Dear Readers, It seems fitting to introduce this 20th edition—yes, this has been a tradition for two decades now—of the “Best Books I Read…” with a quote from a book about books and reading: Our […]
Theodore Maynard’s landmark 1945 biography Too Small a World: The Life of Mother Frances Cabrini has been buried by the sands of time. It was, and remains, the only study to draw directly from letters, […]
In 1298, Pope Boniface VIII decided to name four saints as Doctors of the Church to recognize their excellence as teachers of the Catholic faith and to honor the enduring impact of their thought on […]
Dear Readers, I was recently browsing through The Quotable [C.S.] Lewis (Tyndale, 1989), and was struck by how often Lewis extolled the virtue of re-reading books. “You really lose a lot,” he wrote in a […]
Dawn Marie Beutner converted to the Catholic faith as a young adult, and now writes extensively on the lives of the saints, and how the saints can be guides and models for us today. She […]
When the Catechism of the Catholic Church (CCC) was promulgated by Pope John Paul II in 1992, a huge gap in catechesis was closed. For the first time in over four-hundred years, the Church had […]
Dear Readers, Almost exactly a year ago, I used this space to tell the tale of moving many books into my newly converted “shoffice” in the wilderness near Elmira, Oregon (pop. 546). Admittedly, it’s not […]
Catholics do not worship saints. While that may go without saying for most, if not all, of the present readership, this can be such a contentious point that there is no harm in repeating it, […]
Junípero Serra Ferrer, OFM, died on August 28, 1784, almost seven decades before California became a U.S. state. But it is certainly fitting for Catholics to consider him an American saint. After all, he lived […]
When the Catholic Church commemorates the martyrdoms of Saints John Fisher and Thomas More every June 22nd, people tend to think that their deaths were just collateral damage in King Henry VIII’s spat with the […]
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