After Sunday Mass, I fill my motorcycle top case with books and ride out to Quezalapa for a library afternoon. The community is in a remote area with no public transportation and few services. But there are plenty of dinosaurs, planets, and books about outer space. Six-year-old Wilson loves all this. He is the honorary member of our new library, sometimes the only one who shows up—which at first made me feel like the Pouting Fish from a bestselling children’s book.

Why do I pout when Wilson hasn’t missed a Sunday? His grandparents and mother live next door to the community center where we meet—an aluminum roof with bamboo benches and no walls—so they store a few chairs and a collapsible table for the library at their home. For the first few Sundays his grandfather accompanied Wilson, and then his father showed up a few times, returning Wilson to his mother after weekend visits in San Salvador.

Wilson’s dad is a big, strong man of Spanish descent. When I ask Wilson about his mother, he says she’s learning to dance. His mother is a strong, beautiful woman sculpted from the family’s indigenous roots. She has never accompanied Wilson to the library. I only know her from the small storefront where she helps her mother sell vegetables and fruit. Wilson’s grandmother told me Wilson developed a severe stutter when his parents separated a few years ago.

When Wilson sees a book about dinosaurs, his eyes glow as bright as stars, so I’ve been adding lots of dinosaur books to our collection. His favorite is El magnífico Libro de los Dinosaurios.

Recently, Wilson’s father began arriving Sunday mornings and stays with Wilson and his mother the entire day, except when they take an hour or so to read books and play board games at the community center. Last Sunday, when I went to get the table and chairs, Wilson immediately pulled his father out the door to join me and two other children at the library. His father resisted, but Wilson tugged and pushed until he succeeded. His mother didn’t come with them, but later that afternoon when I returned the table and chairs to the store, she received them with a smile and a warm thank you. I thanked her for reading with Wilson during the week—I said this as a way of testing the waters—and she confirmed that Wilson loves those giant creatures and that she reads with him every night. “Pretty amazing,” I said. “They roamed the earth for some 150 million years.” She looked at me with a nod that said, I know, I’ve read that one a million times.

I see Wilson drinking in every word like water in the desert. I hear his stuttering turning to laughter and watch his parents learning to dance, doing all they can to show their little boy he is not broken—and how to use 150 million years of creation to build an amazing imagination and mind. ♦

Maryknoll Lay Missioner Richard Dixon serves in El Salvador. His poems have appeared in Tomorrow’s American Catholic.

Elias has written for the American Scholar, Hedgehog Review, Shareable, Arion, Strong Towns, Front Porch Republic, America, Diogenes (UNESCO), and other publications. His latest book, Confessions of a Street Catholic, was published earlier this year. He is co-host with the writer and civic advocate Pete Davis of the podcast Lost Prophets, which is dedicated to recovering prophetic voices from the mid-twentieth century and rediscovering what they can teach us today.

Our conversation with Elias approached the current state of American Catholicism from many angles. We looked at what the Polish Solidarity movement—the namesake for Solidarity Hall—might teach us about organizing a spiritual revolution, shared the importance of Small Christian Communities in rebuilding the church from the ground up, and contemplated the concept of “ecclesial solidarity” as a way to mend intra-church divides and begin to “speak as one.” We also delve into Confessions of a Street Catholic—a must-read for anyone interested in envisioning new forms of Catholic culture and community—and consider how a post-parochial, post-national, and even post-denominational world church might evolve in response to a time of social, ecological, and technological transformation.

See also:

Solidarity Hall

Lost Prophets podcast

Dorothy’s Place podcast

Confessions of a Street Catholic (with additional background here)

“Toward a New Politics of Care: Reexamining Broken-World Thinking,” Elias’s essay in the Hedgehog Review, Fall 2024

Foolishness to Gentiles: Essays on Empire, Nationalism, and Discipleship by Michael Budde

A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit

The Spirit of Solidarity by Father Józef Tischner

Background on Nicholas Berdyayev

The Convivial Society, a a newsletter exploring the relationship between technology and culture by L. M. Sacasas

First is Writing and the Sacred: An Anthology of Reflections, edited by Sarah Law for Amethyst Press. I am honored to have a chapter included in this anthology alongside several poets previously published in TAC, including Johanna Caton, O.S.B., Maryanne Hannan, Kathryn Sadakierski, and Wally Swist. Poetry, Eugenio Montale said, is the “fruit of solitude and accumulated impressions,” and to be present in communion with others in this textual space is a gift of the season. Writing and the Sacred is available on Amazon here (UK readers can order here, and Australian readers here).

Next is The Blessing of Others: Reflections on the Life and Work of Michael Ford, out later this month from UK-based publisher Darton, Longman and Todd. Michael was a treasured contributor to TAC from 2019 until his passing in 2024; long-time readers might recall his thoughtful, deeply personalist profiles of such figures as William Hart McNichols, Mother Dolores Hart, Father Matthew Kelty, and Henri Nouwen. It was with great joy that I accepted an invitation from editors David Torevell and Simon Lee to contribute a reflection on Michael’s “ministry of journalism” for the volume, which features an array of tributes exploring the central theme of Michael’s work: “how the Other, especially those wounded, dispossessed and on the margins of society, as well as those who have opted for a distinctive, Christian lifestyle, are able to become a blessing to those whom they meet and with whom they engage.” The Blessing of Others is available for order here.

– Michael Centore

We continue our special contributions to Franciscan Month with reflections by Janine Walsh and Stephanie Cottrell Caporaso and a podcast interview with Brother Gregory Cellini, O.S.F. In “Searching for Saint Francis,” Walsh—the former communications director of the Franciscan Action Network—writes about how her Franciscan spirituality has helped her along the path of “continual conversion,” especially finding balance and reconciling relationships through forgiveness. Cottrell Caporaso reapplies the story of Saint Francis and the wolf of Gubbio to our age of climate crisis, overconsumption, and rationalized violence, observing how Francis “approached the wolf without a weapon, symbolically ending the cycle of violence before exercising his dominion over the creature—not as a controlling lord, but as a humble steward.”

Brother Greg is a Franciscan Brother of Brooklyn who currently serves as the Director of the Office of Mission, Ministry and Interfaith Dialogue at St. Francis College. He is the host of Thank God for Monday, a weekly radio show focused on issues of the workplace, as well as the author of the book Transform Yourself – Transform the World: A Franciscan View of Career.

In our podcast interview, Brother Greg brings his infectious Franciscan joy to a range of topics, including the “kissing the leper” moment that led to the discovery his vocation after a 29-year career in big pharmaceuticals, overcoming the temptation to self-assertion with the grace of self-giving, and why we should seek to be a church “that’s beautiful in its simplicity.” Listen and find additional resources here.

The Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast is now also available on Apple Podcasts—feel free to listen and leave a review there.

In the coming weeks, we’ll be releasing new podcasts with Elias Crim of Solidarity Hall, Carlos Malave of the Latino Christian National Network, Brady Young of the Franciscan Federation, and a special “peacemakers week” with John Dear and Shane Claiborne.

If you would like to support our work, please consider upgrading to a paid subscription, sending someone a gift subscription, or adding a donation—every amount, no matter how small, is a help in sustaining our mission. We also realize that not everyone is in a position to give, so another way to assist is to forward one of our mailings to a friend—we would love to reach 1,000 subscribers by the end of the year, and we are very close! A few more folks interested in our framing question—“Who is tomorrow’s American Catholic, and how is their understanding of themselves, their faith, and their church evolving in time?”—could help us achieve our goal.

I’ve always been a “wolf girl.” The works of Jack London and Gary Paulsen proudly grace my bookshelves among wolf figurines and paintings. The Balto film soundtrack is among my most listened-to Spotify selections. So it’s no surprise that my favorite pious legend is Saint Francis of Assisi’s encounter with the wolf of Gubbio.

As the story goes, the wolf had been attacking livestock in this central Italian region for some time before setting its sight on human targets. Francis, feeling sympathy for the terrified citizens, resolved to settle the issue his way. Against the advice of everyone who knew his intentions, Francis walked unarmed to the wolf’s lair, where the creature waited for him, fangs out, ready to strike. Francis made the sign of the cross, invoking the wolf to “do no harm, in the name of Christ.” At the mention of the Savior’s name, the wolf became docile and sat at Francis’s feet. Francis rebuked the wolf for its ferocity, acknowledging the harm it had done to the people of Gubbio. But he also recognized that the wolf acted out of desperate hunger and arranged for the wolf to be fed by the people daily in exchange for mutual safety. The wolf agreed to these terms with a “paw-shake” and the people rejoiced.

On the surface, this is a straightforward story about peacemaking and sharing the redemptive love of Jesus. We also see this incident frequently described as “the time Francis of Assisi tamed a rabid wolf,” and it’s often sentimentalized in devotional art. But this is a story with layers, one that reveals uncomfortable truths about human nature and how we view creation: not as a gift of God, but as something to be subjugated at best and eliminated altogether at worst.

My husband and I own three cats. I knew absolutely nothing about cats when we first got together and found myself getting frustrated quite frequently at our oldest fur-baby’s antics. Why was he always getting into things he shouldn’t be? Why wouldn’t he listen when I told him no the first fifty times? Why did he always have to bite when he played? One day I got so angry and fed up that I started yelling (whether it was at my cat or my husband, I can’t recall). Once I was calm again, my husband sat me down and said something simple yet incredible: “Cats have their own rules. You have to operate on their level.” That was when I began really watching my cat, observing his body language and taking note of what times he was most active. I even watched a few videos on “cat psychology” and got input from vets and animal experts. Over time, being a cat-mom became easier. I had a better understanding of my cat’s behavior and how to “communicate” with him with my eyes and tone of voice.

