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Cathleen Falsani
Journalist
United States
United States
LATEST
From the moment I first heard her fierce voice and mighty, fragile heart thru the radio in my teenage bedroom, Sinéad O'Connor has been one of my favourites. Oracle, prophet, pilgrim. Now, ancestor.
New 'Profit for Good' companies hope that funneling profits to charities rather than shareholders will be good for business - and the world
I was standing in another threshold, and I knew it.
When I became a professional newspaper columnist for the first time more than 20 years ago, I wasn't sure what I was doing, but I made promises to myself - and my readers - that I would always: 1) Write about what was actually on my heart and mind, and 2) Say the things that were true and real for me even if it felt risky to say them.
Holy Saturday is confounding. It is the big liminal space in the narrative that is the Easter story, a day when whatever happened between Jesus' death and resurrection happens. Some say Jesus literally spent the day in hell. Some say it was figurative because there is no hell.
Beannachtaí na Féile Padraig daoibh go léir! I spent the first several of hours of this Feast Day of Naomh Padraig - my first as an actual Irish citizen - watching Bono and the Edge show Dave Letterman around Dublin in the new documentary film, A Sort of Homecoming , and listening to the latest release from U2: Songs of Surrender , both of which dropped at midnight to coincide with the day we remember the life and legacy of Ireland's patron saint.
When I was 12 years old, my family moved into a new home where my bedroom was a spacious renovated attic that had three big skylights-one above my bed, one over a sitting area, and a third above the commode in the ensuite bathroom.
"Do you know her?" my son, then nine years old, asked as we were at a stop sign near the bottom of the hill that leads to our house. I had waved at the woman driving the car facing us at the intersection because she had made eye contact, smiled, and waved at us first.
For most of us, the passions that fuel our lives don't enter them by accident. Someone introduces (or re-introduces) us to them at the moment we are ready to embrace them profoundly and enduringly.
One of the greatest blessings of community is being able to share the load. So, this week, as your regular correspondent ( :: weak wave, cough :: Hi ever'buddy. :: wheeze, inhaler puff :: ) continues to recover from the respiratory gnar I picked up in Montana, one of my dearest spiritual companions, the Rev.
For many years, the Oscars have been my Superbowl. There were parties and themed cocktails, betting pools and the occasional opportunities for fancy dress. But that was in the before times - before COVID, before parenthood (for me), and, if counterintuitively, mostly before moving to California where more than a few of our friends and neighbors make their living in the business of show.
"Curiosity," the Irish novelist James Stephens said, "will conquer fear more than bravery will." Recently, I've been contemplating the connection between curiosity and bravery, an exploration unexpectedly catalyzed by the Canadian/global treasure that is Eugene Levy and his new docuseries The Reluctant Traveler on AppleTv+ .
My cousin Nell arrived at LAX on the morning of Mardi Gras, a holiday neither of us grew up celebrating with our Irish-Italian families of origin in Connecticut. It was her first visit to the Golden State and I had five days to show her some of the glories of what has been my adopted home since 2009.
My friend Lin died today. Five words I hoped I'd never have to contemplate, nevermind type.
The first in a series of Monday stories based on Sunday television episodes that are too good to wait a week to write about, so I call an audible. Today: the Bill and Frank episode of 'The Last of Us"
Greetings fellow travelers. I hope this new year has been gentle and kind to you so far. My 2023 has gotten off to a bit of a bumpy start as I've been unwell since Christmas began, battling what we believe are delayed effects from the snake incident at the end of September.
Spending much of the last fortnight like a Brontë sister, feeling mostly ever-so-crappy as if someone had removed my batteries and thrown me down the stairs, does have its benefits.
Surviving a rattlesnake attack — and a global pandemic — with the power of love.
The night before my mother's funeral in October 2019, I submitted my application to the Living School, a two-year program created by Franciscan Fr. Richard Rohr at his Center for Action and Contemplation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, to study Christian mysticism and other wisdom traditions, ancient and contemporary.
There are few moments in the high desert more beautiful than just after the sun sets. Words have been invented for the light magic that happens when the sun slips beneath the horizon, but it's not yet completely dark. Twilight. Gloaming. The "edge of the day," a liminal space between evening and nighttime.
Why the Russian Orthodox Church is blessing nuclear weapons in a once-atheistic society
One of the series I'll miss most when it ends its eighth and final season later this week is The Good Fight, a legal dramedy that originated on CBS and has been streaming on Paramount+ since 2021.
The work of spiritual integration is essential. And it is exhausting. One of the gifts of walking the way of contemplation these last few years has been learning that nothing-and no one-is wholly one thing or the other. Such duality is a falsehood.
"Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen. Don't be afraid." - Frederick Buechner As I rounded a bend in the dusty, arid trail late Monday afternoon, feeling the full force of a relentless August sun bearing down on me even through my allegedly-SPF-blocking felt hat, the improbability-perhaps, even, impossibility-of the destination I sought made me chuckle.
As an immunocompromised person trying hard to survive the COVID-19, "plague years," I've spent most of the last 20 months in strict lockdown at home in Southern California with my husband, our dog, and my late mother's canary, Sean, not venturing much beyond the end of our driveway, sometimes for weeks at a stretch.
Last week, I saw a friend I hadn't seen in person for at least two years. She's one of those connections that doesn't need to be tended to fastidiously, regularly, or, it would seem, even in the flesh to remain true, deep, and soulful.
Editor's note: This review contains spoilers for the documentary series Murder Among the Mormons. Where the particularly eclectic Venn diagram of true crime enthusiasm and religious history nerdery overlap, you'll find your binge-worthy streaming recommendation for the weekend: Netflix's compelling new limited series, Murder Among the Mormons.
In Godmothered, the well-intentioned if poorly executed new holiday offering from Disney, the most demonstrable magical assistance fairy-godmother-in-training Eleanor (played by Jillian Bell) initially offers her would-be charge Mackenzie (Isla Fisher) is to return Mackenzie's stress-plucked eyebrows to their originally fulsome state. Sort of. "Oh hey, now they look just great, like two little fox tails!"
(RNS) - When the creators of CBS's new, surprise hit TV show " God Friended Me " set out to create a series with religious ideas at its center, they wanted to bring something innovative to the genre: Doubt. It's a theme that the handful of earlier successful faith-based shows hadn't tried.
Surely Ruth Bader Ginsburg was one of them. The Tzadikim Nistarim or Lamed Vavkniks (lamed-vavniks or Lamed Vovkniks, depending on your transliteration preference)-one of the 36 righteous souls who, according to Jewish mystical tradition and folk beliefs, carry the fate of the world on their shoulders.
At 1:54 p.m., Tuesday, a nurse injected 0.5 mL of JNJ-78436735-the single-dose Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine-into the deltoid muscle of my left arm. I didn't even notice the needle when it went in, tears of a relief too profound for words filling my eyes as I exhaled more deeply than I have in a full year.
All week, I've been trying to recall where I'd seen light refracted by smoke the way it has been this week here in Southern California, 80 miles or more from the nearest wildfires raging up and down the West Coast.
Easter morning, we took the Christmas tree down. It had been up since the day after Thanksgiving-four months and change. For our first (and please God, last) COVID Christmas, we put the tree up weeks earlier than usual, saying we needed all the light we could get.
"The light-house looked lovely as hope, that star on life's tremulous ocean." —Thomas Moore When he was about four years old, my brother became obsessed with lighthouses. It started, as best either one of us can recall all these decades later, with a book about the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World that my parents read to him at bedtime.
ROSTREVOR, Northern Ireland-The most powerful moment in the new Mister Rogers' biopic A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood, is when, for a full minute (60 actual seconds, I timed it), nothing happens.
Somewhere in my late childhood, someone told me that yellow was one of the few colors I “shouldn’t” wear. It made me look sallow, apparently. So, despite my love for buttercup flowers (if you hold them under a person’s chin, Daddy said, you can tell whether they like butter) and stubborn devotion to a short-sleeved, white-and-Big-Bird-yellow plaid polyester skirt suit that I insisted on sporting long after I’d outgrown it and the white patent leather Mary Janes that completed the ensemble the...
Each time the credits roll, I find myself thinking the same thing: Thank God, Foster woke up. If he didn't shake himself out of the stupor of malaise 10 years ago and get back in the water, if he hadn't been able to maintain his practice of diving daily, if he hadn't been able to slow down enough to be fully present, he might never have seen her.
A SELECTION OF PROFILES & INTERVIEWS
"I have a deep faith. I’m rooted in the Christian tradition. I believe that there are many paths to the same place, and that is a belief that there is a higher power, a belief that we are connected as a people, that there are values that transcend race or culture, that move us forward, and that there’s an obligation for all of us individually as well as collectively to take responsibility to make those values lived. I probably spent the first forty years of my life figuring out what I did...
While he waits for the Brazilian faith healer to arrive, Paul Simon is supposed be meditating quietly with his eyes closed. Instead, he's peeking.
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (RNS) - Richard Rohr believes the predominant theme in Scripture and tradition is grace, which he describes as a kind of divine spackling compound that God uses to fill in the gaps between everything in all of creation. Rohr's latest book, 'The Universal Christ,' recently hit the New York Times best-seller list.
