It is Thanksgiving week and we want to celebrate that here on Church Life Today. I am going to do different kind of episode to mark the occasion. This episode is called “Eucharist Means Thanksgiving” and what I want to do is share with you quotes, passages, even a poem that invite us to deepen our appreciation for and wonder about the gift of Christ in the Eucharist as an exchange of thanksgiving. Now I know, of course, that the holiday Thanksgiving is not itself about the Eucharist. But this civic holiday is probably the closest in character to our religious holidays, and all the more because it is a feast of dedicated to giving thanks. For those who revere and adore the Sacrament of the Eucharist, we know that being transformed by that particular and unique “thanksgiving” should shape and transform our entire lives. So I hope you will spend the next half hour with me and a few guests who aren’t joining us by phone or in the studio, but rather through their meditations and prayer about the Eucharist meaning Thanksgiving.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Praying for the dead. This is a spiritual work of mercy, but does it really do anything? Do our prayers matter to the dead? Do the dead matter to us?I wanted to find us some help in understanding this practice of the Christian faith, and so I have invited Prof. John Cavadini to talk with us about his own practice of praying for the dead, the love of Christ poured out for us, and our communion with the dead in the Eucharist. Yes, these are theological matters, but they are also matters of devotion, of grieving, of longing, and of hope. I think that what we are about to talk about will matter to you. I think it will matter to me, too.If you’ve been listening to our show for some, you know that I am working on a project between my own McGrath Institute for Church Life and Ave Maria Press about our relationship with our beloved dead. This is part of a book I am writing on this topic. As part of the project, I’ve been talking with people about their memories of and their hopes for their beloved dead. I’ve asked a few of those people if they would be willing to record an episode for our show so you can listen in, too. This episode stands in that line, and there were three previous episodes where I hosted, first, https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=cbab65ed7bc87dfe8ddbbc4c5ad79c7a (Laura Kelly Fanucci), then https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=41036ec763c281f66445a4c88d8be772 (Stephanie DePrez), and finally https://spokestreet.com/church-life-today?ppplayer=c1e6f1222116b6fb8c24fd7676839822&ppepisode=3bbfed57c695430c36e1ca5729d22b0b (Robert Cording). You may want to check out those episodes on our podcast if you like this one.By the way, John Cavadini is professor of theology and McGrath-Cavadini Director of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at Notre Dame, which makes him my boss.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

It is easy to bemoan the problems in the Church; it is harder to take the initiative to heal and renew the life of the Church, and to sacrifice for that renewal with all your own creativity and passion. But that is exactly what the Our Sunday Visitor Institute for Catholic Innovation is calling forth from leaders in the Church today. They want to help visionaries become the innovators who discover new means of evangelization and who revitalize the faithful’s responsibility for proclaiming the Good News of Jesus Christ.Dr. Matt Smith directs strategic alliances for the OSV Institute for Catholic Innovation, and today he joins me to talk about the tradition of innovation and its timeliness in the life of the Church today, while also highlighting some of the specific initiatives he and his team are working to develop to foster a culture of innovation for the Church.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Meg Hunter-Kilmer has no time for bland, stale stories of saints. She is too busy reveling in the wild and diverse beauty of holy people. When their stories have not been told well, she seeks after the heart of their story and waits to see the drama, the glory, the full-fledged humanity that others have missed. And then she tells their stories. Meg tells the stories of the saints with passion, with care, with personality, with joy.Friends, I have read a lot of books about sanctity. I have read a lot of stories about saints. I have read a lot of books of stories about saints. But the book that Meg Hunter-Kilmer wrote stands apart. It is an education in true holiness, which depends on a willingness to see and accept the whole human condition. Her stories of saints are filled with piety and grace, but also with the afflictions, failures, abuses, and unrespectability of these very flesh and blood people who received and responded to the love of God in Christ.The book is Pray for Us: 75 Saints Who Sinned, Suffered, and Struggled on Their Way to Holiness. The author, Meg Hunter-Kilmer, joins me today in the studio from her travels around the country where she speaks and teaches everywhere as a full-time missionary evangelist. Believe me, you’re in for a treat in listening to her.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

​​There was a time before the Second Vatican Council, and there is a time after. The time before is old, outdated, stodgy, stale, and lifeless. The time after is modern, progressive, adaptive, active, and alive. Out with the old and in with the new. That, at least, is the way Vatican II has often been portrayed, as a breaking point between liberals and traditionalists, between those who want to be relevant and those who want to be ancient.But maybe by interpreting Vatican II that way, we are seeing something that isn’t true. We are perhaps seeing a false image of the council, rather than seeing the council itself. That, in part, is what my guest on today’s show has to say to us, and he wants to help the Church and the world to rediscover the Second Vatican Council for what it truly is, not for what we have been led to think about it, one way or another.Fr. Blake Britton is the author of Reclaiming Vatican II: What It (Really) Said, What It Means, and How It Calls Us to Renew the Church. Fr. Blake is a priest of the Diocese of Orlando, frequent writer for the Evangelization & Culture blog and journal, and cohost of the The Burrowshire Podcast.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

