There are certain words in our Catholic faith that can become so familiar that we stop hearing the human story hidden inside them. Assumption. Queenship. Coronation. We see paintings of Mary floating above the clouds with angels surrounding her. A crown is placed upon her head. Christ sits upon His throne. Everything is gold and … Read more
There are houses we leave that somehow never quite leave us. Years can pass. Families change. People we love die. Rooms are remodeled. Someone else eventually sleeps in the bedroom that once belonged to us. And yet we can still walk through those houses in our memory. We remember how the light came through a … Read more
There are some saints whose lives are so extraordinary that, if I am being truthful, I sometimes have a hard time knowing what to do with them. St. Maximilian Kolbe is one of those saints. We know the ending of his story. Auschwitz and the starvation bunker. The condemned prisoner who cried out for his … Read more
There is something about the story of Our Lady of Walsingham that has always moved me. Perhaps it is because the story does not begin with something grand. There is no enormous basilica. No great cathedral. No throne room. It begins with a house. A little house. And not just any house. The little house … Read more
I suppose there are easier ways to decide to write a book. Some people begin with an idea, perhaps a subject they have studied for years. Others have always dreamed of seeing their name on the cover of something. That really is not how 7 Reflections From the Edge of Death happened. In fact, for … Read more
On Jan Hus Day, the Czech Republic remembers a priest burned for heresy. But was Jan Hus truly a heretic, or did he simply uncover the wound too early?
There are some images of Jesus that do not merely ask to be looked at, hey ask to be endured. The image seen above, titled Sic Deus Dilexit Mundum, is one of them. Christ looks out at us with the crown of thorns pressed into His brow, His robe blood-red and his face bearing that strange mixture … Read more
There are moments in life that cannot be explained neatly. They can only be remembered with reverence. For me, one of those moments happened in November of 2020, during the worst part of the COVID-19 pandemic, when I was on a ventilator, in a coma, fighting COVID and bilateral pneumonia. I was not aware of … Read more
The road to Emmaus is not a triumphant road. It is a retreat. In Luke 24:13–35, two disciples are not heading toward mission, or clarity, or even hope. They are walking away—from Jerusalem, from the Cross, from everything they thought they understood. They had believed. And now they are disoriented. “We had hoped…” That line … Read more
There are songs that entertain, and there are songs that uncover something older than memory—something planted deep in the soil of the human heart. Christ Has a Garden by the Hillbilly Thomists belongs to the latter kind. It feels less like a composition and more like a recovery, like stumbling upon a path that was … Read more