One of my favorite stories to tell is about the interview I wanted most, but didn't get. It was 2005 and I had just signed a contract to write what would be my first book - a collection of profiles of mostly well-known people with whom I'd spent time talking one-on-one, face-to-face about their spiritual lives.
“The idea that the same love and logic would choose to describe itself as a baby born in shit and straw and poverty is genius. And it brings me to my knees, literally.”
RECENTLY HAVING REACHED the inauspicious age of 42, no longer a kid but not yet feeling entirely grown up, I find myself in a decidedly reflective mood. I’ve been taking stock—spiritual, emotional, relational, vocational—as I stare with some trepidation at the unchartered future. Obviously, my experiences of late, while not quite universal, are hardly unique. There are many terms used to describe this time of life, some less generous than others. (“Mid-life crisis” comes to mind.) “Betwixt...
John Mahoney’s God is a kind God. But that’s not the God he knew as a child. “My original idea of God was an extremely vengeful, powerful God. Love never entered the equation,” he says. “If I had children, what I would mostly want them to understand is exactly the opposite of what I was taught when I was a kid. I’d want them to know that they will always be forgiven, that they will always be loved, that they will always get a second chance, a third chance, a fourth chance, and a fifth chance...
VENICE, Calif. (RNS) - At the height of Ireland's sectarian Troubles in the early 1970s, when he was not long out of diapers, Paul Hewson met Derek Rowen, a neighbor boy from a few houses away in their working-class Finglas neighborhood of North Dublin. The Hewson family lived at No.
''I think I'm always looking for answers,'' he said when asked to describe himself spiritually. "There are things that happen in this world that trouble me....The question is not, why is this human condition so bad? But what are you doing about it? Just to observe it and lament the bad outcome, I just don't think that's enough."
Many cinephiles have a short list of virtuoso actors who are so graceful and true we'd watch them read a phone book. For me, the list includes Jeff Bridges, Helen Mirren, Diane Keaton, John Mahoney, Christopher Plummer and that great icon of American cinema, Oscar-winner Robert Duvall.
“You don’t have to go to the ashram or go up the mountain or into the desert to experience spirituality. It happens every day if you’re open to it.”
“Doubt is there all the time,” he says, softly. “The questions are there, and all my questions are stronger than all my answers.” And yet you continue to wrestle with God? “I continue because what is the alternative?” he says. You could walk away. “And do what, really?"
The day before his ordination to the Roman Catholic priesthood, Tom Mescall seemed to be wrestling with some old ghosts. "It's the biggest regret of my life, that it happened, and that we were unable to get it reconciled," Mescall, 56, said. "I didn't want it. I opposed it. I wanted to get back together. . . . But you know, it's time to get on with my life." He's talking about his divorce, 23 years ago, from his wife, Mary Molina Mescall.
"And when you come to the point where you don't have to say that any more, where that is so ingrained in you that you just gaze in the mirror and you don't have to say it to know it, at that point you can start saying, 'It's all about me.' Because it is," he said, laughing. "Because it's all about you and me and everybody else on a non-ego level. Because there is only one us, ya know?"
Of the American Film Institute’s list of the 100 Funniest American Movies of All Time, Harold Ramis has four: Ghostbusters, which he cowrote and in which he played Dr. Egon Spengler; Groundhog Day, which he cowrote, directed, and produced; National Lampoon’s Animal House, which he cowrote; and Caddyshack, which he cowrote and directed (and which I can pretty much quote to you verbatim). He’s also written, directed, or acted in Analyze This, National Lampoon’s Vacation, Stripes, Back to...
For no reason at all When life circles around And you can't see straight - from "Can't See Straight" by Sam Phillips "Push Any Button," the first physical album in five years from singer-songwriter Sam Phillips, is a blithe, fetching exploration of life's flip side - after the flush of youth, after the heartbreak, after the bottom falls out and the road bends and you head in a wholly unexpected direction that turns out to be exactly where you need to be.
The controversial director talks about his lifelong fascination with Noah's ark and why it's the messages of biblical stories-not the historical details-that matter. When a seed is planted in the mind of a child, it's impossible to predict accurately how it might take root and blossom in years to come.
"I don't feel like I belong in comedy," Pete Holmes says at the start of "Nice Try, The Devil," his 2013 Comedy Central special. "I like to think there are millions and millions of different universes, each slightly different from the last, and this universe - the one we're living in currently - is the only one where I'm not a youth pastor."
Currently, 78 nations worldwide criminalize same-sex relations; of those, seven may impose the death penalty for consensual same-sex conduct, according to ORAM. In Uganda, for instance, where there has been capital punishment for homosexual activity in the past, homosexuality currently is considered a criminal act punishable by a 14-year prison sentence.
