James Martin, S.J.

Yesterday a Jesuit friend told me that the Easter Vigil at his parish was three hours and forty minutes Upon hearing this another friend remarked That pretty much leaves out anyone with children doesn t it For me and for most Catholics the Easter Vigil is the absolute summit of the litu

If you ve ever read the seemingly weekly surveys of American Catholics and then scratched your head at the results and thought Who in the world did they talk to then you might have fun participating in this new nationwide survey sponsored by Beliefnet the largest spirituality and religion w

After the sabbath as the first day of the week was dawning Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb And behold there was a great earthquake for an angel of the Lord descended from heaven approached rolled back the stone and sat upon it His appearance was like lightning and

Word has reached us that Jon Hassler has died at his home in Collegeville Minn at the age of 74 One of the great novelists of our time his books including North of Hope Staggerford Dear James and Grand Opening examined with infinite compassion the lives of the re

Sending out hundreds of Easter cards this year Attending way too many Easter parties Doing some last-minute shopping for gifts to place under your Easter tree Getting tired of all those Easter-themed specials on television I didn t think so How does Easter resist the commercialism tha

It was just a few weeks ago that I blogged about this but I wanted to celebrate today March 18 the 50th anniversary of a great epiphany that changed the course of Thomas Merton s life After years of feeling separate from other men and women as a result of his choosing to live a monastic

I m not sure what I like the most the name of the website gloria tv their in-your-face slogan the more catholic the better their spokesnun she with the arbitrary binoculars the impressively multilingual comments Bei so sch nem Gesang wird die Fastenzeit richtig s or the mus

News has come of the murder of the Chaldean Archbishop of Mosul Paulos Faraj Rahho who had been kidnapped The Associated Press has this story AP And Catholic News Service is running this interview with an American-based Chaldean bishop who lays some of the blame for the outcome on the

One of the better blogs on things religious is Therese Borchard s Beyond Blue hosted by Beliefnet com Nominally it is about the topic of depression which Borchard had suffered from and also discussed in last week s America article Shadows in Prayer Shadows More broadly it i