Francis spent a lot of time in the wilderness before and during his ministry. It’s not difficult to imagine him observing animals from a distance and picking up on their behavioral patterns. Francis was known to preach the Gospel to animals, and he would have had to build some kind of rapport with them in order to do this. He wasn’t “taming” them; he was getting on their level to share the love of Christ that had changed his life so profoundly. Francis truly saw animals as his brothers and sisters, siblings who also had a share in God’s gift of creation.

God gave us dominion over creation in the book of Genesis. But in our brokenness we began to abuse this privilege. The Old Testament is full of stories of prideful kings who did great evil and brought destruction upon themselves and their people. Man, in his role of dominion over creation, is no exception. The poaching of animals, pollution, climate change, generative AI, and deforestation are all crimes committed in the misguided name of human progress and supremacy, crimes committed with no regard to their impact on future generations.

If Francis hadn’t intervened, I can only imagine the people of Gubbio would have made the same mistake as so many before and after them: indiscriminately killing every wolf in their path until the balance of nature was damaged beyond repair. Wolves are crucial to keeping herbivore populations in check and thus protecting human crops and precious vegetation. Francis knew, because of his past as a prisoner of war, that violence was not the answer, and so he approached the wolf without a weapon, symbolically ending the cycle of violence before exercising his dominion over the creature—not as a controlling lord, but as a humble steward.

Francis did more than just appease a beast and a frightened crowd that day. He also acknowledged what had caused the wolf attacks in the first place. Wolves have been shown to attack livestock only in cases when their regular food supplies (such as deer and rabbits) are low, another problem usually caused my human overconsumption. Hunger had driven the wolf into human territory, and its “crimes” were the result of desperation. Violence begets more violence. Francis knew the only peaceful solution was to tackle the problem at the source, and so he made sure the wolf was fed.

Death and ruin is a sentence our society has become too quick to dish out. We see it all the time on social media, where accountability for our words doesn’t seem to matter. “He should have complied.” “They should’ve come here legally.” “She shouldn’t have been drinking.” We rationalize violence, against nature and each other, to fulfill our own misguided sense of justice. As Catholic Christians we believe in a Savior who took on the skin of creation to die for us, a Savior who takes on the skin of creation at every Mass in the guise of bread and wine. It’s hard to think about that and not be ashamed of our bloodlust.

In an age of apathy, overconsumption, and normalized hatred, we are all being called to radical compassion more than ever. To feed the hungry and so cure their desperation, as Francis did. To speak out against physical and emotional violence when we see it. To strive for a world where we no longer die by the sword. To protect this beautiful world given to us by a God who is Love itself.

Radical compassion does not always look like activism or volunteering in soup kitchens. It actually begins with small acts of charity that pave the way for inner transformation, to paraphrase Saint Maximilian Kolbe (another Franciscan hero of mine). Sometimes it begins with a paw-shake. ♦

Stephanie C. Caporaso is a lifelong Connecticut resident, animal lover, and spiritual seeker. She currently resides with her husband, John, and three spoiled cats, Belushi, Molly, and Tina.

Brother Greg’s primary ministry is at St. Francis College in Brooklyn, New York, where he is Director of the Office of Mission, Ministry and Interfaith Dialogue. He is the host of Thank God for Monday, a weekly radio show focused on issues of the workplace, as well as the author of the book Transform Yourself – Transform the World: A Franciscan View of Career.

Brother Greg is a staff member of Franciscan Pilgrimage Programs, where he assists lead pilgrimages to parts of Italy. He is currently involved in Franciscan Month, an effort to have the month of October designated as such.

In this episode, Brother Greg brings his infectious Franciscan joy to a range of topics, including the “kissing the leper” moment that led to the discovery his vocation after a 29-year career in big pharmaceuticals, overcoming the temptation to self-assertion with the grace of self-giving, and why we should seek to be a church “that’s beautiful in its simplicity.” Brother Greg also shares his key question for spiritual direction, his thoughts about the importance of storytelling as a means of religious dialogue, and his belief that “in 2026, the San Damiano Cross is talking to each one of us.”

See also:

Transform Yourself – Transform the World: A Franciscan View of Career (Tau Publishing)

Thank God for Monday radio program and podcast

“I’d Like to Say: It’s Time to Act Like St. Francis,” article in St. Anthony Messenger, December 2024

Franciscan Brothers of Brooklyn

Franciscan Month website

Franciscan Federation

An AI search for “St. Francis of Assisi” along with the word October offers up a single sentence about the man himself: “St. Francis of Assisi is the Catholic Church’s patron saint of animals, ecology, and merchants, as well as a co-patron of Italy.” Alongside this, there are a few notes about the reasons behind his feast day on October 4, as well as information on a custom that many Franciscans still shake their head about: the blessing of the animals that is so often associated with him. (As well it should be, since he is the patron saint of animals.)

However, the mission of Franciscan Month, celebrated throughout October, is to educate people that Francis of Assisi is much more than a statue in a birdbath. Rooted in the teachings and example of St. Francis and St. Clare, Franciscan Month is an initiative that encourages people to pause from the noise of everyday life and discover the simplicity, gratitude, and joy at the heart of the Franciscan way. In the tradition of Tomorrow’s American Catholic, I will offer the story of my own spiritual journey as a way of explaining what the Franciscan charism has meant to me in light of this special month.

For much of the first two thirds of my life, I had not realized how closely I had been following in the footsteps of St. Francis and St. Clare. I was raised Catholic, the second of three girls in a tight-knit family that moved all over the country my father’s job with IBM. When my dad proposed to her, my mother was in discernment, considering joining the Franciscan Sisters of Perpetual Adoration in Colorado Springs. When we were little, my two sisters and I always knew (and made jokes about the fact) that mom was “learning to be a nun,” but we thought nothing further of being brought up in her Catholic-yet-Franciscan way.

This was a special upbringing with a significance I didn’t grasp until I was in my mid-forties, when I began working with the Franciscan Action Network (FAN) as communications director. When I started with FAN, I researched deeply into who St. Francis was. What did he preach? What did Franciscans believe? What convictions did they follow? Every time I learned something, I remember thinking to myself, “Well, yes, this is what I was taught.” One day, about two weeks into my new job, my mother came over to my house and asked what I was working on. When I told her about FAN and the newsletter I was building, she reminded me of her discernment and told me the name of her community. On that day I recognized that my faith, while Catholic, was also heavily Franciscan.

So, what does it mean to be “Franciscan”? I borrow one response from my friend and former boss at FAN, Michele Dunne, OFS: “A Franciscan path is one of continual conversion, interconnected to others and all of Creation turning toward God, justice, and mercy.”

For me, being interconnected to others and all of creation is the easy part. Due to my uniquely Franciscan Catholic faith, I developed deep friendships with people across a broad spectrum through a process of fraternitas during my 12 years with FAN. I became very adept at connecting with others. Intentionally asking people their story then telling mine was a good way of getting to know someone deeply. This knowledge helped me to care about them and, by extension, many other people I didn’t know. It guided my way of thinking about their lives and allowed my heart to open with compassionate empathy.

While canonized shortly after his death, the full story of Francis includes times when he did not act saintly. He was human, as we all are. He made mistakes, sometimes treating others poorly, as we all do. The difference in Francis was that he always sought to reconcile those relationships. Again, this is something I was brought up to do. Whenever my sisters and I had a fight (and there were some doosies), after giving us some time to cool off and hearing both sides tell their story, mom would gather us in a room together. We had to calmly tell the other person how we felt, why we were angry, and what wrong we believed needed to be righted. Then we had to apologize, hug each other, and tell the other person that we loved them. This was the hardest part! When my sister, with her older-sibling “what’s-mine-is-mine-and-what’s-yours-is-mine” attitude, took my things without my permission, ruined them, and was only marginally remorseful, I had to hug her—while still upset! It was very difficult for me as a nine-year-old, but I cherish these lessons now when I see too many sibling relationships crumble for lack of communication and reconciliation. Life is too short to hold a grudge.

My continual conversion has been more difficult. I have one of those personalities that yearns for completion. I’m someone who will write a list of things I’ve already done just to see them crossed off. Being in a state of flux makes me edgy and unsettled. I firmly believe God brought me to Francis in order to work on this aspect of my character. Learning the pillars of St. Francis was a gift that continues to impact my life beyond my time directly associated with FAN. I am better at balancing everyday life with my faith and my desire to act for social justice, and I feel confident in the lessons I have taught my own children about the importance of relationships.

While listening to a recent Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast, where my good friend Patrick Carolan spoke with guest Daniel Horan, I was struck when Dan said, “Those of us in the Franciscan world know what we mean.” It was a simple phrase at the very beginning of the conversation, but to me it pointed to the mission of Franciscan Month: to welcome those “outside” the Franciscan world to learn about the teachings of Francis and Clare, to celebrate the Franciscan way of life, and to offer insightful perspectives on living as Franciscans in today’s world.

Franciscan Month is for everyone, regardless of faith background. It is catholicity in practice. Jesus came and taught everyone, irrespective of their personal history or faith life. He broke boundaries and did not exclude anyone. The first rule of all branches of Franciscans is the same. It reads, “The way in life of the Franciscans is this: to live the holy Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Francis chose to live his life prioritizing relationships, just as Jesus did. Nothing was going to hold either him or Clare back from relationships to others.

