Church of Saint Joseph the Carpenter

In Untold Blessing: Three Paths to Holiness, Bishop Barron outlines three ways we can progress in our call to holiness: finding the center, knowing you are a sinner, and realizing that your life is not about you (see also Centered: The Spirituality of Word on Fire, pp. 83-92). Today, on the feast of his nativity, […]

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There is a classic picture of Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati, the twentieth-century Italian saint who enjoyed having a good time, playing billiards, and hiking with his friends. This picture is from one of his mountaineering outings as he’s scaling a cliff and looking up to the heavens. In his own hand, he inscribed on the […]

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Concluding our look at how we identify and understand beauty in all its forms, we again feature Denis McNamara, the Director of Benedictine College’s Center for Beauty and Culture. In Part V, Dr. McNamara discussed the importance of liturgical iconography and why it matters to the Mass. His conversation with Robert Mixa, the Word on […]

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After he’d experienced a mystical vision lasting two hours, Blaise Pascal immediately wrote a summation of what he had been shown, which he then had sewn into his coat. There it remained, undiscovered, until his death.  Sometimes, inspired by this story, I wonder if I should sew St. Ignatius of Loyola’s Prayer of Surrender into […]

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A couple of years ago, a British Heart Foundation–funded study followed fifty-two patients over four months, aged between twenty-eight and eighty-seven, who suffered with what is officially known as takotsubo cardiomyopathy. An article in the UK Telegraph reports:  The little-known condition was first coined in Japan in 1990 and named after the native word for […]

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There is a lot to see in Jerusalem, but one of the places that struck me most when I went there on pilgrimage was the Kidron Valley. It lies east of the Temple Mount, between the Old City and the Mount of Olives, and it is filled with ancient graves. According to our tour guide, […]

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Here is a little something that I have always wondered. When it comes to atheists engaging the question of God (that is, his existence, his providential love, his judgment, and his narrative for our lives from their beginnings to eternity), I have wondered why there is often so much anger? If there is no God, […]

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Continuing our look at how we identify and understand beauty in all its forms, we feature Denis McNamara, the Director of Benedictine College’s Center for Beauty and Culture. In Part IV, McNamara discussed the importance of liturgical music as a reflection of Christ’s own song to the Father. His conversation with Robert Mixa, the Word […]

The post Beauty Will Save the World—But How? Part V: Liturgical Iconography appeared first on Word on Fire.

In this interview, apologist and Word on Fire Institute Fellow Matt Nelson sits down with Dr. Travis Dumsday, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Concordia University of Edmonton, Canada. They discuss the problem of divine hiddenness as presented by atheists for proof of God’s nonexistence and how Christians might respond with clarity and logic to such […]

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The Sacred Heart of Jesus is one Catholic devotion I find both strange and inspiring. That combination is to be expected, I suppose, for one who is just embarking on the Catholic journey after half a century in evangelical Protestantism. But of course, the Christian journey itself is a mixture of things both strange and […]

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