I don’t know how many people are like me. I consider myself a fairly good listener and have always been ready with what I have considered pretty good advice. I certainly have had my fair share of times when I have given bad advice as well, but good or bad, …

It’s one of those infamous dinnertime phone calls. “Hello, Steffen, this is Travis at Marketing Research Associates. You’ve been identified as an opinion leader and we value your opinions. I would like to ask you a few questions.” If you’re a registered voter and have a landline listed in one …

Millennials at Mass aren’t aren’t extinct, but they seem to be an endangered species. A recent Pew Research Center study noted that in 2014, just 16 percent of millennial Americans identified themselves as Catholic. The same study noted 35 percent of millennials identified themselves as “nones,” a term meaning they …

Dear Father: What happened to Purgatory? Haven’t heard about it for decades. Did it go away? What are the past and current teachings of the church on the subject? Dear Reader: Thank you for your question. Purgatory is still very much a part of church teaching. In paragraphs 1030-1032 of …

  Like it or not, March Madness Basketball is very serious business indeed. Just ask your nearest UC, UD, UK or Xavier fan. The NCAA Tournament is an $11 billion-per-year industry. People bet more dollars on March Madness than on the Superbowl. But as St. Paul taught in the book …

Treatises on discernment are many and varied throughout the great tradition of the church. There are spiritual masters who have written whole books on how to discern your vocation and many who have written books on the spiritual masters who have written about discernment. Yet, the common problem that we …

There’s much talk and much more being written these days in the Catholic world about evangelism – sharing the joy of the Gospel message with others. We’ve all met evangelists, seen them on TV or witnessed them giving their witness in any number of forums – including in the political …

When you ask why millennials aren’t attending church on a regular basis, you get a variety of answers. Because of the music, or the sermons, or because we have the attention span of a gnat, some say. Because an hour for God is just too much, after all we’ve gotta …

Spoiler Alert: if you’ve not yet seen the film Brooklyn you may not want to read the end. Our increasingly secularized culture insists that we should all be “spiritual but not religious.” Brooklyn, a 2015 film distributed by Fox Searchlight Pictures, is an antidote to such one-dimensional political correctness. It paints a luminous …

When you write it down, you put yourself in the game. So says a writing coach who specializes in getting people past writer’s block. We have embarked on one of the great American adventures in citizenship — a presidential election year. As I write this, the Iowa Caucuses are a …