The topic of personal goals has been coming up lately, and it is a timely topic for the new year. I am recently engaged, and my fiancé and I, and a group of our friends, have been sharing with each other our goals and dreams, many times in the context of a 10-10-10 list as suggested by Mark Pi...
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This time last year, I intended to visit an elderly man I knew from church. He had suffered from a stroke in November, so I wanted to visit him at the nursing home. Sometime between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, however, he passed away. I was devastated that I had let all that time pass and...
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One of my favorite aspects of the Catholic faith is the way that it’s able to reconcile paradoxes – the faith enables opposites that should never go together to coalesce and, in their synergy, make the transcendence of Heaven more apparent on earth. Think: a Savior who is fully God and...
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“If you can be anything, be kind.” I stumbled onto this quote awhile back, but it’s a string of words that have continuously stayed with me and are stuck in my head like a song on repeat. They are powerful little words that challenge us to live with a greater meaning. In a world f...
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Many of us approach prayer as a trade-off, forgetting that it’s a gift and forgetting to be grateful beyond the point of general recognition. “Thanks, God! Now, if you’ll please give me this, I’ll be sure to try harder at that.” We appeal to the idea of an exchange bec...
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One of the most marvelous things about the Church is that she considers the whole person and nourishes her people on every level: individual, communal and universal. While it can be easy to slide faith into one of these compartments, we’re called to encounter God in all of these spheres. ...
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I recently stumbled across an article that offered advice on how to be cute so that boys will be attracted to you. The author asserted that “cute is fragile and nervous,” and encouraged ladies to be gentle and delicate. The article gave 25 tips on how a woman can change her behavior in...
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I attended a retreat at the Dominican Sisters of Saint Cecilia motherhouse in Nashville, Tennessee, about a month ago. I'm always struck by the joy that exudes from the sisters; and during this retreat especially, I found myself thinking, “They're pretty fortunate, being able to have such a h...
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We are wasting our time. It doesn’t matter how or when or even why; it’s simply a fact. In high school, I can see this clearly. Everyone does just enough to get by, and then squanders the rest of their time. Whether “getting by” is an A or a C according to an individual̵...
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October is my favorite month for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is its litany of great feast days: Our Lady of the Rosary, Our Lady of Fatima, Saint Francis, Saint Faustina, Saint Pope John Paul II . . . and we hit the ground running with Saint Therese of Lisieux, whose feast day is Oct....
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