February 2018
From Widow’s Grief to New Life
Mired in grief over the loss of her husband, this college professor found a kindred spirit in another widow: St. Elizabeth Ann Seton.
God’s Great Reversal: Key to the Gospel of Luke
The Gospel of Luke assures us that the Kingdom of God, in its fullness, will confound all our expectations and will overturn our experiences. In fact, in the Kingdom of God everything will be turned upside down.
Sporting His Faith: An Interview with ESPN’s Tony Reali
Five days a week on ESPN, Tony Reali hosts Around the Horn, a 30-minute television show viewed by a half million sports lovers. This popular program accentuates his quirky talents as puppeteer and lion tamer, someone with an almost supernatural ability to mute any of the sportswriters or sportscasters on the four screens in front of him with the push of a button.
“I can talk for hours about giving voice to people, and, oddly, my job is to silence people with a mute button, ” says Reali, 39, laughing. “But I trust they know it’s done with a wink. “
A Night with the Homeless
1:25 a.m.
I am getting out of the shower, but I feel so tired I want to go back to bed. Why did I volunteer for this? I think of how Jesus came back from the garden at Gethsemane and found the three apostles asleep: “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak ” (Mt 26:41).
1:39 a.m.
The sky is so clear. There seem to be more stars than usual. You have to get up at a very strange time to see this kind of beauty.
Chicago’s Lenten Kickoff
On Ash Wednesday, Catholics show their stuff. It’s not the fancy jewelry you might see in a night on the town. It’s the ash of penitence, typically received at church, smudged onto our foreheads, faith on display as we walk about. In few places will you see a greater outpouring of public witness than at the Franciscans’ St. Peter’s Catholic Church in Chicago, known to the locals as “St. Peter’s in the Loop. “
Take This and Eat—Please
Before my husband, Mark, and I had kids, one of the things we agreed on was that we would try to always eat together as a family. We both had great memories of time spent with our siblings and parents around the table. It was cherished time, so we wanted to continue that with our own kids.
Fast-forward to when we actually had kids, and we quickly learned that those idyllic dinners of our childhood and adolescence had a dark underbelly that our parents never warned us about. And that was the hard work that went into pulling off those dinners.