"The world's biggest rock star tours the heartland, talking more openly about his faith as he recruits Christians in the fight against AIDS in Africa."
'My calling, my work is to speak about things I see that are injustices. It's the artist's responsibility to keep making art that is authentic and honest.' You may not know his name, writes Cathleen Falsani, but you probably recognize Edel Rodriguez's work-bold, satirical posters, magazine covers and illustrations tackling injustices and lampooning political figures (most notably the 45th President of the United States) that have earned him the nickname, 'America's Illustrator-In-Chief.'
She remembers it as if it were yesterday: the ancient record player in a corner of her grandmother’s apartment; the stack of vinyl albums, several of them by U2; her father picks one out, puts it on the turntable, places the needle at the start of the third wide groove, and sits back down on the couch to watch his daughter’s reaction as the song begins to play.
“We live in hell because we take ourselves too seriously. If there’s any one message that’s permeated my literary output, I guess that’s it: Stop taking yourself too seriously, which is not the same thing at all as living a life of frivolity. There is nothing whimsical or frivolous about it,” he says. “When I fall out of grace, which is a great deal of the time, sooner or later I realize it’s because I’m taking myself too seriously.”
“Do I have a mission? Yes, I have a mission: To be a good, faithful scientist. That’s my mission, and I’ve done everything I could do to fulfill my mission,” he says, sounding very official. “Every day I feel accomplished. Every day I take one more step.”
(RNS) - More than 20 years ago, when Layli Miller-Muro was still in law school, her first immigration client was a Muslim woman from Togo who sought asylum in the United States to avoid a forced marriage and female genital mutilation. Instead, the woman, Fauziya Kassindja, spent 17 months in detention before the young law student intervened.
"I've always been interested in the common ground that all mysticism, from various disciplines seems to have. The idea of, from a line in one of T.S. Eliot's poems: 'Teach us to care and not to care.' That whole notion of to care enough to achieve some mystical union with God is to take on the pride that would prevent you from having that kind of awareness," he explains.
For cantors, the 10 days between Rosh Hashana and Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, can be the most taxing in the Jewish calendar—both spiritually and musically.
Originally posted September 2, 2016
A SELECTION OF INTERNATIONAL REPORTING
It's been three weeks since I returned from Haiti and a fortnight since Hurricane Matthew made landfall along the southern coast of the Caribbean island, bringing its Category 5 devastation to the poorest nation in the Western Hemisphere. And in the time that has passed since my first visit to Ayiti (as they say in Creole), I can't stop thinking about her.
BANBRIDGE, Northern Ireland—...But, like so many others, the hurdle erected by one act of unkindness that becomes emblematic of a systemic problem in the body of Christ, takes effort to clear. And when you’re exhausted and there are too many hoops to jump through … maybe you stop jumping. Maybe you don’t bother any more.
Sunday afternoon, after us ONE Moms dropped our luggage at the hotel, piled into our chartered bus, and drove to the outskirts of the city to the Mary Joy Aid Through Development Association, I met my Ethiopian sisters who are speaking out for those who cannot, advocating on behalf of the destitute, judging with righteous wisdom, and defending the rights of the poor and the needy.
KATHMANDU, Nepal-The Boeing 737 loaded with relief supplies and caregivers touched down at Tribhuvan International Airport six days (nearly to the minute) after the first of two cataclysmic earthquakes wrecked havoc on the tiny Himalayan nation of Nepal.
DUBLIN, Ireland - When Pope Francis steps off of his chartered Alitalia flight from Rome at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, he will be walking into a country that is in some ways barely recognizable from the last time he visited the Irish Republic nearly 40 years ago.
LUSAKA, Zambia - "Paint those pills red, white and blue if you have to, but they're the greatest advertisement for the U.S. you're ever going to get." As the story goes, that's what Bono told President George W.
On World AIDS Day, Dec. 1, 2002, I climbed aboard a bus in Nebraska to join a feisty Irish rock star on a tour of the Midwest. I was a young reporter and the rock star was Bono, lead singer of the ...
LIVINGSTONE, Zambia - Vasco's voice wrested me from awe-filled reverie as I stood on the lip of a gorge high above the Zambezi River, gazing into the massive, thundering maw of Victoria Falls. "God's creation is amazing!" my son shouted over the roar of the enormous waterfall - the largest on Earth.
LUSAKA, Zambia - "Behold, how good and pleasant it is for brethren to dwell together in unity." The words of King David from his Psalm 133 - a "song of ascent" - greet visitors to the headquarters of the Evangelical Fellowship of Zambia, the mother body of Christian denominations, churches, parachurch organizations and missionary agencies founded here in 1964.
