Church Life Today

“A woman who knows she’s loved can do anything.” This fundamental belief animates the ministry of the Sisters of Life, who dedicate themselves to building up a culture of life and who work with the Lord to drive out the contempt for life in our world. It all begins with restoring the belief in one’s own belovedness before God.In collaboration with our McGrath Institute for Church Life and CampCampo film production company, the Sisters of Life have created a new, 12-part original series on accompanying women into life. The series is called “Into Life: Love Changes Everything.” This series will be released, for free, on March 25, 2022, along with accompanying study and discussion guides, that are especially well suited for parishes, schools, and ministry groups. The hope is to reframe the conversations around abortion and the beauty of life through helping people learn how to listen and understand the heart of another, how to rejoice in the beauty of the individual person in an encounter of hope, and how to truly accompany someone into God’s life and freedom. My guests today are two of the co-creators of this series. Sr. Marie Veritas is a Sister of Life, and Michael Campo is the founder of CampCampo and the series’ director.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.

In countries with underfunded health systems, surgical care is often ignored and widely inaccessible to the poor. Local facilities lack appropriate supplies and equipment, medical professionals do not have the benefit of training in the latest techniques, and few can afford the high cost of surgery.An organization responding to this gap in healthcare is One World Surgery. Focusing heavily on forming local partnerships and capacity-building, One World Surgery has established a surgery center in Honduras and is developing one in the Dominican Republic. In Honduras, the Honduran staff leads the surgery center that serves patients on a daily basis, while volunteers and medical missionaries provide additional personnel support, education, and an extension into specialty services. Through its partnership with local health professionals and working in tandem with the local health care system, One World Surgery seeks to provide world-class surgical care and strengthen primary care for underserved communities.My guest today is Senior Director of Programs and Operations for One World Surgery. Kate Clitheroe graduated from the University of Notre Dame with a bachelor’s degree in sociology and pre-med, before completing a master’s in public health from Washington University in St. Louis. She has served in health care in Honduras for several organizations, and has been with One World Surgery for the past six years, both in Honduras and in the U.S. I first came to know Kate when she served as a Mentor in Faith in our Notre Dame Vision program while she was an undergrad, after she attended the program as a high school student herself. She joins me to talk about her work, the impact of One World Surgery, and what it means to live solidarity in action.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.

Does purgatory matter? Does it matter later, as in after we die? How about now? Does purgatory make a difference to who we are now as Christians, how we live now, what we are responsible for now, and our relationship to the dead now?My guest today has been researching and writing on purgatory for some time. Dr. Brett Salkeld is no stranger to the McGrath Institute for Church Life, where he has contributed to the Office for Life and Human Dignity, as well as to our Church Life Journal. He is the author of several books, including the recently released Transubstantiation: Theology, History and Christian Unity from Baker Academic, as well as the book Can Catholics and Evangelicals Agree about Purgatory and the Last Judgment?, which will figure into our conversation today. In addition to being the Archdiocesan Theologian of the Archdiocese of Regina in Canada, Brett also hosts the podcast “Thinking Faith,” where this very episode will also be shared. Today, my conversation with Brett is all about purgatory.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 people speak of “gender fluidity,” what is the understanding of the human body that is at play? When a researcher analyzes a dead body, are they seeing a still frame of what the body really is? How do we best conceive of––maybe even wonder about––the human body, and what does that mean for gender theories, feminist concerns, and biological sex?To guide us in thinking about all these things and more, Dr. Angela Franks joins me for a discussion today, building off of one of her recent essays which bears the title “The Body is a Formed Stream.” That essay appeared in the Church Life Journal. Dr. Franks is professor of theology at St. John’s seminary in Boston and Senior Fellow at the Abigail Adams Institute in Cambridge. I’m excited about this conversation today because I think that what Dr. Franks both lays out and proposes can help all of us to think more clearly and in a richer way about the questions of embodiment, sex, and gender that are so difficult to think through 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.

How would an authentically Catholic feminism both dialogue with and meaningfully differ from secular feminism? This is the focus of a new program from The Catholic Woman. The program is called  “Cultivating Catholic Feminism.” It  seeks to establish a framework for Catholic feminism through lesson and story and, from that framework, to engage with secular feminism on a range of important topics. Today I welcome two guests to talk about this program’s aims, approach, and timeliness. Corynne Staresinic is founder and executive director of The Catholic Woman, an online based nonprofit that is dedicated to sharing stories and wisdom from Catholic women to affirm the goodness, unrepeatability, and dignity of every woman for the redemption of humankind and the Church. Abigail Favale is Dean of Humanities at George Fox University, who wrote and presents the 21 video lessons included in “Cultivating Catholic Feminism.” She is the author of Into the Deep: An Unlikely Catholic Conversion, and of the forthcoming book The Genesis of Gender from Ignatius Press.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.