There are many stories of Francis’s equitable treatment of everyone he meets. He sees the inherent brotherhood and sisterhood of all through Jesus Christ. This powerful Franciscan charism—to “see each other as the siblings that we are in God, and to recognize that that sibling connection extends beyond the human family to the more-than-human world”—is so vital to us today.

This October, I invite you to consider joining in “Five Weeks of Living the Gospel” with the good people at Franciscan Month. We’ll be given the opportunity to meet St. Francis and St. Clare and learn how to open our hearts to God’s love. We will explore what it means to live in right relationship with the earth and with each other, and discover how compassion in the Franciscan tradition is not sentimental—it is demanding, courageous, and transformative. Finally, we will close the month where Francis would have us: learning how to live in simplicity, in service, and in joy. ♦

Janine Walsh is the former communications director of the Franciscan Action Network.

Writer Number Zero

Michael Centore on reading and remembering Annie Dillard: “The words on Dillard’s page are like footprints of someone trying to find their soul in the universe left across a snowy field. To read her is to follow her in this venture, and soon you find your own attentiveness begins to sharpen, keening to her quest. It has to do with the way she uses language, which is not, in her hands, the language of discourse or exposition or critique—though it could be any or all of those things—but more like a physical implement that clears and canalizes new provinces of the mind.”

Read more »

Marc Greenberg is the executive director and co-founder of the Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing (IAHH), a coalition of religious organizations and individuals based in New York City that works with and on behalf of the homeless population.

In this episode of our podcast, Marc recounts the origins of IAHH, which included a vigil in City Hall Park that lasted several months, and speaks of its mission to “bear witness to the crisis of homelessness.” He opens us to the human face of homelessness by sharing personal stories of how his own life has been changed by being present to others—a process he describes as “reducing the distance between ourselves and those who suffer.” Marc also speaks about the interfaith and inter-spiritual aspects of his work, how he understands the relationship between public policy and direct action, and why homeless outreach must always be seen as “a fellowship of accompaniment.”

Listen here »

Ben Bowler on what spirituality offers as intelligence moves beyond us: “At the heart of my response is a conviction that intelligence is not spirit. Spirit is a higher reality than processing power. Intelligence is a magnificent capacity, but its power does not make it the source of meaning or the measure of a life. The ability to answer a question, solve a problem or produce a compelling argument tells us something about capability. Our spiritual traditions ask further questions about the one who knows, the purpose of knowing, and the love through which knowledge becomes service.”

Read more »

There is a scene in David Remnick’s 2016 profile of Leonard Cohen for the New Yorker where the songwriter recounts an afternoon driving around Los Angeles with Bob Dylan. Dylan tells Cohen that another prominent songwriter had declared to him, “Bob, you’re Number 1, but I’m Number 2.” He clarifies this for Cohen: “As far as I’m concerned, Leonard, you’re Number 1. I’m Number Zero.”

“Meaning,” Cohen explains to Remnick, “that his work was beyond measure and my work was pretty good.”

For myself and many others, Annie Dillard—who passed into eternal life at her home in South Wellfleet, Massachusetts, on September 15—was Writer Number Zero. Words like peerless and incomparable aren’t quite accurate: she had peers in Emerson and Thoreau, and her prose can reach Melvillian cadences in both incident and effect. Melville’s searching spirit, his seemingly fathomless hunger for that elusive mystery that lies at the center of things, is an apt touchstone: the words on Dillard’s page are like footprints of someone trying to find their soul in the universe left across a snowy field. To read her is to follow her in this venture, and soon you find your own attentiveness begins to sharpen, keening to her quest. It has to do with the way she uses language, which is not, in her hands, the language of discourse or exposition or critique—though it could be any or all of those things—but more like a physical implement that clears and canalizes new provinces of the mind.

“To the poet, phonetics and semantics are, with few exceptions, identical,” Joseph Brodsky wrote in his encomium for Marina Tsvetaeva. It’s an observation that could be applied to Dillard’s work, with its nimble musicality and the way perception is bound up in sound. She got her start at a poet and only later migrated to prose; she once spoke of poetry as an instrument and prose as an orchestra, so much wider did she consider its range of potential tones and effects. There’s some truth to this, given the formal properties of poetry as an art of distillation and prose as one of expansion, yet she was able to retain what Brodsky saw as poetry’s “lessons of laconism and harmony”: even in her more speculative passages, there is a trenchancy in her selection of detail so that the shimmering light of the sentences always catches on concrete particulars. We never take leave of the world in Dillard, but we pass through it, like a baptism, to arrive at some charged, and one might even say hallowed, understanding of our surroundings:

My brain is full of numbers; they swell and would split my skull like a shell. I examine the trapezoids of skin covering the back of my hands like blown dust motes moistened to clay. I have hatched, too, with millions of my kind, into a milky way that spreads from an unknown shore. (Chapter 10, “Fecundity”)

I stood under tulips and ashes, maples, sour wood, sassafras, locusts, catalpas, and oaks. I let my eyes spread and unfix, screening out all that was not vertical motion, and I saw only leaves in the air—or rather, since my mind was also unfixed, vertical trails of yellow color-patches falling from nowhere to nowhere. (Chapter 14, “Northing”)

Just a glimpse, Moses: a cliff in the rock here, a mountaintop there, and the rest is denial and longing. You have to stalk everything. Everything scatters and gathers, everything comes and goes like fish under a bridge. You have to stalk the spirit, too. You can wait forgetful anywhere, for anywhere is the way of his fleet passage, and hope to catch him by the tail and shout something in his ear before he wrests away. (Chapter 11, “Stalking”)

In studying these moments from Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, one begins to understand the difference between lyric and rhetoric. Rhetoric may incorporate lyric, but no matter how soaring or the depth of the echo it might occasion in the hearer, there is always a subtle ulterior motive: it wants something from the hearer, whether it means winning him to some cause, however noble, or shoring up some uncertainty. Dillard’s sentences are squeezed dry of rhetoric, and what you are left with is a lyrical consciousness placed in perfect offering to the reader without demanding anything in return, not even an ideological assent. I’m not sure I even agree with her notion of “stalking” the spirit, beautiful though that it is—but the point is not that I’m convinced of its veracity as a principle so much as an element of her own experience. This is where her connection to Thoreau is at its strongest, that fidelity to the individual as his or her own best exegete of the text of the world.

Dillard converted to Catholicism in the late 1980s, a movement that makes sense given the incarnate spirituality and moral tenor of her work. Her books are studded with scriptural references, and she had the uncanny ability to conjure a sense of biblical time—the wan light of an old, quiet earth that has been waking up to itself anew each day, eon after eon. Though she ultimately left the church, maintaining a spiritual if not a sacramental bond, I am not sure that is the most fruitful line of inquiry in thinking about her project. Her work remains Catholic in the Greek sense of katholikos, “throughout the whole.” She expresses better than many within the church the reverence and wonder that should be central to our communion, and she does it through the hard, often lonely labor of trying to keep a patient heart attuned to the world’s gratuitous beauty—or its pitilessness or confusion, whatever the case may be—and transmuting it sentence by sentence. If we pass through the world in her writing, it is because she allowed it to pass through her first. ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Tomorrow’s American Catholic.

This essay originally appeared on the UNITY EARTH website. We are grateful to author and executive director of UNITY EARTH, Ben Bowler, for permission to reprint it here—Ed.

Over recent days, I have found myself returning to a question that feels increasingly important: as rapidly advancing AI transforms our understanding of intelligence, can we also deepen our understanding of spirit? The conversations are everywhere. What will happen to our work, our creativity, our children’s futures? What happens as machines surpass us in more of the capacities through which we have understood our place in the world?

The genie is out of the bottle. We are already living within the transformation, and its implications reach into our sense of identity and purpose. For those of us engaged in interspirituality, a space of collective human spirituality, this moment brings a particular opportunity and responsibility. We have spent years creating containers where wisdom traditions can meet, where people can discover a wider belonging, and where spiritual understanding can become shared insight and action. I believe this work is becoming more urgent.

At the heart of my response is a conviction that intelligence is not spirit. Spirit is a higher reality than processing power. Intelligence is a magnificent capacity, but its power does not make it the source of meaning or the measure of a life. The ability to answer a question, solve a problem or produce a compelling argument tells us something about capability. Our spiritual traditions ask further questions about the one who knows, the purpose of knowing, and the love through which knowledge becomes service.

The opening chapter of Genesis offers a starting point shared by Jewish and Christian traditions: “So God created man in his own image.” The verse goes on to include both male and female in that divine image. For me, this places human dignity in our relationship with the Creator. We do not earn that dignity through intellectual achievement, economic usefulness or public recognition. It belongs to us before any of these things can be measured. (Genesis 1:27)

That has profound implications in an age increasingly preoccupied with superior intelligence. A child does not become more sacred by learning faster. An elder does not become less sacred as memory fades. Someone who needs lifelong care possesses a dignity as complete as that of a celebrated scientist. If we truly believe that human beings bear the divine image, then our worth cannot rise and fall with our performance. A machine’s greater capability cannot diminish the sacredness of a person.