The Grower of Trees, the gardener, the man born to farming, whose hands reach into the ground and sprout, to him the soil is a divine drug. He enters into death yearly, and comes back rejoicing. He has seen the light lie down in the dung heap, and rise again in the corn.
BLANTYRE, Malawi - Look for a billboard on the right and a sign for the Ngumbe CCAP on your left. There's a dirt road. Turn there. In this part of the world, most of the streets - if there are actual streets - have no names.
In the West, machines do most of the commercial weaving, not people. In Ethiopia, and elsewhere in the developing world, handloom weaving is most often an occupation for men and one that isn't usually heralded for its artistry. Weaving isn't a prestigious job and, by and large, those who weave are the working poor.
LALIBELA, Ethiopia -- You know the images you have in your mind of Ethiopia from 27 years ago? The ones from the nightly news reports on TV about the famine in the Horn of Africa as the death toll mounted and horror stories grew more unfathomable by the day.
LAKE TANA, Ethiopia - We finally returned to the boats, where the rest of our group was waiting patiently, and on our journey back to Bahir Dar, I began thinking about pilgrimage and how, perhaps, what you believe (or don't) actually doesn't matter. It's the journey itself that makes it sacred.
My flight's about to board for Ethiopia. I'm not looking for anything or anyone. I'm going with an open hand and heart. And I know - more than I ever could express in words - that God is even bigger than we think.
ASSISI, Italy - "Francis." The name Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose as his nomem pontificalem has a long history in my family. My Irish grandfather was a Francis, although he was an orphan so we've never known why my great-grandparents chose his Christian name.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis arrived in St. Peter's Square on Tuesday morning a half-hour before his inaugural Mass was set to begin wearing papal whites, an enormous smile, and black - not red - shoes. He also left the Popemobile behind in the Vatican garage.
VATICAN CITY - An hour after sunset, the wait in St. Peter's Square had become thoroughly miserable. The rain was relentless. It was cold. And the mood had grown increasingly grumpy as those waiting for smoke to rise from the Sistine Chapel's chimney jostled and bumped each other with their umbrellas Even the sea gull perched atop the smokestack had ceased to be amusing.
VATICAN CITY - As a person of faith, the work I do as a journalist is more than just a job. To me it is both a vocation (in the spiritual sense of that word) and, in some sense, a ministry. B...
Forgive me for beginning a column about the new Roman Catholic pontiff with a quote from a Baptist preacher, but more than a century ago Charles Spurgeon found the words I've been searching for but could not muster: "We are all, at times, unconscious prophets."
VATICAN CITY - When black smoke billowed from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel around 7:41 p.m. Tuesday, many among the thousands who had poured into St. Peter's Square awaiting word from the papal conclave greeted the news with groans and disappointed shouts. Nera! La fumata e nera! Nera!
Tuesday afternoon in Rome, 115 cardinals clothed in red will walk from the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, through the Sala Regia with its frescoes depicting other moments in history when the church has stood at a crossroads, toward the Sistine Chapel.
SELECTION OF OTHER REPORTAGE AND COLUMNS
The last thing I packed in my aged Subaru before driving from Southern California to Phoenix, Arizona, on the morning of November 9, 2016 was my Polaroid 210 Land Camera. I carried it in its original, inelegant gray case with the too-short brown plastic strap. The 1967 camera, which I bought last year on eBay for $13, is one of my prized possessions. It reminds me of Patti Smith, the punk poet-iconoclast, who has made ethereal, often haunting images with a similar model for much of her life.
PARADISE, Calif. (RNS) - "I miss the quiet." Gretchen Harrison's voice cracked as she recounted in harrowing detail her escape on Nov. 8 from a ferocious wildfire that drove her from Paradise, the idyllic mountain town in the foothills of the Sierra Nevadas that she's called home for 26 years.
(RNS) - Nadia Bolz-Weber wants your purity ring. She's collecting the rings - made popular in 1990s-era programs such as "True Love Waits" - for a protest project inspired in part by the biblical prophet Isaiah.
MALIBU, Calif. (RNS) - Two hours before the sun set over the Pacific Ocean on Nov. 8, the Rev. Joyce Stickney, rector of St. Aidan's Episcopal Church in Malibu, received word about wildfires that had broken out 30 miles away in the hills above the Simi Valley.
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (RNS) - Early on the morning of Nov. 8, Bonnie Fear awoke at her home in Colorado to a two-word text message from Rich Martin, director of K-9 Ministries for Lutheran Church Charities in Chicago. "Call me." Something terrible had happened, and Fear knew she was about to be deployed to wherever it was.