Who am I when I’ve forgotten who I am? What does it mean to love God and be loved by God when I have forgotten who God is? These are the two main questions of John’s Swinton’s book on Living in the Memories of God, and these are the kind of questions that Xavier Symon is trying to explore in developing a more robust theology and philosophy of dementia.Xavier Symon is Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Australia Catholic University’s Plunkett Centre for Ethics and currently scholar in residence at Georgetown University’s Kennedy Institute for Ethics. In an essay he published with our Church Life Journal, he proposes that Christian personalism offers promising avenues for pursuing a theology and philosophy of dementia, since Christian personalism leads us toward seeing and caring for whole persons. Today we will talk about conceptions of the self, the deconstruction of the ego, the loss and the dignity of those who suffer from dementia, and even the radical reversal of our commonplace understanding of personhood.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 was the strength of the Israelites that scared the Pharaoh. You learn that in the first several verses of the Book of Exodus. The rest of the Book is about the journey to freedom: first the liberation from Egypt, then the training in freedom through the years in the desert. The whole journey concerns Israel’s growth as God’s own people.Since 2016, the Exodus 90 program has been following this same path: giving men a reliable structure of basic spiritual disciplines to grow in freedom. The point is to let the true strength of men become a gift for others.My guest today is the co-founder and CEO of Exodus 90, James Baxter. James has overseen the growth of this program from a handful of men in its first year to now over 50,000 men in over 70 countries around the world, and from hundreds of parishes all across the United States. I want to talk with James about the inspiration for this spiritual program, the fruits that it bears, and why something like this is so needed for men 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.

If you wait for certainty before acting, you will rarely ever act. More often, it is action that leads to certainty. We might expect to find a saying like that on an inspirational poster or as the takeaway from a motivational talk. But we might be surprised, challenged, and invigorated to consider such wisdom when approaching discernment, especially discernment of the priesthood. Rather than waiting for certainty to take the first step, start taking steps and build toward certainty. This, in a way, is the approach of a new guide to discernment produced by the Archdiocese of Boston, in the form of a series of short videos under the title “Sciavias: Know the Way of the Lord.” The creator of the series is Fr. Michael Zimmerman, assistant vocations director in the archdiocese, who joins me today to discuss discernment, the sanctification of time and place, and discovering true intimacy in the Christian life.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.

More than 8,000 miles separate students at the University of Notre Dame from students at St. Bakhita Vocational Training School in Northern Uganda, but a course in innovation and design thinking brings them together. The creator of that course is Wendy Angst, teaching professor in the Medoza College of Business at Notre Dame, where she also serves as assistant department chair in Management and Organization––she is also a fellow of the Pulte Institute for Global Development. Through a partnership with St. Bakhita’s begun in early 2020, Professor Angst has taught and guided Notre Dame undergraduate students in working with students at St. Bakhita’s and local community members to develop and strengthen this school that helps create opportunities for young girls who otherwise have few opportunities before them.One of the best places to learn about St. Bakhita’s Vocational Training School is on their Facebook page, where you can also link to ways to supporting St. Bakhita students, especially in the form of scholarships.For now, Wendy Angst joins me to talk about the history and mission of the school, the ways in which design thinking is helping her own students serve the St. Bakhita community, and the innovative approach to development that begins with empathy.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.

On more than a few occasions on this show, we have hosted experts in media and technology, or education and family life, to talk about young people and the effects of digital and social media on their relationships and development. Today, I want to do something a little different, not in terms of content but in terms of conversation partner. That’s because my guest today is not someone talking about the ubiquity of technology in the lives of young people, but indeed a young adult who is living in this technological environment, and doesn’t like what he’s seen.Isaac Sullivan is a recent high school graduate from Lafayette, Indiana. He has been paying attention to what we have all seen elsewhere when a group of people get together in public: they’re technically together, but not really. They are all separately engaged with their phones. Isaac’s seen this very clearly in his own friend group for years now, and in this show he and I will talk about what he thinks about all that.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.