The language of being children of God takes this relationship further. Writing to the Christian community in Rome, Paul describes the Spirit bearing witness that we are God’s children. Here, spiritual identity is something encountered inwardly through relationship with God. I hear in this an invitation to discover our inheritance in a universe whose deepest source is personal and loving. (Romans 8:16)

My conviction is that this divine parenthood embraces the whole human family. To understand ourselves as children of one Creator changes the way we look at one another. The stranger, the opponent and the person whose beliefs unsettle us belong within that same family. Our responsibility to our Maker finds expression in the quality of our relationships with all God’s children. This is powerfully encapsulated in Jesus’ radical teaching: “Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you, that you may be children of your Father in heaven.” (Matthew 5:44–45)

Christian scripture also speaks of divine indwelling. In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul describes the body as a temple of the Holy Spirit, received from God. This is an embodied teaching, joining spiritual presence to responsibility for how we live. It invites us to treat our lives as places in which the sacred is present and through which it can find expression. (1 Corinthians 6:19)

Within my own spiritual understanding, the indwelling spark is central. The Urantia Book describes a divine presence within the human mind, guiding the growth of the soul, and understands personality as a gift bestowed by the Universal Father. These teachings give particular depth to the sense that “we are spiritual beings having a human experience”. Personality, in this understanding, is the unique person capable of relationship and choice; the soul grows through our living response to spirit. Together, these gifts open our lives towards an eternal destiny. (The Urantia Book, Paper 5, especially 5:1.5 and 5:6.1–8)

Pope Leo XIV brings a timely voice to this inquiry in his 2026 encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. He warns that making intelligence an absolute measure can obscure affection, will, commitment and relationships. His examination of transhumanism asks us to consider the understanding of humanity beyond its technological achievements. He locates our deepest fulfilment in divine grace and transformation through love. I hear in this a powerful contribution to the interspiritual conversation: our capacity to grow is inseparable from the soulful relationships through which we receive and share life. (Magnifica Humanitas, §§113–117 and 126–128)

This also brings me to a concern about certain visions of transhumanism: the assumption that, if we could preserve and reproduce enough of a person’s memories, thoughts and patterns of behaviour, we would have preserved the person. Such mechanistic views provoke profound questions about identity. Would a digital reconstruction of everything I have said, remembered and believed actually be me? My conviction is that we are far more than the sum of our thoughts. Our spiritual identity reaches beyond the contents of our minds.

To understand ourselves as children of God, endowed with personality and growing souls, is to recognise a dimension of personhood that an informational account leaves unexplained. The divine image is not a pattern of data. The indwelling spirit is not an accumulation of knowledge. However faithfully a system might reproduce our expressions, that resemblance would not establish the continuation of the person whose life gave them meaning. From this spiritual perspective, our eternal potential rests in our living relationship with Spirit. The desire to transcend human limitation finds its deepest fulfillment in the transformation of the whole person through love, spiritual growth and participation in divine purpose.

Questions about machine consciousness remain open to investigation and debate. Yet whatever we discover about artificial intelligence, we still face the responsibility of becoming more truthful, loving and responsive to the divine presence in our own lives. No advance in technology relieves us of that work.

Buddhist teachings add another dimension. In Mahayana traditions, Buddha-nature is considered a fundamental aspect of our identity and points towards the capacity for awakening present in all sentient beings. Texts such as the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra and the Mahayana Mahāparinirvāṇa Sūtra explore this profound potential. Ignorance, attachment and habitual patterns obscure what spiritual practice can reveal. Wisdom and compassion can be cultivated because awakening is possible. (Tsadra Foundation: Buddha-Nature)

Buddha-nature has its own meaning, distinct from a Creator-bestowed soul or an indwelling fragment of God. Honouring that distinction makes interspiritual encounters richer. I find a powerful resonance in the invitation to look beyond our habitual identities and discover a depth that ordinary measures of achievement cannot capture. My language of spirit and the Buddhist language of awakened mind arise from different understandings, yet both can challenge a civilisation that treats intellectual performance as the highest human aspiration.

This is part of what interspirituality makes possible. We bring our convictions into relationship with the lived wisdom of others. We listen carefully enough to be challenged. We allow another tradition’s practice to illuminate something our own habits have obscured. Such encounters can deepen our faith while enlarging our capacity to recognise wisdom beyond familiar forms.

The 2015 Fuji Declaration gives this conversation a contemporary and collective expression. Its opening affirmation states: “We affirm the divine spark in the heart and mind of every human being.” It connects that recognition with commitments to peace, the well-being of all life, creativity and the development of a more harmonious civilisation. As a contemporary declaration, it carries these spiritual aspirations into a shared public commitment. (The Fuji Declaration)

What moves me is the responsibility contained in that affirmation. To recognise the divine spark in every person is to accept that our institutions, economies and technologies should serve the flourishing of those persons. In relation to AI, this becomes a searching question: will the systems we create help people live with greater dignity, deepen their relationships and contribute meaningfully to the world? The answer will depend on choices made by people, communities and institutions, and on the values those choices embody.

Indigenous wisdom contributes to this inquiry as a living presence. Through UNITY EARTH’s encounters with Indigenous elders and communities, questions of wholeness, Country, ancestry, belonging and responsibility have repeatedly come into focus. These encounters ask us to see ourselves within relationships that precede us and will continue beyond us. They also ask us to listen to particular peoples and places, respecting the distinctiveness of the knowledge they carry.

As we spend more of our lives in digital environments, I feel a growing need for that grounding. We remain embodied beings, nourished by the Earth, formed through relationships and responsible to future generations. Sacred travel, ceremony, time on Country and attentive listening can help us remember this. A wider field of information becomes more meaningful when we remain present to the living world in which our decisions take effect.

I also believe this moment invites us to reconsider revelation from God. The possibility of divine communication deserves serious attention in a civilisation increasingly captivated by the power of its own inventions. If our universe is spiritually alive, then wisdom can reach us through an initiative greater than our own. We seek, but we may also be sought. We ask, and we may be addressed. Our capacity to receive deserves at least as much cultivation as our capacity to produce.

Revelation asks for discernment. A claim to divine authority must be examined carefully, with attention to its truthfulness and the life it encourages. Does it deepen humility, compassion and responsibility? Does it invite sincere inquiry? Does it help people grow in love? Interspiritual friendship offers a valuable setting for these questions, bringing different histories of faith, lineage, insight and error into an honest conversation.

What, then, do we owe our Creator? I return to this question because gratitude seems inseparable from the recognition that life is a gift. We have received the capacity to love, to choose, to seek truth and to participate in creation. Those gifts carry an invitation to become more fully available to their Source. Prayer, contemplation, service and the daily effort to live sincerely are ways of answering. Through them, spiritual conviction takes root in the ordinary circumstances of a life.

For UNITY EARTH, this gives fresh urgency to the work of gathering. Across cultures and traditions, we need places where people can practise listening, encounter the sacred and develop the trust required for meaningful collaboration. We need conversations in which scientists can bring their discoveries, spiritual practitioners their disciplines, and Indigenous wisdom keepers their knowledge on their own terms. We need to carry what we discover into education, community life and the decisions shaping our technological future.

In The Age of Convergence, I reflected on the meeting of human aspiration and divine presence. The age of AI brings that inquiry into sharper focus. As intelligence becomes more powerful, our need for spiritual orientation becomes more pressing. We are being asked to remember our origin, attend to the presence within us and take responsibility for what we bring into the world.

The divine spark is an invitation to more life. To recognise it in ourselves is to accept a calling; to recognise it in others is to accept a relationship. As we enter this extraordinary chapter of human history, may we become more faithful to both, allowing the love of our Creator to shape the civilisation we are creating together. ♦

Ben Bowler is the executive director of UNITY EARTH, a global network on a mission to accelerate the realization of unity and peace on earth.

Since the assembly’s establishment in 1985, Marc has been addressing homelessness by advocating for public policy solutions and other strategies in partnership with an ever-broadening network of faith communities, other advocates, housing and service providers, elected officials, and those who have experienced homelessness. In his work for housing justice, Marc seeks to include as many stakeholders as possible in a conversation about how, drawing from our inherent spirituality and a reverence for life and our environment, we can promote the ongoing evolution of our relationships with each other and our natural world.

In this episode, Marc recounts the origins of IAHH, which included a vigil in City Hall Park that lasted several months, and speaks of its mission to “bear witness to the crisis of homelessness.” He opens us to the human face of homelessness by sharing personal stories of how his own life has been changed by being present to others—a process he describes as “reducing the distance between ourselves and those who suffer.” Marc also speaks about the interfaith and inter-spiritual aspects of his work, how he understands the relationship between public policy and direct action, and why homeless outreach must always be seen as “a fellowship of accompaniment.”

See also:

Interfaith Assembly on Homelessness and Housing (IAHH)

Street Homeless Advocacy Project (SHAP)

Life Experience and Faith Sharing Associates (LEFSA)

Coalition for the Homeless

Sacred Shelter: Thirteen Journeys of Homelessness and Healing, edited by Susan Celia Greenfield (Fordham University Press, 2018)

“Through Life Skills Training, Professor Helps Empower People in Transition,” Inside Fordham, February 3, 2014

James Parks Morton tribute at the Interfaith Center of New York

A Virtuoso of Phases and Stages

Michael Centore on Encountering Henri: The Living Legacy of Henri Nouwen: “This is another theme that crops up repeatedly in these reflections—the line between writing and life, and the way they mutually reinforce or rework each other into a hard-won form of personhood. ‘His ability to explore essential elements of our humanity, not only through his writing but through how he lived, was one of the reasons he became one of the most read and beloved spiritual writers of our time,’ Michelle O’Rourke observes in the appositely titled ‘Henri’s Spirit Alive in My Life and Work.’ Carolyn Whitney-Brown, a friend of Nouwen’s from their time together at L’Arche Daybreak in Ontario, suggests ‘that one aspect of Henri’s enduring power seems to be not so much in his thinking or his writing but in Henri as a person, as he described himself, and as others experienced him.’”

