“I will fear, love and honor God above all others, even at the cost of my own life.” The early Church was full of martyrs. These men didn’t simply give up their lives for Christ, they faced their death with courage and — sometimes — even jokes! It is said that as St. Lawrence was being roasted to death on an iron grill, he teasingly told his torturers, “I am done on this side, turn me over.” Christ was so real to the early Christians that they counted death as nothing so long as they could be with Him. You may not have to die for your faith. But you may suffer from “soft martyrdom,” such as losing friends over your beliefs. The word “martyr” means “witness.” By holding true to Christ’s teachings, you are witnessing to a higher order of values.

It would be very strange if a child ever whipped out his checkbook to reimburse his parents for bringing him to life. One could try to put a dollar amount on the medical bills, the nursery expenses, the food consumed, the diapers ruined, the hourly rate of the parent. But this is all an obvious absurdity. 

King James IV of Scotland (r.1488-1512), one of the last Catholic monarchs of Scotland, was considered a true Renaissance man devoted to learning and enlightened rule. In addition to his pursuits in science and the arts, he had a particular interest in language and its origins. He was a polyglot and the last King of […]

I’ve never been good at initiating hugs. I’m pro-hugging, and very much so, it’s just that I’ve always felt awkward with being the first to spread his arms and move in for the hug. “Zubair,” Louis Coker, OFS, would say before spreading his arms and moving in on me, “my brother.” He had a knack […]

“How did you go from Islam to Catholicism?” I’ve been asked that several times since my confirmation in 2012. I don’t mind answering this question at all. The problem has typically been that I’ve been asked this in such a setting in which I’ve only had only a few minutes to give an answer. The […]

Among Catholics who love our Lord Jesus, there is a great deal of interior suffering and perplexity of late. The reason is no mystery. The forces of evil have been unleashed on the world, and the the spirit of wickedness, the spirit of anti-Christ, grows ever stronger, like the thick, black clouds of a threatening […]

Of all the faculties of human nature, one of the most powerful is that of attention. What we choose to attend to to a great degree shapes our experience of the world for good or ill. Our intellectual faculties are limited, and we simply cannot pay attention to all the visual or auditory stimuli we […]

“The difficulty of explaining ‘why I am a Catholic’ is that there are ten thousand reasons all amounting to one reason: that Catholicism is true.” – G.K. Chesterton Many of you know that I am a convert to the Catholic church. Why, you may wonder, would anyone, especially in the 21st century, join such an […]