THOUSAND OAKS, Calif. (RNS) - "Sovereign God, hear this lament: Why, Lord, has evil seemed to get its way?" So began the litany of prayers offered by grieving students, faculty, friends and family who packed the chapel at California Lutheran University Thursday night, not quite 24 hours after a mass shooting in a nearby country and western bar claimed the lives of a dozen people, including 2018 Cal Lutheran graduate Justin Meek.
(RNS) - Even in our present "golden age" of television, with the number of scripted programs on network, cable and streaming channels expected to top 500 this year, shows that feature religion or faith are scarce. Rarer still are spiritually themed series that successfully find an audience, if not critical acclaim, amid the thrum of hundreds of other viewing options.
"Forever," the dramedy series that premiered last month on Amazon, is the most spiritually intriguing new TV show you should be watching this fall. Starring SNL alums Maya Rudolph as June and Fred Armisen as her husband, Oscar, the eight-part series, which dropped in its entirety in September, does a deep dive into the meaning of life by exploring what happens when it ends.
'There's all this human activity that's occurring on our planet, and unlike your typical day-to-day experience where you're very isolated in what you see or what you do, when you see this continually over a span of months, it definitely gives you a feeling of how integrated and connected we are.'
This is the tale of how Batman helped Mr. MacPhisto find his way to eXPERIENCE + iNNOCENCE. Cathleen Falsani reports. Artist and digital experience designer Marc Wakefield was 13 years old when Joel Schumacher's Batman Forever debuted in the summer of 1995.
From Maya Angelou to Patti Smith, and from Begum Rokeya to Michelle Obama, the dazzling mix of image and song in Ultraviolet has become one of the most talked-about moments of the show. Cathleen Falsani reports on the trailblazing women of herstory and why #povertyissexist.
'Some friends know us better than we know ourselves. They're our biggest fans, the ones who see us as we are, and, more importantly, who we are meant to be. And when we miss the mark or sell ourselves short, those friends—the very best kind—call us on it. For America, U2 is that friend.
As President Trump and his administration create their first budget request for Congress in the coming weeks, they have an opportunity to fund fully the U.S. international affairs account - a decision which is not only the smart choice, but also the benevolent one.
"First you must travel a long and difficult road, a road fraught with peril. Mm-hmm. You shall see thangs, wonderful to tell .... I cannot tell you how long this road shall be, but fear not the obstacles in your path, for fate has vouchsafed your reward.
In her book "The Funny Thing Is ...," Ellen DeGeneres describes being invited to God's house for wine and cheese. When the Almighty walks into the room, Degeneres describes God this way: "I would say she was about 47, 48 years old, a beautiful, beautiful black woman. And we just immediately hugged.
The first thing most people mention when they talk about the Rev. Nadia Bolz-Weber is her tattoos. She has many - most of them religious in nature, including a large icon of Mary Magdalene covering her right forearm.
When the leader of the free world is in the market for pastoral care, he can turn to any number of ecclesiastical superstars for prayer and spiritual guidance. But the pastor President Barack Obama chose to shepherd him daily throughout his first five years in Washington, D.C., was the opposite of a big shot.
Tanner was in the habit of reading the Bible to his slaves on the Sabbath... The first Sunday after my coming to the plantation, he called them together, and began to read the twelfth chapter of Luke.
I'm tired. And, truth be told, pretty damn blue. Mary Grace, being a priest and all, had some advice. "Two words," she told me. "Ethel Merman."
The moon's thin crescent hung like a street light in the dusky sky last week as I exited the cinema and wandered into the parking lot feeling discombobulated and a little bit lost. It took me a full five minutes to find my car. I walked past it at least twice before recognizing it.
Expecting authentic insight into the lives of pastors from the new reality show "Preachers of L.A." would be like turning to "The Real Housewives of Orange County" for parenting advice. As with most shows in the genre, there is very little "real" in either "reality" show.
"I have a dogmatic certainty: God is in every person's life. God is in everyone's life. Even if the life of a person has been a disaster, even if it is destroyed by vices, drugs or anything else-God is in this person's life. You can, you must try to seek God in every human life.
He is the theological Ed Sheeran to my inner tween. When I see him smiling on TV or on the cover of a magazine in the checkout line at Ralphs, I get the warm fuzzies. I follow him religiously on Tw...
ARLEE, Mont. - For as long as I can recall, I've loved a good road trip. As a child, August usually was the time when my family would take our summer vacation, piling into the station wagon to head to Cape Cod, Maine, the Hamptons or my grandmother's home in New Hampshire.
