Church Life Today
Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner.
Episodes
268 episodes
Theology and Children’s Literature, with Daniel McClain
As you may have heard on recent episodes of Church Life Today, Ignatius Press just released a new volume called The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis. I am the editor of that volume, for which seven other schola...
C. S. Lewis on Education and the Theological Imagination, with Rebekah Lamb
What you read goes a long way toward shaping the kind of person you become. At the same time, the kind of person you have become goes a long way toward determining how you read what you read, what you think about and how, and the ways in which ...
The Atmosphere of Narnia, with Michael Ward
Fr. Michael Ward is a member of the Faculty of Theology and Religion at the University of Oxford. He is the author or editor of several books, including Heresies and How to Avoid Them, The Cambridge Companion to C. S. Lewis, and After Humanity:...
Arriving at Narnia, with David Fagerberg
C. S. Lewis published the first of the Chronicles of Narnia in 1950, followed by six others. Over the decades since, parents have read these books to their children as bedtime stories, and children have read them for themselves when they got a ...
Integrating Mental Health and Faith, with Pat and Kenna Millea
Salvation comes from the Latin word “salus”, which means “health” and “well-being”. Illness and sin are therefore both, in different ways, a lack of the health and well-being that is intended for us. We might even say that we are created for wh...
2022 SCOTUS: Dobbs, Roe, and Abortion Law, with Rick Garnett
Each year, the so called “June Court” decisions from the Supreme Court garner quite a lot of attention, but few in recent memory have received close to the same level of attention as Dobbs v. Jackson, which effectively overturned Roe v. Wade. B...
2022 SCOTUS: Religious Liberty Cases, with Rick Garnett
Cases with issues of religious liberty regularly make their way before the Supreme Court, and this year was no exception. In the decisions that the Court rendered in summer 2022, there were at least four cases where questions of religious liber...
Empowering Young Catholic Professionals, with Jennifer Baugh
The Christian life is a life of creativity, the creativity to receive the Good News of Jesus Christ and allow him to transform every dimension of who you are, every aspect of how you live, wherever you find yourself in life. That’s the theory, ...
The Past, Present, and Future of the Eucharist, with Michael Hahn
The theology of the Eucharist in St. Thomas Aquinas may seem complex, but that complexity is conformed to the tremendous mystery of Christ’s gift of himself in the sacrament. There is growth ahead for us not primarily in understanding the Eucha...
Augustine on the Eucharist, with Elizabeth Klein
St. Augustine’s Eucharistic theology is more controversial than you might think. It is controversial because throughout the Christian tradition, rival theological camps have appealed to Augustine to further their own arguments and Christian pra...
Our Eucharistic God, with Jonathan Ciraulo
God is Eucharistic. That is a bold and profound claim. It is different from only saying that God gives the Eucharist or that Christ is made present in the Eucharist. To say that our God is a Eucharistic God has profound consequences for, well, ...
(rerun) Maureen Condic on When Human Life Begins
This week we bring you another past episode from June 2019 with Maureen Condic.Do you want to know when human life begins? And how to explain that to other people? That's what I'm going to ask our guest today, Dr. Maureen Condic, Associate Prof...
(rerun) The Church’s Call to Foster Care with Holly Taylor Coolman
This week we bring you another past episode from February 2021, with Holly Taylor Coolman.“We have to imagine a people so deeply committed to their neighbors that they would risk their lives for them—and risk their lives perhaps not even to sav...
(rerun) Mary O’Callaghan on Disability Selective Abortions
This week we bring you a past episode from December, 2020 with Mary O'Callaghan.Every child is a mystery, but as scientific advances in prenatal testing grow, so does the temptation to know more and more about our unborn children. Will they be ...
(rerun) Tricia Bruce on How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 1
This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July of 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 1.American do not talk much about abortion. That’s sounds strange, doesn’t it? We seem to hear a lot about abortion in the news, in politics, in relation t...
(rerun) Tricia Bruce on How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 2
This week we bring you 2 past episodes from July, 2020 with Tricia Bruce. This is Part 2.Americans do not talk much about abortion, but we can under the right conditions. This is one of the conclusions that Dr. Tricia Bruce and her team of rese...
Will They Return to Mass? with Hans Plate
If you attend Mass regularly, maybe you’ve thought that your parish is a little less full than it had been before the pandemic. Or, maybe you’re someone who has noticed that you yourself haven’t been attending Sunday Mass quite as consistently ...
Forming an Intentional College Culture, with Joe Wurtz
In his apostolic constitution Ex Corde Ecclesiae, St. John Paul II wrote that a Catholic university or college is “a living institutional wtiness to Christ and his message, so vitally important in cultures marked by secularism.” He continues by...
Claiming the Mission of Easter (Special Episode)
Christ did not rise from the dead so we could gorge ourselves on marshmallow Peeps. Gorging is an act of singular enjoyment, and it only takes a moment to look around our world to see how disastrous it is when people just fill themselves with w...
The End and Beginning of Life, with Noreen Madden McInnes
With the right kind of care, support, and attention, the last days and months of an aging loved one’s life can become a source of new life for those who draw near to them. My guest today witnesses to this splendid, glorious truth in her new boo...
Breaking from the ‘Culture War’ Mentality, with Fr. Aaron Wessman
When we, as Christians, engage in evangelization that seeks to transform our culture, what metaphor tends to inform our thoughts and actions?Frequently, we land on the metaphor of “war”––we are engaged in a “culture war.” Have we thought, thoug...
The End of Friendship, with Jennifer Senior
It’s your friends who break your heart.That’s the title of the article by Jennifer Senior for The Atlantic. It is an incisive and enlightening piece that also made me laugh out loud. Friendship doesn’t get the kind of attention that other forms...
Evangelization through Catholic Education, with Thomas Carroll
When you hold a position of authority in Catholic education and you believe that the #1 goal of Catholic schools is to evangelize, then that affects everything you do. It affects who you hire and why, what your priorities are, how you think abo...
Rethinking Work, with Paul Blaschko
Do you or someone you know feel burned out by work? Have you questioned the place of work in your life, and how it balances with everything else? Do we work to live? Do we live to work? Do we reach for and sometimes touch value that is in our w...
Xavier Society for the Blind, with Malachy Fallon
Missionaries venture to sites unseen, to open up the Gospel in new ways. The hard to get to places are the special province of missionaries, who exercise both creativity and commitment to get where others have not thought to go. We might think ...