Read more »

Drawing from influences such as folk, Americana, hymnody, and singer-songwriter traditions, musician Rick Lee James writes songs that invite listeners into honest reflection about hope, suffering, mercy, and belonging. His recordings include Thunder, Basement Psalms, and Hymns, Prayers, and Invitations, earning him recognition for thoughtful songwriting and spiritually rich storytelling. His latest single, “Heaven Is Full of Criminals,” featuring legendary guitarist Phil Keaggy, continues his exploration of God’s surprising mercy and the possibility of redemption for all who need grace.

This week’s podcast conversation with Rick moved from his upbringing as the son of a pastor to the early influence of music on his life and faith. We touch on some of his songwriting influences and practices and the role of the musician as a kind of “conduit” for story, melody, and image. Rick also discusses how his work as a hospital chaplain complements and informs his songwriting, and why the art of attentive listening is so vital to both vocations.

Listen here »

Women and non-binary people are invited to join Catholic writer, contemplative activist, certified spiritual director, and previous TAC contributor Leslye Colvin for a free virtual daylong retreat on Saturday, November 7. In preparation for the Season of Advent, participants will gather in community to reflect on the lifelong and intergenerational work of decolonization and anti-racism through Leslye’s writing, guided reflection, and creative contemplative practice. Leslye’s poem “Come Down Jesus in a White Body,” published here for the first time, will serve as one of the guiding texts of the retreat.

Leslye has studied at the Living School of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the Guild for Spiritual Guidance. For more information, visit her website or email her at leslyeslabyrinth@icloud.com. Click here to register.

There is still time to join the Prophecy Workshop convened by Solidarity Hall and the Lost Prophets podcast! In each session, hosted every Friday from 1PM-2PM ET, the group will talk about short readings (all PDFs or accessible online) related to key themes distilled from several of our lost prophets:

• Prophecy/Exile—readings from A. J. Heschel, Marc Ellis, Daniel Berrigan, bell hooks

• Inner Sanctum—readings from Heschel, Thomas Merton, Thich Nhat Hanh

• Askesis/Renunciation—readings from Ivan Illich, Gary Snyder, Dougald Hine

• Vocation/Work—readings from Peter Maurin, Paul Goodman, Wendell Berry

• Inhabitation—readings from Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, bell hooks

• Conviviality—readings from Ivan Illich, Jane Jacobs, L. M. Sacasas

Registration is available here. The Workshop’s recommended donation is $10/monthly (or an annual donation of $100) via a subscription to the Lost Prophets podcast on Substack.

We’ve been hearing great things about Dr. Ariane David’s presentation, “From Conflict to Understanding,” hosted by Root & Branch on September 17. Beginning with the question, What is the thinking that keeps us stuck in our thinking, unable to move on, unable to find lasting solutions to our differences, unable even to “hear” each other?, Dr. David explored the elements of “non-positional thinking,” a technique to overcome the mental habits that keep individuals and societies stuck in conflict. The recording of the presentation is available here.

On October 8 at 3pmET, Dr. David will follow up with part II of her presentation incorporating a series of experiential exercises. Participants will have an opportunity to put non-positional thinking into practice and experience how it can change the quality of a difficult conversation while still holding to one’s principles. These skills can be used in political and religious discussions, as well as in the everyday conversations with family members, friends, colleagues, and neighbors. Registration is available here.

Join Fr. Adam Bucko in conversation with Mirabai Starr about the newly revised and expanded edition of her classic text God of Love, originally published in 2012, on Tuesday, September 29, at 3pmET. Fr. Adam writes: “We are living in a time when so much conspires to divide us and make strangers of one another. In that context, this new edition of God of Love feels particularly timely: an invitation to return to the deeper currents of our traditions and to ask what kind of people our encounter with the sacred is forming us to become.” The conversation will be streamed live to Substack; see (and subscribe) to Fr. Adam’s Contemplative Witness newsletter for details.

Holy Family Passionist Retreat Center in West Hartford, Connecticut, will host two visual art–themed retreats in the month of October. On Saturday, October 10, Fr. Sam Fuller, OFM Cap, will facilitate For the Beauty of the Earth: Sculpture as Prayer; Beauty, the Apophatic and Hope. This event will explore the nature of beauty as a revealed gift, the apophatic as negation leading to presence, and hope as embodying unity and solidarity. Sculptures from Fr. Sam’s show at the retreat center gallery will be integral to his conferences, and the day will include time in the gallery.

Then on Saturday, October 24, Ronald Barnett, PhD, will facilitate The Good Eye Opens: An Introduction to Contemplative Photography. From a still, silent, receptive mind, mindful photographing opens a richer visual field beyond concepts, revealing greater beauty, clarity, elegance, and poignancy. This is not merely a photography workshop, but a practice of cultivating nonconceptual awareness, allowing the camera to express perceptions precisely as they arise in present-moment experience without distraction or judgment.

Both programs will be offered both in-person and online via Zoom. Information on how to access the program on Zoom will be sent to participants in advance.

Despite the scores of books and articles written by and about him, the figure of Henri Nouwen remains something of an enigma. This is in part due to his shape-shifting spiritual path: always on the move, he had an uncanny ability to seize on the materials of each new direction in his life and transform them into stories of religious awakening. Whatever the latest subject, situation, or encounter—the immersion in Trappist monasticism recounted in Genesee Diary, a famed painting by Rembrandt in The Return of the Prodigal Son, the experience of accompanying the disabled in Adam: God’s Beloved—Nouwen threw his whole being into extracting its essential teachings and reformulating them as lessons to pass on through his writing. He was a kind of virtuoso of the phases and stages of one’s growth in God.

That very virtuosity, however, can make the “real” Nouwen difficult to pinpoint. He can slip between the cracks of his various selves or disappear behind the mask of a current preoccupation. Encountering Henri: The Living Legacy of Henri Nouwen, published earlier this year by Orbis Books to coincide with the thirtieth anniversary of his death, fills in some of these cracks and peers behind these masks to give us a fuller accounting of the man and his capacity for connection. Editor Stephen Lazarus, who serves as the literary manager of the Nouwen Legacy Trust, has assembled a diverse array of voices to reflect on their relationship with Nouwen and how his presence affected them personally. The effect is one of sitting around a convivial table as friends, colleagues, and former students reminisce about this seeker and “wounded healer” who gave so much of himself to so many.

In his essay “Henri and the Facets of Friendship,” Michael W. Higgins quotes Nathan Ball, the associate of L’Arche who first met Nouwen at the movement’s founding community in France: “Henri’s desire to know you and to relate to you overrode the normal process by which people determine and manage their relationships. His overwhelming need to connect at the level of the heart bypassed the normal process.” As becomes clear throughout the book, the intensity with which he lived and pursued and developed these relationships—Lazarus records an astounding sixteen thousand letters to Nouwen in his archive, and Michael J. Christensen, citing Nouwen biographer Michael Ford, notes that he tallied some fifteen hundred personal friends—was both his strength and his struggle, his grace and his wound. As former student Michael O’Laughlin writes of Nouwen’s time at Harvard Divinity School, “[H]e quickly interwove his life into the lives of everyone around him, and never went anywhere alone or even sat down to eat a meal by himself.”

This interweaving of self and others was at the heart of his priestly vocation; he seems to have had the pastor’s gift to reveal a person to herself, as much through his presence as his ability to abjure that presence to allow the Holy Spirit room to move. “Drawn by Henri Nouwen’s profound love of community, deep faith, ability to accept things he could not change, childlike love of celebration, and desire to stay connected and be faithful to his friends, I’ve discovered a kindred spirit in Henri and, in turn, discovered the woman I want to be,” Christiana Crook attests in her piece, “My Year with Henri.” It’s a sentiment that recurs throughout the volume. In “Finding Henri and a New Path,” Cistercian monk Brother Ambrose speaks of how, despite never having met Nouwen on the earthly plane, the author’s books set him on a course that would culminate in his monastic profession. “Even though the monastery was not his own vocation, he was a finger pointing the way for me. I would not have encountered the Cistercian way that I am living today if it wasn’t for Henri,” he writes. Gabrielle Earnshaw expresses a similar gratitude succinctly: “Henry Nouwen ennobled people.”

Like all writers, Nouwen’s books afforded him a sort of second life, an emissary of his embodied existence that could venture out and meet people across divides of space and time. This is another theme that crops up repeatedly in these reflections—the line between writing and life, and the way they mutually reinforce or rework each other into a hard-won form of personhood. “His ability to explore essential elements of our humanity, not only through his writing but through how he lived, was one of the reasons he became one of the most read and beloved spiritual writers of our time,” Michelle O’Rourke observes in the appositely titled “Henri’s Spirit Alive in My Life and Work.” Carolyn Whitney-Brown, a friend of Nouwen’s from their time together at L’Arche Daybreak in Ontario, suggests “that one aspect of Henri’s enduring power seems to be not so much in his thinking or his writing but in Henri as a person, as he described himself, and as others experienced him.” For O’Laughlin, “[Nouwen’s] lifestyle was a gospel teaching in itself”—a comment that closes the gap between the written and the unwritten self, fused in the Word of God. One almost gets the sense that, through this lifelong process of integration, he began to achieve in this world what O’Rourke reports he had hoped for in the next: “[W]hen he died, he wanted his spirit to be available to those who he loved and those who loved him.”