Whither Walter White? How the morality tale of a cancer-stricken chemistry teacher compelled first by desperation (and then sheer hubris) to transform himself into a cold-blooded, Machiavellian drug kingpin will end is what legion fans of AMC's Emmy-winning morality-play-cum-uberseries "Breaking Bad" want to know.
Moments before I left Laguna Beach to drive to Long Beach one recent Friday afternoon, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals dissolved its stay on gay marriages, giving county clerks permission to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples for the first time in more than five years.
The first thing I did when I read the U.S. Supreme Court's decision in the cases involving the Defense of Marriage Act and California's Proposition 8 was offer a silent prayer. It was short - just two words. "Thank you," I told God.
"Listen to the words," the young woman behind me stage-whispered to her chatty date. "Are you listening?" He wasn't. But I was and so was most of the rapt, standing-room-only crowd that crammed the Greek Theater at UC Berkeley for the second of three sold-out Mumford & Sons concerts late last month.
The sounds of the Pacific crashing on the shore mix with a reggae tune playing on the outdoor stereo of the bar next door as the speaker, a 41-year-old former pastor and bestselling author, resumes his riff on categories of consciousness and the spiritual practice of meeting people exactly where they are.
Many evangelical Christians seem to be taking to heart the words often attributed to St. Francis of Assisi (even if he likely never said them): "Preach the gospel at all times. When necessary, use words."
While chatting with the Rev. James Mulford, a Catholic priest and publisher of Zenit News Agency after Pope Francis' first official audience with members of the news media in Rome last month, he told me a story about the early days of the late Pope John Paul II's papacy that got me thinking about the personality of the new pope.
What must have been going through her mind as the old man knelt before her in his white cassock, poured water over her sockless toes, dried them gently with a hand towel, and then, bowing his head even lower, kissed her foot? She is a young Muslim woman incarcerated in Rome's Casal del Marmo juvenile detention center.
In more than 30 years as a believer, I've attended enough "Christian conferences" to expect that at least a few of the speakers to be talking out of their ... um ... butts, if you will.
Labels can be helpful when, for instance, applied to cans of soup or barrels of toxic waste. But they are less so when affixed to human beings - particularly when said label is meant to summarize, indelibly, one's spiritual identity.
This is a love story. An unlikely love story, perhaps, but a true love story just the same. Not 10 minutes after meeting her for the first time in the shadow of a 33-foot-tall metallic statue of the Virgin Mary at a convent in the Rust Belt suburbs of Chicago's south side, Sister Annunziata told me she loved me.
"Each day we take around 26,000 breaths," Bell begins, a little stiffly at first. "Our breathing should come from our stomach, not our chest. But when we are moving too fast, when we're stressed, when we're distracted, we tend to breathe from our chest," he continues, on a roll. "Where is your breathing coming from?"
Cathleen Falsani If you say a modern celebrity is an adulterer, a pervert and a drug addict, all it means is that you've read his autobiography. -P. J. O'Rourke Perhaps I was naïve to think I could thank a celebrity publicly for something she did that was a source of epic blessings in my life.
Back when I interviewed Barack Obama about his faith in spring 2004 a few days after he'd won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate, I didn't ask him something I've remained curious about since: Does he consider himself an evangelical?
by Cathleen Falsani In the Gospel of Saint Matthew, we are told that Jesus said, "You cannot serve both God and money" and, "It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."
While marked by murder, mayhem, deception, and all manner of chaos, there is an order-a moral order-to the world depicted in Joel and Ethan Coen's films. That's the good news. The bad news is that when the moral order is ... Read More
Cathleen Falsani is the religion columnist for the Chicago Sun Times and the author of The Dude Abides: The Gospel According to the Coen Brothers. She is guest blogging on Jewcy all week, and this is her first post. ... Read More
In the Book of Genesis, the author tells the story of Sodom and Gomorrah, two cities destroyed by God's wrath for their unrepentant lasciviousness. Before hellfire and brimstone rain down on the twin towns, Abraham, God's chosen dude, argues with ... Read More
In his 20-plus years as a rock star, Bono has been criticized from time to time for being a bit preachy. On Sunday, World AIDS Day, he graduated to full-blown preacher.
"One of the best things clergy can do for their mental health is to have a spiritual director." — the Rev. Randall Warren, director of the office of pastoral care for the Episcopal Diocese of Chicago
Agnes Nyamayarwo, 50, has been HIV-positive for a dozen years. She is a nurse and a volunteer for TASO, a Ugandan organization that provides AIDS education and care throughout her country. This is her story.
