I had a desperate need to be considered cool. In fact, it may have been the thing that I valued most through high school and into college. So when I started college, I absorbed the cultural values of the college campus wholeheartedly. I valued what the cool kids valued. I did what they did and I did it to a greater degree. I partied hard. I chased girls. I talked loud and brash (still working on that one). I hung with the cool dudes who would enable such behavior. But, I was lost.

If there is one phrase which can get a Catholic argument going, it is "a personal relationship with Jesus". One one side there are folks that argue it is a phrase stolen from Evangelical Protestants and is empty of meaning. They might also charge that it shuns the communal aspect of Christianity. On the other side...

as Christian disciples we are called to something better than just living with our bias. We are called to submit it to our Lord and allow him to sift through it to see where we are right and where we are wrong in our bias. Even further...

Sin never stops. This weekend, we got word that a friend and local pastor stepped down due to an inappropriate relationship with an adult. It hurt me, my family, and many others. It has wounded many good people who were shocked to find out...

Easy Christianity doesn’t work. We have tried it for too long and it has failed us (and the world). Passive Catholicism doesn't change lives. Soft Selling tough discipleship means we don't make disciples, but soft Catholics, who will fade away when things (or doctrines, morality, human sin, scandal, etc) get too tough....

In 2017 I drove to Houston after Hurricane Harvey to help with relief efforts. A drive that would normally take 1.5 hours took me twice as long, due to closed streets, debris, flooding, etc. I finally made it to my destination and spent the rest of the day at a home that had 5 feet of water in it. It was a daunting task. You have to wonder

Why doesn’t our parish do _______? We should start a _________ at our parish! Father really needs to _________ at our parish! If you have ever worked in a parish then you have probably heard these kinds of questions / statements and...

It may have been the best compliment I have ever received. One of the young men I had been working with told me once, "until I met you, I never knew what it meant to have a father love a son. Now I can see through you, how much God loves me." Wow. I was not only humbled, but overjoyed at what God had done in our discipleship relationship.

During much of the 20th Century, in both Russia and China, Christians were viciously persecuted under Communism. But in the modern era, we see Russian Christianity stagnating (at best and declining in many ways), even though the government now officially advocates for Russian Orthodoxy. Yet, in China, the growth has been exponential. Why? What can we learn?

15 years ago a book called Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers by sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton. It is a summary of findings from a large survey of teens in America and what they believe. Their key finding is...

NOTE - There will be a lot of bold (and frank) statements in this post. Discussion and feedback is welcomed and appreciated, but please be polite, even if you disagree. When the Catholic Church, in the USA, faced the biggest problem in her history (the clergy abuse scandal), the reaction and change was...

There is no arguing with the data, and the facts are sobering and sad - most self-identified Catholics in the USA live like those who have no faith. They say they are Catholics and live like they are pagans.

There were two differences between us. First of all, he was better dressed than I was. The second was that he was black and I was white. As two friends, we entered the convenience store at the same time....

There is a somewhat obscure Bible passage that has been bothering me lately. Whenever that happens, I try to go back to it again and again, until I can discern what God wants to say to me through it. After talking to my spiritual director and praying about it more, I have some glimpses into what God is saying. Here is the passage...

We were both right, but neither of us was giving the full answer. This is like the answers that you might receive if you asked a Catholic leader about the relationship between evangelization, catechesis, and apologetics. You are probably going to get a lot of right answers, but incomplete ones, which may not hit every angle of the issue.

Our enemy is the devil, who tempts us and desires our destruction. He hates God and all those who follow Jesus. There is nothing he desires more than to have you and everyone else in Hell with him. If we are to win at spiritual warfare we have to both know...

There is a new reality that is hitting many Catholic leaders - it is that this crisis may extend far into the future. Some have said we could have waves of quarantine happening well into 2021, if not into 2022, depending on when we get a vaccine and are able to administer it widely. This is something that parish and diocesan leaders need to be planning for now, not months from now.

When the Catholic Church, in the USA, faced the biggest problem in her history (the clergy abuse scandal), the reaction and change was dramatic. In fact, due to changes made after the scandal, the Church in the USA has now become one of the most effective organizations in the country, in terms of protecting children and vulnerable adults. Still, one of the main reasons it got so bad was a failure of our leaders to do the right thing in the first place. We are seeing some of the same issues in the face of the Coronavirus.

The Catholic Church has its own set of urban legends. When asking a few friends some of their ideas, we ended up compiling a list that has several dozen urban legends and myths. Thus, this will only be part I of our series on Catholic urban legends. Here are the two.

My friend is a Southern Baptist pastor and his statement about the Catholic Church floored me and it wasn't about what you are probably thinking it was. He told me a story about when he was in seminary in the 80s. One of his seminary professors was teaching a class on missiology, which is the study of Christian mission. They did an exhaustive historical study on the spread of the Gospel. Toward the end of the class, one student asked...