the National Board of Science, the oversight body for the National Science Foundation. Her research focuses on the development and regeneration of the nervous system, spinal cord repair and regeneration, and embryonic development, while she cultivates a strong commitment to public education and science litera

This week we bring you another past episode from February 2021, with Holly Taylor Coolman.“We have to imagine a people so deeply committed to their neighbors that they would risk their lives for them—and risk their lives perhaps not even to save them, but simply to be present and perhaps to speak to them of another life. As we imagine that, we begin to see the enormity and beauty of our own vocation as Christians.” This at the very heart of what it means to be “pro-life”Those are the words of Holly Taylor Coolman, who invites and challenges us, as Christians, to heed the central call of the Gospel to provide care to the suffering, to offer hospitality to those who need, and to build communities that are indeed “pro-life”, through and through. Dr. Taylor Coolman is assistant professor of theology at Providence College, where she also serves as chair of the department of theology. She is here to talk with me about foster care, in particular, which was the subject of an essay she published in our Church Life Jou

This week we bring you a past episode from December, 2020 with Mary O'Callaghan.Every child is a mystery, but as scientific advances in prenatal testing grow, so does the temptation to know more and more about our unborn children. Will they be healthy? What are the chances they will have a disability? With questions like these comes another question: how much is too much when it comes to trying to know who our children will be? My guest is Dr. Mary O’Callaghan, a developmental psychologist who, among other things, studies, writes about, and teaches on “disability selective abortion” and issues of human dignity.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July, 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 2.Americans do not talk much about abortion, but we can under the right conditions. This is one of the conclusions that Dr. Tricia Bruce and her team of researches posit in the report on their groundbreaking and comprehensive interview study focusing on abortion attitudes in the United States. Dr. Bruce is joining me for the second of a two-part interview on her report “How Americans Understand Abortion.” Dr. Bruce’s study was conducted in partnership with the McGrath Institute for Church Life and you can download a copy of the report for free at mcgrath.nd.edu/resources.I’m Leonard DeLorenzo, this is Church Life Today, and you can find part 1 of my interview with Dr. Bruce on our Church Life Today podcast.------Live: www.redeemerradio.comFollow Redeemer Radio on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@RedeemerRadioFollow McGrath Institute for Church Life on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram:@McGrathNDChurch Life Today is a partnership betwee

This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July of 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 1.American do not talk much about abortion. That’s sounds strange, doesn’t it? We seem to hear a lot about abortion in the news, in politics, in relation to the Supreme Court, but in terms of everyday Americans in their interpersonal conversations, we are actually very quiet about abortion..This is part of what Dr. Tricia Bruce and her team of researchers discovered in their groundbreaking and comprehensive interview study of abortion attitudes in the United States among “every Americans.” The report of their study was released in mid-July 2020 under the title “How Americans Understand Abortion.” This study was undertaken in partnership with our McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and you can download a copy of this report for free at mcgrath.nd.edu/resources.Today Dr. Bruce joins me, Leonard DeLorenzo, for a two-part interview to discuss her report and to offer us some observations and insi

If you attend Mass regularly, maybe you’ve thought that your parish is a little less full than it had been before the pandemic. Or, maybe you’re someone who has noticed that you yourself haven’t been attending Sunday Mass quite as consistently as you did before. Some parish and diocesan leaders have some evidence about their own Mass attendance numbers to confirm the perceived drop in participation, but many of the rest have hunches or our own unscientific observations. Regardless, for everyone who notices and is concerned about the decrease in Mass attendance, the question of whether or not those who are not there will come back lingers.Thanks to a new report from Vinea Research, we now have survey data to support or challenge our assumptions, and to give us some reliable predictors about future Mass attendance, as well as church giving, faith in God, and prayer. My guest today is Hans Plate, founder and president of Vinea Research, which seeks to support the Church by helping it better understand those it s

In his apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, St. John Paul II wrote that a Catholic university or college is “a living institutional wtiness to Christ and his message, so vitally important in cultures marked by secularism.” He continues by saying that everything in these Catholic institutions should be conducted in harmony with the evangelizing mission of the Church, including offering an “education in a faith-context that forms men and women capable of rational and critical judgement and conscious of the transcendent dignity of the human person.” I wonder if you might agree that Catholic colleges and universities that seek to form young adults holistically and intentionally in this manner are perhaps more important today than they ever have been.My guest today carries the responsibility of helping provide just such a Christocentric formation in an intentional college culture. Dr. Joe Wurtz is Dean of Students at Benedictine College in Atchison, Kansas, where he also serves as Executive Director of the G

Christ did not rise from the dead so we could gorge ourselves on marshmallow Peeps. Gorging is an act of singular enjoyment, and it only takes a moment to look around our world to see how disastrous it is when people just fill themselves with what they want… besides, it would be just gross if all we wanted was to be stuffed with marshmallow Peeps. The true measure of Easter joy is the degree to which the disciples of the Risen Lord indulge in the good of others. The celebration of Easter is ordered to communion, so much so that Easter works centrifugally through Christ’s disciples: we move the joy outwards.Using Pope Francis’s beloved term, Easter is the season for “missionary disciples.” The heart of the mission is Christ, the source of the mission is his Resurrection, and the power of the mission is the Holy Spirit he imparts to us. With this mission, we, his disciples, bring him to others and work to unite all in him.This is a special episode of Church Life Today. Only very rarely do I create an episode wi