COVERAGE FROM VATICAN CITY AND PAPAL VISITS
BANBRIDGE, Northern Ireland-I am seated on a train as I write this, slowly making my way north from Dublin to see family in Northern Ireland, the verdant Irish countryside rolling by on my left, the gray, glimmering Irish sea on my right, and acedia's first whispers buffeting my mind like a tiny, malevolent gale.
DUBLIN, Ireland-Pope Francis wrapped up a whirlwind tour of Ireland by issuing his most detailed public apology to date for the horrific abuses suffered by generations of Irish families at the hands of the Catholic Church during an outdoor Mass for an estimated 130,000 people in Dublin's Phoenix Park.
KNOCK, Ireland-Standing just a few feet away from where many Catholics believe the Virgin Mary appeared in 1879 to a dozen denizens of this bucolic corner of western Ireland at the height of a famine, on Sunday morning Pope Francis begged God's forgiveness for the abuse of countless innocents by priests and other members of the Catholic Church.
DUBLIN, Ireland - When Pope Francis steps off of his chartered Alitalia flight from Rome at 10:30 a.m. Saturday, he will be walking into a country that is in some ways barely recognizable from the last time he visited the Irish Republic nearly 40 years ago.
Whenever people try to exclude LGBT Catholics from the life of the church, they are "tearing apart the body of Christ," Fr. James Martin told the standing-room-only crowd that packed a tented hangar Aug 23. at an international meeting of Catholic families in Dublin, Ireland.
Non ricordiamo giorni; re ricordano momenti. "We do not remember days," the Italian poet Cesare Pavese said, "we remember moments." Pavese's words have come to mind often as I've thought about Pope Francis' historic visit to the United States, particularly when people have asked me what the "best part" of covering the papal visit was for me.
" I needed clothes and you clothed me, I was sick and you looked after me, I was in prison and you came to visit me. " -Jesus, in Matthew 25:36 On May 31, 1973, a group of inmates at Philadelphia's Holmesburg Prison walked into the deputy warden's office to ask for the establishment of a special prayer room for Muslim prisoners.
"Brace yourself, Father," I said, taking a seat in a plastic chair facing my would-be confessor in Madison Square Garden's dimly lit Madison Bar on Friday, a few hours before the start of the papal mass. The bearded Franciscan priest in his dove gray vestments laughed and said, "No way.
Two years ago, when he stood on the center loggia of St. Peter's Basilica in the Vatican to greet the world for the first time, Pope Francis spoke two simple words in Italian: "Buona sera," or, "Good evening."
As Pope Francis' motorcade made its way from the Joint Base Andrews in Maryland to the Apostolic Nunciature in Washington, D.C., late Tuesday afternoon, it made a hard left from scenic Rock Creek Parkway onto Massachusetts Avenue, wending its way northwestward at a fast clip along the manicured thoroughfare known as Embassy Row.
VATICAN CITY - When black smoke billowed from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel around 7:41 p.m. Tuesday, many among the thousands who had poured into St. Peter's Square awaiting word from the papal conclave greeted the news with groans and disappointed shouts. Nera! La fumata e nera! Nera!
Forgive me for beginning a column about the new Roman Catholic pontiff with a quote from a Baptist preacher, but more than a century ago Charles Spurgeon found the words I've been searching for but could not muster: "We are all, at times, unconscious prophets."
Tuesday afternoon in Rome, 115 cardinals clothed in red will walk from the Pauline Chapel of the Vatican's Apostolic Palace, through the Sala Regia with its frescoes depicting other moments in history when the church has stood at a crossroads, toward the Sistine Chapel.
VATICAN CITY - An hour after sunset, the wait in St. Peter's Square had become thoroughly miserable. The rain was relentless. It was cold. And the mood had grown increasingly grumpy as those waiting for smoke to rise from the Sistine Chapel's chimney jostled and bumped each other with their umbrellas Even the sea gull perched atop the smokestack had ceased to be amusing.
VATICAN CITY - Pope Francis arrived in St. Peter's Square on Tuesday morning a half-hour before his inaugural Mass was set to begin wearing papal whites, an enormous smile, and black - not red - shoes. He also left the Popemobile behind in the Vatican garage.
ASSISI, Italy - "Francis." The name Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio chose as his nomem pontificalem has a long history in my family. My Irish grandfather was a Francis, although he was an orphan so we've never known why my great-grandparents chose his Christian name.
"Thank you, good night!" Those words, uttered in Italian (" Grazie, buonanotte!") from a balcony at Castle Gandolfo on Thursday, were the last Pope Benedict XVI spoke in public as shepherd to the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics.
VATICAN CITY - As a person of faith, the work I do as a journalist is more than just a job. To me it is both a vocation (in the spiritual sense of that word) and, in some sense, a ministry. B...