The Daughters of St Paul are re-releasing two albums sung by Sister Thea Bowman, FSPA. Songs of My People: The Complete Collection is being made digitally available to a new generation. Fr Maurice Nutt, C.Ss.R., who was Sr Thea's student and "spiritual son" and who is working for the advancement of Thea's cause for canonization in the diocese of Jackson, Mississippi, likes to think of it as a revival."Sr Thea preached the good news of a Church revived, and w...

In the Acts of the Apostles, we read that when the Spirit came upon the disciples in wind and fire, they proclaimed the Word in languages they didn’t even know, so that everyone who heard them would understand.Understanding and connectedness: those are two of the gifts of Pentecost, and two that we need sorely today. Division has been a theme in politics for a long time, but these last few months of the coronavirus pandemic have brought our polarization of thought into sharp focus, forcing...

Teaching the faith within the digital media culture can be an immense challenge. Parents and teachers wonder how to communicate the essence of what we believe while competing with Snapchat, Minecraft, Netflix’s Stranger Things, and every superhero film that exists. Our catechesis does not need to be removed from these cultural experiences. Instead we have to make them integral by teaching our youth how to think about media consumption and the messages it communicates. Media mindfulness is ...

Author of The Perfect Blindside and Extreme Blindside, Leslea Wahl kindly took some time away from writing this week to chat with Pauline Books & Media.First, let’s talk a little about your life.I live in Colorado. In fact, I’m a Colorado native, even though my husband and I moved away for eight years… our families were here, though, and we were happy to be able to come back and live near them. I have three children, the youngest is in college now!  I’m a writer...

Explaining faith is a difficult task, because faith is separate from intellect. Or... is it? Certainly some of the greatest "apologists"—explainers of the faith—have managed to incorporate the two, and one of those people lived in a time both entirely unlike and entirely like ours—barely a century away from us. His writing hovers over that liminal valley between past and present. He wrote unequivocally about his own time... and just as unequivocally abo...

There’s a story about Louis-Marie de Montfort embracing a dying leper in the street. He carried the man to a religious house, where he called out, “Open the door for Jesus Christ!”Seeing Christ in the poor, the disenfranchised, had always been part of his spirituality. In 1693, at the age of 20, Louis chose to begin seminary in Paris. He adopted the life of a mendicant, deciding to walk the entire 230 miles to Paris. He arrived with the tattered outward appearance of a poor beg...

And so Advent begins. Some of us are ready: our wreaths are out, our calendars prepared, our readings marked. Some of us, on the other hand, are feeling already overloaded as the year seems to accelerate toward Christmas. Ready or not, though, it’s here.I’ve recently been reading some of Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI’s writings, and the other day I came across his homily at the First Vespers of Advent in 2009. “Advent,” he writes, “this powerful liturgical season...

Last week, I had one of the most frustrating days ever. I was supposed to pick up a prescription, then do a series of errands that would take up an hour or so of my time. My prescription wasn’t ready; the office-supply place had to order my printer-ink refill, the grocery store had to give me a raincheck for the eggs that were supposed to be on sale, and I was feeling like life just shouldn’t be this difficult. Then, when I came home, I happened upon an article about a man in Mexico ...

It was late on a Sunday afternoon, and I was sitting in the chapel of a hospice care facility, waiting for Cherry to die.Cherry and I weren’t related by blood, but as her dementia increased—she was in her nineties when we met—I was asked to take on legal and other responsibilities around her care. It was my honor and my delight: I never knew my grandparents, and she became in many ways the Nana I would have loved to have. She was still smart, still funny, still kind.Even before...

It can be difficult to teach the kids you love about faith and the power of God’s providence. Often we find that these are abstract concepts, difficult to explain, and we decide to leave them alone, to put off talking about them until children are older. But the true story of the Loretto Chapel in Santa Fe, New Mexico, demonstrates the power of prayer—and can open kids’ eyes to the wonders of God’s work.The story begins when a group of seven sisters set out to build a cha...