With the right kind of care, support, and attention, the last days and months of an aging loved one’s life can become a source of new life for those who draw near to them. My guest today witnesses to this splendid, glorious truth in her new book about accompanying her father through death into life.Noreen Madden McInnis is the director of liturgy and spirituality for the Diocese of San Diego and author of the book Keep at It, Riley! The title of the book is a saying passed down through generations of Noreen’s Irish Catholic family––the Maddens––who never quit in the face of challenges in life and never quit on each other. In her testimony of journeying with her father and her mother toward their deaths and, ultimately, into the love of God, that resolve and resilience is shown to be a profound commitment to the dignity and beauty of the aged, the infirm, and the dying. Noreen’s book is part of the Magenta series from New City Press, which is committed to healing the ills of polarization by uplifting visions t

When we, as Christians, engage in evangelization that seeks to transform our culture, what metaphor tends to inform our thoughts and actions?Frequently, we land on the metaphor of “war”––we are engaged in a “culture war.” Have we thought, though, about the implications of that metaphor, about what it might do to us and what it might do to “the other” in our eyes? If we do think about that, perhaps we see that this metaphor, which has been widely adopted, might in fact be at odds with a truly Christian vision of ourselves, of others, and of engagement with culture more broadly.Fr. Aaron Wassmen has been developing ideas about the inaptness of the “culture war” metaphor for the evangelizing mission of the Church and for Christian’s missionary activity. He spoke on this topic recently at a conference on Transforming Culture hosted by Benedictine College, in Atchison, Kansas. The title of his presentation made his conclusion pretty clear: “It’s Time to Bury the Culture War Metaphor.”Fr. Aaron is vicar general and

It’s your friends who break your heart.That’s the title of the article by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic. It is an incisive and enlightening piece that also made me laugh out loud. Friendship doesn’t get the kind of attention that other forms of relationship tend to get. It is not studied as much in psychology. It is not examined like family relationships for the sake of explaining the way someone is. It is not fretted over like romantic relationships or marriage. It is not obsessed over for the sake of maximizing productivity like the relationships in work culture. And yet, as Senior writes, “friendship is the rare kind of relationship that remains forever available to us as we age. It’s a bulwark against stasis, a potential source of creativity and renewal in lives that otherwise narrow in time.” So Jennifer Senior writes about friendship, but from an unexpected perspective: from their end, the dissolution of friendship.In addition to her work with The Atlantic, Jennifer Senior has written for the New Yor

When you hold a position of authority in Catholic education and you believe that the #1 goal of Catholic schools is to evangelize, then that affects everything you do. It affects who you hire and why, what your priorities are, how you think about curriculum and culture, and what you value in the hard decisions you have to make in times of trial or crisis. You give an account of why the kind of education you provide matters by what you place as your #1 goal, not just in print or in theory, but in practice.My guest today is shaping one of the largest and oldest Catholic school systems in the United States with precisely that goal in mind. Thomas Carroll is Secretary of Education and Superintendent of Catholic Schools in the Archdiocese of Boston. A longtime leader in education and in community development, Mr. Carroll has been leading Catholic schools in Boston since 2019.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Su

Do you or someone you know feel burned out by work? Have you questioned the place of work in your life, and how it balances with everything else? Do we work to live? Do we live to work? Do we reach for and sometimes touch value that is in our work and also somehow beyond our work? What is the meaning of work?Here’s another question: Can philosophy help us find meaning and purpose at work? That is a question that my guest has been asking, and he is helping college students and other people out there in the world to think about and investigate the meaning and the good of work.Paul Blaschko is assistant teaching professor in the Department of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, where he now also serves as director of the Sheedy Family Program in Economy, Enterprise & Society within the College of Arts & Letters. Dr. Blaschko is deeply committed to matters of practical philosophy, and of doing philosophy in public, helping others to engage the world philosophically, as a way of life. In the past c

Missionaries venture to sites unseen, to open up the Gospel in new ways. The hard to get to places are the special province of missionaries, who exercise both creativity and commitment to get where others have not thought to go. We might think of missionaries sailing across seas or hiking across mountains, but a missionary’s vision and aim can take on very different forms than those we see in movies. Sometimes, missionary work means recognizing the obstacles that impede access to the Gospel, or the Church’s tradition, or spiritually edifying resources that enrich people’s lives, and finding ways to lower those barriers to grant access where access was not previously granted.Such is the work and mission of the Xavier Society for the Blind, which came into existence over a century ago in response to a prayer that “God would inspire someone to take pity on the blind of the country for whom there was no Catholic book to be had.” The person who prayed that prayer became a co-founder of the society, and since then