But the process of integration does not come without its shadow side, and Nouwen certainly had his. Contributors speak of his neediness, his tetchiness, his hunger for attention and affirmation. In a sensitively drawn portrait, his editor at Orbis, Robert Ellsberg, retraces the evolution of their personal and professional friendship that begins with a misunderstanding but blossoms over time into a rich creative partnership—a development that parallels, in Ellsberg’s telling, both Nouwen’s own “radical conversion” of “growing into the ideas he had explored in his earlier writings” and Ellsberg’s deepening spiritual maturity. In the end, we learn, Nouwen’s life “came into harmonious focus” as his restlessness abated. Author and apostle of nonviolence John Dear credits this to Nouwen’s “spirituality of peacemaking [that] connected everything,” interior and exterior, church and world—so much so, in fact, that even his funeral becomes for Dear a catalyst of peace as it brings together a wide range of people all touched by his witness. A final brushstroke in Ellsberg’s portrait serves as a beautiful epitaph: “Through the broken pieces of his own complex humanity he managed to reveal an aspect of the divine image.” ♦

Michael Centore is the editor of Tomorrow’s American Catholic.

Together, participants will consider the ways we continue to be formed by colonization and racism, while exploring how our baptismal call invites us to resist these interconnected systems and imagine more faithful ways of living in relationship with one another. The retreat will offer space for prayer, reflection, creativity, and honest conversation within a thoughtfully held community. The retreat is free, with donations gratefully accepted.

Leslye has studied at the Living School of the Center for Action and Contemplation and the Guild for Spiritual Guidance. For more information, visit her website or email her at leslyeslabyrinth@icloud.com. Click here to register. The poem below, published here for the first time, will serve as one of the guiding texts of the retreat.

Come Down Jesus in a White Body

Come down Jesus
in a white body.
Come down
from the cross.
You exist only
in artistic form, never
as The Word
of God made flesh.

You were created
to imitate the One
living 1400 years
before those craving
wealth and dominance
racialized skin color.
Come down Jesus
in a white body.

Systems bleached your skin
to mute the Asian ancestry
of the Palestinian Jewish man
who walked the earth
as Yeshua, the Nazarene.
Come down
from the cross.

You affirm beneficiaries
of cruel colonized systems
that dehumanize and oppress
as they privilege a construct
of racialized whiteness.
Come down Jesus
in a white body.

For six centuries
you have been a prop
to assuage any guilt
for denying the imago Dei
in human beings identified
as black, brown and colored.
Come down
from the cross.

Seeing beyond the facade,
we know the truth
and recognize the beauty
of God’s diverse creation
in the hues we wear.
Come down Jesus
in a white body.

Guilt, shame, and
social sin are not yours
as you are only another
breathless and soulless
manufactured product.
Come down
from the cross.

Imagine the world
if explorers had
embraced the Nazarene;
respected the people
of the lands; and
sought new ways of being.
Come down Jesus
in a white body.

How can those familiar
with the oppression
of the Nazarene’s people
under the Roman empire,
seek to establish empire?
Come down
from the cross.

In this empire
of United States,
you are marketed
to deny religious freedom
by promoting the heresy
of white christian nationalism.
Come down Jesus
In a white body.

You are an archetype
for untruths and oppression –
the same that resulted
in the killing and death
of the Nazarene and so many
in the communion of saints.
Come down
from the cross.

The significance of the work
to be done is revealed
by the discomfort and rejection
of seeing the Nazarene
in bodies that are not white.
Why is the norm whiteness?
Come down Jesus
in a white body.

A lifeless form,
it is rhetorical
to say come down
as only the faithful can
take you down,
Jesus in a white body.
Only the faithful can
take you down.

After wrestling
with how the history and sins
of colonization are present
here and now, they will learn
to see anew with clarity.
The faithful will take you down
Jesus in a white body.

Metanoia and sacred curiosity will lead
to asking new questions and
to having liberating encounters
with their neighbors
and transformation.
They will take you down
from the cross.

Seeing the pain inflicted
by the systems you bless,
they will weep in solidarity
with those wounded
by exclusion and grieving
because of hate.
They will take you down,
Jesus in a white body.

Desiring healing, wholeness
and holiness will lead them
to consider the truth you
were created to deny.
They will take you down,
Jesus in a white body
from crucifixes, creches,
stained glass windows,
hearts and minds.

Until the faithful see Christ
in siblings of different hues,
they will not see the rejection
of Christ in systems, will remain bound
by whiteness and will not be liberated
so as to be known for their love.
We will take you down
Jesus in a white body.

Drawing from influences such as folk, Americana, hymnody, and singer-songwriter traditions, James writes songs that invite listeners into honest reflection about hope, suffering, mercy, and belonging. His recordings include Thunder, Basement Psalms, and Hymns, Prayers, and Invitations, earning him recognition for thoughtful songwriting and spiritually rich storytelling. His latest single, “Heaven Is Full of Criminals,” featuring legendary guitarist Phil Keaggy, continues his exploration of God’s surprising mercy and the possibility of redemption for all who need grace.

Beyond his solo work, James recently contributed electric guitar to “Guitar Tree” from Antonio Vergara’s Grammy-nominated album The Fury. As the host of Voices in My Head, he has interviewed numerous musicians, authors, and cultural voices, creating meaningful conversations at the intersection of faith and creativity. James also serves as a full-time hospital chaplain at Springfield Regional Medical Center in Springfield, Ohio.

Our conversation with Rick moved from his upbringing as the son of a pastor to the early influence of music on his life and faith. We touch on some of his songwriting influences and practices and the role of the musician as a kind of “conduit” for story, melody, and image. Rick also discusses how his work as a hospital chaplain complements and informs his songwriting, and why the art of attentive listening is so vital to both vocations.

See also:

The official website of Rick Lee James

Out of the Depths: A Songwriter’s Journey Through the Psalms by Rick Lee James

Voices in My Head (The Rick Lee James Podcast)

Edoardo Giribaldi, “Pope: Like a Stream Leading to Its Source, Music Leads Us to God,” Vatican News, July 29, 2026

Daniel J. Levitin, I Heard There Was a Secret Chord (W. W. Norton, 2024)

This past Sunday, I found myself at Mass at a different parish from the one I normally attend. After finding my place amidst the parishioners, listening to the riches of the readings I had reviewed earlier that week with our small Christian community, a man in the row in front of me suddenly collapsed to the floor.

It happened during the consecration of the gifts. As the priest was praying over them, I saw the shape of the body tilt straight to the ground like a felled tree. It startled everyone, and I let out an audible cry; the man’s wife got down on her knees, while others on the aisles of the nearby pews came forth to help. The priest suspended his consecratory prayer, but I could sense the prayers of those of us in the pews pick up where his left off. Someone called 911. The few people gathered around the man managed to lift him onto the pew. One of them, who clearly had medical knowledge, started feeding him questions to assess his mental state.

“What’s your name?” he asked, leaning over the man while supporting his head from behind.

“Peter,” the man answered. His eyes were open and he appeared alert, if understandably in shock.

Hearing this, my mind flashed to the man’s namesake and his multiple falls: first through the trapdoor of the sea set by his own distrust, and then again figuratively, three times before the cock crowed twice, in denial. There was also his falling prostrate with his brothers James and John at the sight of the transfiguration—a fall at the foretelling of the resurrection.

Gradually the situation stabilized. The animal-like fear in the man’s eyes subsided, his gaze softened, and he gave himself over to focus on his breathing. A bottle of water was procured. From the altar the priest sensed this shift and resumed his place in the liturgy. We filed up to receive the Eucharist, and by the time we returned two paramedics had arrived, summoned by the earlier call to 911. I watched from my place at the center of the pew as one of the paramedics knelt down beside Peter and began speaking to him. I could not make out the words over the dolorous stabs of organ intoning the communion hymn, but it didn’t matter: I glimpsed the face of the gospel in the way the medic attended to this perfect stranger, nodding to him, holding eye contact with humane concern.

Magnifica Humanitas is as valuable for the questions it puts on offer as for the provisional solutions, grounded in a renewed catechesis of Catholic social teaching, that it suggests. Throughout the whole of the encyclical, between the paragraphs and behind the words, one feels the presence of an animating question: What makes humanity magnificent? Rightly framed as a response to the crisis-opportunity of artificial intelligence, Pope Leo’s document actually goes much further, forcing us to reconsider who we are, how we think, and how we serve each other in a time when the frictionless cognition of the machine is vying, however improbably, with the “concrete forms of human coexistence” (153) that have been the bedrock and base standard of our species for millennia.

“Even when machines excel in efficiency, a human face that asks to be gazed upon remains the center of our history,” Leo writes (233). I thought of this line throughout the week as I recalled the events of Sunday, the way the medic took in the face of the felled man, Samaritan-like, registering each nuance of response, seeking little openings in consciousness to make contact. How different this contact is than the cold and clinical tools of “facial recognition” software promulgated by machine—those tools used to scan and surveil (and to discipline and punish), where the face is reduced to a series of vectors and planes. Cézanne reduced faces to vectors and planes, too, the difference being that he did this to give them a second life in paint, whereas the machine only extrapolates data. In this the face becomes no more than another extractive site, one more to add to the catalogue of cobalt mines, oil wells, and gas pipelines scarring the earth with our endless appetites.