A good number of the students I have taught in theology courses at Notre Dame have gone on to medical school. Many of these students feel called to the practice of medicine, and would even speak of their professional pursuits as a vocation. But I often hear from the graduates a grave sense of disappointment in what they encounter in medical school. These are the kind of people who are most committed to their Catholic faith and to seeking out a Catholic approach to healthcare and the understanding of the human person and their own role as healers, They learn a lot in med school and they are prepared well for the technical practice of medicine, but they feel like their way of seeing the world and other human beings is often under strain in the course of their studies. We might think this is the inevitable result at public, secular medical schools, but it turns out that many students who attend the few Catholic medical schools tend to feel similarly. Which leads us to this question: How ought we form young Catholics––as Catholics––for the healthcare professions?The students have become the teachers in this regard, and today one of my former students is my guest to talk about her own vocation as a doctor and how to form Catholics for healthcare. Dr. Maggie Skoch Musso is a psychiatry resident at Case Western Reserve University/University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center. She completed her MD and a concurrent MA in Bioethics at the Loyola Stritch School of Medicine in Chicago, and she is a 2016 graduate of the University of Notre Dame, where she studied Theology. While at Notre Dame, Maggie served as the president of the Notre Dame chapter of NAMI––the National Alliance on Mental Illness––and for her work and advocacy on behalf of those suffering with mental illness, Maggie has received numerous awards at both her alma mater and through national organizations.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

What happens online does not stay online. The borders between the digital world andthe flesh and blood world have become rather porous. The ways we think, speak,and act in the digital environment bears meaning for how we think, speak, andact offline, and vice versa, at least to some extent. When we search around inmedia for Catholic voices, or for how Catholics engage with each other in thedigital space, what we find is conduct that is often far from charitable, andcontent that leads more readily to polarization than communion. What is theimpact, then, of digital media and the ways of being that are fashioned indigital space on concrete Catholic communities, like the parish?My guest today is paying close attention to these phenomena and workingto help develop ways and habits of communicating that are more conducive to theGospel. Deacon Matthew Kuna is a transitional deacon in the Diocese ofAllentown, who is finishing up his study and formation for the priesthood atSt. Charles Borromeo Seminary in Philadelphia. He is also a member of theinaugural cohort in the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s ChurchCommunications Ecology Program, where pastors, lay ministers, and educators arecalled to respond to the myriad pastoral challenges raised by life in thedigital age. He joins me to talk about the ways in which our environments shapeus––especially the digital environment––and how we might create betterconditions for disciples to be formed for healthy, responsible, and discerningengagement in our increasingly digital world.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

​​“O God, smash the teeth in their mouths!”“Make their eyes so dim they cannot see.”“May his children be fatherless, his wife, a widow.”Who prays like that? Well, we do: Christians. Those petitions––those curses––that I justrecited come from Psalm 58, Psalm 69, and Psalm 109. But we don’t hear themvery often: not in the public liturgy as at Mass, not in the liturgy of thehours that we might pray alone. What is being lost by not praying things likethat, in just those words: the words of Scripture––the Psalms?These are examples of the imprecatory psalms. My guest today says we need to bring backthese psalms into the regular of the Church. He wrote an essay for our ChurchLife Journal with the very direct title, “Bring Back the Imprecatory Psalms.”This is the voice of Christ himself, who in praying the psalms took on eventhese cries, which the abused and oppressed offer up to God against theirvictimizers and the wicked.Timothy Troutner is a doctoral candidate in systematic theology at Notre Dame, where hefocuses on the doctrine of creation and the place of language. He is here totalk about this call to bring back the imprecatory psalms, especially now inthe wake of scandals in the Church and the seeming prosperity of the wicked atthe expense of the lowly across the world today.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

What does it take to create a world? Well, you might think it requires you to be God. So why don’t we ask the question about a literary world, but nevertheless a complete world, with a comprehensive vision, an atmosphere and a history and languages, customs, and traditions. We might think few people are capable of creating such things, and we are definitely right in thinking that. Yet there are some authors––some artists––who manage such a feat, and one such figure who stands perhaps above just about any other in the powers and fruits of creation is J. R. R. Tolkien, creator of The Lord of the Rings. So let’s ask our question again: What did it take for Tolkien to create Middle-earth? And that is where today’s episode comes in. Many might think that Tolkien was a stand-alone genius, to whom ideas and images came complete unto themselves and without precedent. We might think his work is something like “pure originality” in that he conjures things up out of nothing, as if he were quite a bit like God who is indeed an uncreated creator. Or we might think that any influences Tolkien had, however dim they might be, are all located in the past, which accorded more with his special area of scholarly expertise. But today, we will consider the modern influences on Tolkien’s creative imagination, and in so doing we will think about what a creative imagination is and how a Catholic like Tolkien exercises his imagination.To guide us on our quest, Dr. Holly Ordway joins us today. Dr. Ordway is the Cardinal Francis George Fellow of Faith and Culture at the Word on Fire Institute, whose recently published book is Tolkien’s Modern Reading: Middle-Earth Beyond the Middle Ages.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

When a Catholic parish is being what is called to be, what does that look like? What are the marks of healthy and vibrant parish life? If we really tended to questions like these, we might find ourselves changing our perceptions of what it is we want from our parishes. And that, my friends, may very well mean that we have to change what we ourselves give to our parishes.My guest today invests her time and energy in helping parishes realize their mission, especially through forming Catholics for lives of vibrant discipleship. Katherine Coolidge is Director for Parish and Diocesan Services at the Catherine of Siena Institute. She joins me today to talk about where we are in parish life, where we should be, and how we get from one to the other.Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.