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[embedded content] Today, Dr. Michael Dauphinais is joined by John Clark, author, political speech writer, and columnist for the National Catholic Register, to discuss the importance of recognizing the sacramentality of marriage. They address themes such as the primary purpose of marriage, its indissolubility, and how it was instituted. In their conversation, they also explore the insights from John Clark’s book “Betrayed without a Kiss: Defending Marriage after Years of Failed Leadership in the Church,” delving into the challenges facing marriage today and the need for strong leadership in its defense. Services Marketplace – Listings, Bookings & Reviews Entertainment blogs & Forums

The psalms are the prayer book of the Church. For this reason, we do well not only to pray them regularly, but also to commit to memorizing them by heart so that “His praise will always be on my lips” (Ps 34:1). What follows is a small sampling of psalms worth learning for different occasions, following the numbering system employed by the NAB and RSV translations. For staying close to Christ: Psalms 1 and 19 speak movingly of devotion to God’s law and the precious fruits that this brings. For loving God in times of grief: Psalm 34 is a gritty, heartfelt prayer of one who has suffered much, yet continues to praise the Lord and find peace in Him. For moments of repentance: The greatest act of contrition ever written, Psalm 51 was written by King David following his adulterous rape of Bathsh...

Brothers in arms, Romeo & Juliet, and knives out Skip to content Pillar subscribers can listen to Ed read this Pillar Post here: The Pillar TL;DR Happy Friday friends, There is a war on. We shouldn’t forget that. In fact, there’s more than one. Real wars, taking real lives, destroying real homes of real families. It’s all too easy for those of us who aren’t doing the actual fighting and dying, living out of immediate danger, to simply dial down the volume and allow this reality to recede into the background static — just one more unpleasant thing going on which we have the luxury of paying attention to, or not, as we choose. I certainly do. Others don’t have that luxury. They are not strangers. They are our brothers and sisters in Christ, our friends, and, in The Pillar’s case, our col...

One of the world’s most important newsrooms just offered a finely detailed profile of Catholic convert J.D. Vance and, imagine this, the feature focused on the emotions and ideas that led him to swim the Tiber. This included his intellectual and spiritual attraction to the work of St. Augustine, one of the most important minds in all of Western culture. Yes, there were political implications linked to this decision since the senator is, after all, the GOP candidate for vice president. Click for Crossroads podcast Another powerful newsroom produced a feature about Vance’s faith and the emphasis was on politics, politics and more politics, including lots of material about Vance and a choir of dangerous, authoritarian Catholic thinkers. Has Vance identified with this group? No, but he has sai...

Last week, I saw that Dr. Richard Dawkins, Oxford’s popular evolutionary biologist, was going to be in Dallas, TX for the first of his “An Evening with Richard Dawkins: The Final Bow” tour dates. His appearances will continue in ten U.S. cities during September and October. He says this will be his final speaking tour, so I decided I needed to go. There’s a history here. When I became Catholic in 2006, the New Atheism was at its height. New Atheism taught young people that religion is superstitious and irrational and, therefore, should not be tolerated. Proponents advocated an “antitheist” view that criticism of religion using, what they considered, rational argument, especially where religion and society intersect in politics and education. Dawkins had just published The God Delusion. Two...

With our ​Voyage Classics​ line of books, we’ve been preserving classic works of literature that elevate our modern lives. Our unique editions of these vintage books are newly typeset and feature original illustrations. Such is the case with our latest book, Story of a Soul! One of the most popular religious autobiographies of all time, this Voyage Classics edition of Story of a Soul by St. Thérèse of Lisieux, highlights the Carmelite saint’s attraction to the sea and her love of the spiritual symbolism behind it. As she wrote in her autobiography, “the symbol of a ship always delights me, and helps me to bear with my exile. Does not the Wise Man tell us: ‘Life is like a ship that passeth through the waves; when it is gone, the trace thereof cannot be found’?” Furthermore, this edition fea...

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By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio – articles – email ) | Aug 30, 2024 Recent observations by Cardinal Luis Antonio Tagle suggest that the charge that Christian missionaries are agents of colonialism has not yet been laid to rest (see Cardinal Tagle defends missionaries). In reality, this is an accusation typically made by those who are themselves “colonializing” by trying to turn the third-world poor into agents of, or supports for, Western secularism. Thomas Mirus recently called my attention to a case in point: African Archbishops: ‘They Are Sending Us Missionaries of Evil’. We have seen this again and again with the rising tide of secularization in the West over the past seventy-five years. It is always the Christian missionaries who are accused of shackling poorer populations to a se...

Readings:Isaiah 35:4–7Psalm 146:7–10James 2:1–5Mark 7:31–37 The incident in today’s Gospel is recorded only by Mark. The key line is what the crowd says at the end: “He has done all things well.” In the Greek, this echoes the creation story, recalling that God saw all the things He had done and declared them good (see Genesis 1:31). Mark also deliberately evokes Isaiah’s promise, which we hear in today’s First Reading, that God will make the deaf hear and the mute speak. He even uses a Greek word to describe the man’s condition (mogilalon = “speech impediment”) that’s only found in one other place in the Bible—in the Greek translation of today’s Isaiah passage, where the prophet describes the “dumb” singing. The crowd recognizes that Jesus is doing what the prophet had foretold. But Mark w...

The date: Sept. 20, 1918.  The place: Our Lady of Grace Chapel, the church of the Capuchin friars at San Giovanni Rotondo, located in the Italian province of Foggia.  There alone in front of a crucifix of the suffering Christ was a suffering, humble, pious friar named Francesco Forgione (1887-1968), named after St. Francis of Assisi, another suffering, humble, pious friar — who in the year 1224 first bore the wounds of Christ; that is, the stigmata.   “After celebrating the Mass,” recalled Padre Pio, as he was later known, “I stayed in the choir for the due thanksgiving prayer, when suddenly I was overtaken by a powerful trembling, then calm followed, and I saw Our Lord in the posture of someone who is on a cross … lamenting the ingratitude of men, especially those cons...

(Image: Tamarcus Brown / Unsplash.com) School is starting, and we need to keep students from curiosity. Curiosity? It sounds bad to modern ears, but ancient and medieval thinkers considered it a vice—a dangerous intellectual habit. You can hear that judgment in the old saying, “Curiosity killed the cat.” You can also see it in horror movies where people decide they must investigate the sounds coming from upstairs—even though they know of a rampaging murderer in the area! Yet apart from those examples, we usually treat curiosity as simply good. What do we mean by “curiosity” as good and healthy? What did those older thinkers mean by it as bad and dangerous morally and spiritually? In our time, we usually define it in a neutral way. The current Merriam-Webster definition ...