Like a kind of mirror—an image Matthew Milliner uses to beautiful effect in an essay from earlier this year—this moment of technological transition offers us a way, or really an imperative, to reassess those words and concepts that have grown stale from overuse: words like transcendence and magnificence and human dignity that are somehow innate to us but which we’ve consistently handed over in the name of efficiency, progress, and growth. The way back to the center begins with the face, the point of contact that breaks the cycle of estrangement from ourselves.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Patrick Carolan on guarding against the sin of hypocrisy: “In the Gospels, Jesus condemns the sin of hypocrisy more consistently and forcefully than any other. He frequently criticizes religious leaders who appear outwardly holy but lack sincerity and a hunger for justice within . . . Unless and until we join together as one people speaking out and challenging instances of hypocrisy like Jesus did, we will never uphold each other as ‘mirrors of Christ’ and create the kingdom of heaven here on Earth.”

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William Droel on how Michael Harrington, Rev. William Barber II, and Pope Leo XIV have exposed the “invisibility” of poverty: “Barber, too, says that poverty is invisible. ‘It is hidden from us by forces we do not understand,’ he explains. Society assumes that anyone who is working cannot be poor, even if the job is hawking wares on a street corner or maneuvering a ride-share vehicle or taking orders in a diner. So, the assumption continues, a truly poor person must be ‘lazy or suffering the consequences of their own choices.’ Society, Barber says, blames poverty on the poor.”

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John Zedolik shares two new poems, “Revealed Hope” and “Natural Catechism”:

“The heat lightning illuminates
the underbelly of God, you see?

sleek and iridescent as a pearl
who let us in on her secrets

behind these diaphanous curves
that counterfeit the day’s light

for a sharp instant . . .”

Read more »

Three new episodes of Flipping the Tables, a podcast about Catholics working for peace and justice hosted by journalist, activist, and author Colleen Shaddox, are now available. Join Colleen as she speaks with Marianne Comfort, justice director for the Sisters of Mercy of the Americas, about extractive industries that harm the environment and increase inequity; activist Karen Dear of the NC Cabrini Collaborative about Catholic social teaching on immigration; and Sr. Sally Duffy about how Ohio’s religious women are advocating for Haitian immigrants who have endured racist slander and now face danger with the end of Temporary Protected Status. You can find complete episodes as well as additional resources and ways to get involved at the Flipping the Tables website.

Human beings are at war across the globe. Children are being trafficked and people are dying from starvation and disease. We often feel hopeless and ask the question: What can we do?

We all have a story to tell, and as storytellers, we have the opportunity to help create a culture of kind-heartedness and understanding. We have often heard it said that you can’t hate someone once you’ve heard their story. Some of the most powerful stories of peace and reconciliation are those written in the lives of the ordinary people doing the patient work of rebuilding communities.

In collaboration with the Franciscan Month initiative and other Franciscan organizations, Tomorrow’s American Catholic is inaugurating a project to collect those stories. Our goal is to publish several during Franciscan Month in October and continue sharing them throughout the year. We are also thinking about the possibility of compiling these stories for a book, so as to have a written record of people transforming together.

We welcome submissions in the range of 500 to 600 words that answer the question: How does your understanding and practice of Franciscan spirituality guide you in your everyday life, including your approaches to faith, family, community, justice, and peace? For further information or to submit a story, contact us at editor@tomorrowsamericancatholic.org.

Revealed Hope

Upon breaking like a cubed egg
the snow’s innards glow with a blue light
akin to the painted color

of the Madonna’s robe as represented
on those sculptures having risen
in a multitude of front yards and back

throughout this neighborhood
and others, with many featuring feet
trampling the serpent, who shall only bruise,

if at all, the heel hidden beneath the folds
of that Virgin hue that breaks also, a cool yolk,
under the chilled blade of consistent effort,

confirming color in a world drained these days
and waiting in the still end of the first month
for the quickening, the heat of renewing life

Natural Catechism

The heat lightning illuminates
the underbelly of God, you see?

sleek and iridescent as a pearl
who let us in on her secrets

behind these diaphanous curves
that counterfeit the day’s light

for a sharp instant—which gives
these glimpses underneath the guise

of clumsy clouds, who do their jobs
anyway—enrobing Deus in sanctest white

ritual-ready for the night, especially when
lit by high electricity, suggesting

if not revealing the secrets Θεοs
dares all to guess

John Zedolik is an adjunct English instructor in Pittsburgh. He has published poems in such journals as Commonweal, Poem, and Transom. In June 2019 he published a full-length collection entitled Salient Points and Sharp Angles (CW Books), which is available on Amazon. His most recent collections are When the Spirit Moves Me: Examinations of Faith (Wipf & Stock/Resource Publications, 2021) and Mother Mourning (Wipf & Stock/Resource Publications, 2022).

“The millions who are poor in the United States tend to become increasingly invisible.” So wrote Michael Harrington (1928–1989) in his influential 1962 book The Other America. The poor are invisible to others and to themselves because television and advertising present a society that lives decently, if not in luxury, Harrington explains. The common assumption is that the poor are the exception. And in time they “slip out of the very experience and consciousness of the nation.”

Invisibility is also perpetuated by public policy and elected officials. Instead of the word poverty, other terms (sometimes unintentionally) convey that nearly everyone is getting by. Terms like working class, part-time employee, or day laborer are used instead of poverty. A notion prevails: Homeless beggars and the like must have made unhealthy choices; their poverty is self-inflicted.

Rev. William Barber II of Yale Divinity School cites Harrington in his recent book White Poverty. Barber, too, says that poverty is invisible. “It is hidden from us by forces we do not understand,” he explains. Society assumes that anyone who is working cannot be poor, even if the job is hawking wares on a street corner or maneuvering a ride-share vehicle or taking orders in a diner. So, the assumption continues, a truly poor person must be “lazy or suffering the consequences of their own choices.” Society, Barber says, blames poverty on the poor. As if they “are themselves the problem.”

Barber challenges the federal formula for poverty. It ignores too many variables, he says. Instead, several journalists and social scientists consider poverty to be one’s inability to handle a $400 or $500 emergency—a car repair or a medical bill, for example. The emergency cannot be solved by borrowing because that person is socially poor. They do not have relatives or friends who are able to help. Using the $400-to-$500 emergency measure, Barber calculates that 43 percent of people in the US are poor.

Pope Leo XIV extends the themes of Harrington and Barber to the world scene. “Without even realizing it,” he writes in the apostolic exhortation Dilexi Te, we have created a “sometimes well disguised” culture that discards others. Poverty is invisible. What we do see is success and consider it deserving, Leo says.

The cause of poverty is not normally the poor person themselves; it is a culture and politics “that are marked by numerous inequalities,” our pope continues. People who are blind to poverty operate under “the illusion of happiness [which is equated with] the accumulation of wealth and social success.” Yet knowingly or not, they participate in “unjust social ideals and political-economic systems that favor the strongest.” The real challenge is opposition to “the social and structural causes of poverty,” Leo concludes.

“Tax the rich,” a slogan heard these days, names an obvious improvement. Progressive taxation makes sense because today’s wealth gap exceeds imagination. “The world’s wealth has grown in absolute terms, [yet] it is increasingly concentrated in fewer hands, widening inequalities,” Leo XIV notes in his encyclical Magnifica Humanitas. Worldwide, only about 60,000 people control three times as much wealth as the bottom half of the population. But how to institute and then enforce a major change in tax policy?

A practical starting point for opposing poverty requires creativity and dedication. And with effort, our own poverty and that of others will come into view. In time the culture will change from cynical callousness to emphatic gratitude. Genuine change begins with small groups and modest gestures. All of us need to see the poor as they truly are, to create a culture of encounter within our dominant culture of detachment and transaction. Touch the elderly, converse with the poor, smell the sheep. Here are modest starter suggestions:

• Implement small, helpful programs. With friends and others, start a fund to help families pay for childcare, which now averages $1,330 per month. Beware of paternalism/maternalism that, for example, requires beneficiaries to attend church services or excludes those who appear ungrateful.

• Keep informed on neighborhood and national news. Remember though that exchanging opinions with friends about elected officials can quickly become a hobby; it is not politics.

• Participate in a rally, though not merely as a spectator. Use the opportunity to encounter like-minded people.

• Participate in a Thanksgiving food drive. It is usually fun. Volunteering at a food pantry every week is better. It is a virtue.

• Visit a homebound neighbor or relative. It is never a waste of time. Try to take the conversation a little deeper.

• Keep in mind: There I go with the grace of God. ♦

William Droel is editor at National Center for the Laity (PO Box 291102, Chicago, IL 60629).

There have been millions of words written about sin. Every Sunday, priests and preachers deliver homilies on the evil of sin and how sin drives us away from God. The Catholic Church classifies sins as either mortal or venial. St. Thomas Aquinas even developed a hierarchy of sin, suggesting that sins against God such as blasphemy, apostasy, and hypocrisy were far more serious than sins like theft: One type of sin is directed against God, while the other is against another person. Thomas presented this understanding in his Summa Theologica, which is considered one of the most influential accounts of sin in Catholic theology.

In the Gospels, Jesus condemns the sin of hypocrisy more consistently and forcefully than any other. He frequently criticizes religious leaders who appear outwardly holy but lack sincerity and a hunger for justice within: “Woe to you, teachers of the law and Pharisees, you hypocrites! You are like whitewashed tombs, which look beautiful on the outside but on the inside are full of the bones of the dead and everything unclean” (Matt 23:27-28). The apostle Paul warns against hypocrisy in the second chapter of his Letter to the Romans (2:19-24) by highlighting the harm of condemning others while tolerating one’s own sins.

The word hypocrisy comes from the Greek hypokritēs, which was used to describe someone wearing a mask. Jesus often employed the term to reference people pretended to be righteous and moral while acting in ways that contradicted those qualities. Today, many of our political leaders who claim the banner of Christianity would fall into that category. One recent example came during the congressional hearings of Dr. Anthony Fauci, the immunologist and medical advisor to President Donald Trump during the Covid pandemic. In the hearing, Fauci was subjected to questions that challenged his credibility. He made the decision to refuse to answer and pleaded the fifth over one hundred times. (“Pleading the Fifth” simply means invoking the right granted by the Fifth Amendment of the Constitution to refuse to answer questions that could incriminate you in a criminal prosecution.

One can agree or disagree that Fauci is a hero who helped save us from the horrors of Covid or, as Senator Rand Paul has suggested, guilty of covering up significant information. But this does not change the fact that Fauci had every right to remain silent. Senator Paul threatened Fauci with contempt charges and possible arrest. Another member of the committee, Senator Josh Hawley, who was educated by the Jesuits and considers himself to be a devout Evangelical Christian, said that “no honest person pleads the fifth.” What both Paul and Hawley seem to have forgotten, however, is that in 2022 deposition in New York, President Trump took the fifth more than four hundred times. While it was well within his rights to do so, holding Fauci to a different standard was very hypocritical, a sin that Jesus vigorously and frequently condemned.

Other examples of hypocrisy abound in our political life. In 2017, Minnesota Senator Al Franken was accused of sexual misconduct. He initially denied the accusation. Almost immediately, leaders in the Democratic party urged him to resign, which he did within a few days. More recently, Ohio Representative Max Miller was accused by his ex-wife of multiple acts of domestic abuse. Yet Republican leaders continue to back his campaign, though senators including Bernie Moreno have urged him to step down.

After President Obama Barack Obama nominated Merrick Garland to replace deceased Supreme Court Justice Anthony Scalia in 2016, the normal process would have been for the Senate to hold hearings and vote on the nomination. Senate majority leader Mitch McConnell refused to hold hearings or consider the nomination. He argued that a Supreme Court vacancy should not be filled during a presidential election year. Yet when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died in September 2020, McConnell wasted no time in pushing through the nomination of Amy Coney Barrett, finalizing her confirmation in two weeks despite his earlier statement about not filling Supreme Court vacancies in presidential election years.

Hypocrisy is not limited to one political party. Former Democratic Senator Bob Menendez of New Jersey campaigned heavily on a platform advocating for anti-corruption measures and government accountability. In 2024, he was convicted on federal bribery and corruption charges. Former Democratic President Bill Clinton often spoke about equality and respect for women and championed policies supporting women’s rights. He then was accused of sexual misconduct.

We are a nation, a people, in crisis. Instead of seeing Christ in each other, we see the other as the enemy, someone to be demeaned and attacked. We can respectfully disagree with each other over issues and policy. But we cannot claim we are one nation under God if we continue to ignore what Jesus called the greatest sin, the sin of hypocrisy, by our leaders. And there are examples of the sin of hypocrisy all across the spectrum—not just in the political arena, but in the religious sphere as well. Unless and until we join together as one people speaking out and challenging instances of hypocrisy like Jesus did, we will never uphold each other as “mirrors of Christ” and create the kingdom of heaven here on Earth. As Jesus admonishes in Matthew 7:3-5: “You hypocrite, first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your brother’s eye.” ♦

Patrick Carolan is a co-facilitator of the Tomorrow’s American Catholic podcast.

On September 1, an American bomb killed five people, including a child, and wounded sixty-seven others who were preparing to celebrate a wedding in the port city of Kuhestak in Iran. These senseless deaths immediately recall the Radda airstrike in Yemen in 2013, where four Hellfire missiles launched by a US drone killed twelve people and wounded fifteen others who were part of a wedding procession. Five years prior to that, US airstrikes in Afghanistan killed forty-seven and thirty-seven civilians, respectively, who were also gathered for weddings.

The gospels are replete with nuptial imagery. Christ chooses a wedding for the site of his first miracle. He refers to John the Baptist as “the friend of the bridegroom” (John 3:29) and compares the kingdom of heaven to a wedding banquet (Matt 22:1-14). His teachings build on the rich symbolism of the wedding in the Hebrew scriptures, from Isaiah (“And as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride, so shall your God rejoice in you” [62:3]) to the royal procession of the bridegroom described in the third chapter of the Song of Songs. A well-known Talmudic teaching states that if a funeral procession and a wedding procession happen to meet at an intersection, the funeral procession must yield the way—love triumphs over death.

These biblical and theological motifs lend another level of poignancy to the tragedy at Kuhestak. When we see the victims in the light of Scripture, we recognize that they were partaking in the universal desire to love and be loved, and to formalize that desire through the rituals, ceremonies, and shared sacred stories of matrimony. Torn apart by a bomb, their day became a sordid inverse of Psalm 30:12: instead of their lament being changed into dancing, their dancing became a lamentation.

As we pause to reflect on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the September 11 attacks this week, we mourn the loss of life on that most tragic day while remembering what Pope Francis found amid the grief of Ground Zero in 2015: the “heroic goodness which people are capable of, those hidden reserves of strength from which we can draw.” We mourn the fact that it took such a traumatic event to bring our fractured and distracted nation together, and we mourn how swiftly that feeling of solidarity soon dissipated. We mourn the hunger for vengeance within ourselves that led to ill-considered invasions abroad resulting in hundreds of thousands of deaths, and we mourn how abstract these cycles of violence have become—something that happens at a distance, perpetually now for a quarter of a century, with the world no safer and our own nation deeper in economic, moral, and spiritual debt.

This Sunday’s reading from the book of Sirach offers a clear warning against carrying resentment:

Wrath and anger are hateful things,
yet the sinner hugs them tight.
The vengeful will suffer the Lord’s vengeance,
for he remembers their sins in detail.

These words can be difficult to hear when we are angry, tormented, or hurt. Sometimes it can be easier to forgive on the macro level, where things are impersonal and achieve a philosophic distance, than on the one-to-one level where we feel we have been wronged. Yet those smaller acts of forgiveness are the seeds of a transformed culture, one that reflects the image of the Lord’s Prayer beautifully adumbrated in the following lines from Sirach:

Forgive your neighbor’s injustice;
then when you pray, your own sins will be forgiven.

Twenty-five years on, we still carry the scars from the awful wound inflicted upon us, just as we carry the weight of a quarter century of retaliation, a “forever war” that seems never to bring us any closer to the peace and equilibrium implanted in the human heart. Deep down, our inherent goodness grieves for this, and we lash out as a way to stay this grief, telling ourselves that this time the final enemy will be vanquished and everything set to rights. But that day never comes—violence just begets more violence, and we are forced to invent new reasons and justifications to sublimate our pain.

If we are serious about following the gospel, we find that Christ offers us another way: one where he has wed the world in the particularity of his incarnation as a human being, and again in the paradox of the cross that grants us refuge even in the furthest ends of our alienation from him. We stand between this wedding, this opportunity to transform and be transformed, when we choose the “snares of death” (Ps 116:3) that bind us to our own blind will; we share in it when we begin to find our wounds, our hurts, our pain in him, and see how the harm we do to others comes back to harm the Christ in us.

Michael Centore
Editor, Tomorrow’s American Catholic

Matthew Shadle is a Catholic theologian, author, speaker and educator. For seventeen years, he has been a professor of theology, most recently at Marymount University. He is the author of Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford, 2018) and The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown, 2011), as well as numerous essays and articles that have appeared in America Magazine, Church Life Journal, Commonweal, and Public Discourse, among other outlets.

Matthew currently serves as a volunteer representative for the United States Conference of Bishops at the Faith and Order Convening Tables, the ecumenical theological dialogue of the National Council of Churches. He is also the creator of the Window Light newsletter, a publication that provides commentary and reportage on issues pertinent to the church and offers a Catholic theological perspective on current events.

Our conversation with Matthew ranged from his reception into the Catholic Church and focus on the theology of Catholic social teaching, through the development of Window Light and his understanding of the role of the public theologian. We discuss at length the experience of the Synod on Synodality and the ways it has helped foster a global perspective, and Matthew shares his thoughts on Pope Leo XIV’s “leadership of listening.” Along the way, he offers reflections on figures who have shaped his theological vision, from John Duns Scotus to Peter Auriol, and explores the “deep spiritual longings” that are drawing people to the church and how this might transform our approach to evangelization.

Listen here »

Matthew currently serves as a volunteer representative for the United States Conference of Bishops at the Faith and Order Convening Tables, the ecumenical theological dialogue of the National Council of Churches. He is also the creator of the Window Light newsletter, a publication that provides commentary and reportage on issues pertinent to the church and offers a Catholic theological perspective on current events.

Our conversation with Matthew ranged from his reception into the Catholic Church and focus on the theology of Catholic social teaching, through the development of Window Light and his understanding of the role of the public theologian. We discuss at length the experience of the Synod on Synodality and the ways it has helped foster a global perspective, and Matthew shares his thoughts on Pope Leo XIV’s “leadership of listening.” Along the way, he offers reflections on figures who have shaped his theological vision, from John Duns Scotus to Peter Auriol, and explores the “deep spiritual longings” that are drawing people to the church and how this might transform our approach to evangelization.

See also:

The Window Light newsletter

Interrupting Capitalism: Catholic Social Thought and the Economy (Oxford, 2018)

The Origins of War: A Catholic Perspective (Georgetown, 2011)

“Why Are So Many People Becoming Catholic?” Order of Christian Initiation of Adults (OCIA) study sponsored by the Archdiocese of Chicago, 2026