No one wants to be at a funeral. It means that a loss has occurred, hearts broken. But there are few other instances in which doing something we dread so deeply can mean so much.
Death and Dying
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
Joan Didion’s legacy: A chronicler of modern life’s horrors and consolations
Joan Didion was capable both of conjuring up the horrors of modern life and of offering solace that there was still a point to it all.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
Parents: Wills and medical directives are the last best gift you can give your kids.
Here is a way to show how much you really love your children: Do the paperwork.
Posted inFaith, News
Pope Francis prays for the victims of deadly Waukesha Christmas parade attack
The pope “joins you in asking the Lord to bestow upon everyone the spiritual strength which triumphs over violence and overcomes evil with good,” said the message released Nov. 23.
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
Knowing how the story ends makes surrendering to death possible
You can cherish life and surrender it when you know that it is never insignificant, that your story matters, that you exist to love the author of our tale.
Posted inFaith, The Good Word
On All Souls Day, we come face to face with the least comprehensible part of life: death.
We experience the death of others—but not as they do. We only know that they are gone, and that fact alone is nigh impossible to comprehend.
Posted inFaith, News
Benedict XVI yearns for heaven but is ‘absolutely full of joy for life,’ private secretary says
Benedict’s longing for heaven, recently hinted at in a letter of condolence, is not to be interpreted as meaning that the former pope “no longer has any desire to live.”
Posted inNews, Politics & Society
Pope Emeritus Benedict XVI hopes to soon join his best friend in ‘the afterlife’
Retired Pope Benedict XVI has said he hopes to soon join a beloved professor friend in “the afterlife,” in a sign that the 94-year-old pontiff is not only accepting his eventual death but welcoming it.
Posted inFaith, Faith in Focus
When a Jewish hospital chaplain was asked to perform a Catholic baptism
If the baby was born alive and they waited for the priest to make it over to the hospital, they ran the risk that the baby might die before the priest arrived to perform the sacrament of baptism.
Posted inArts & Culture, Catholic Book Club
The gift and challenge of love in Kirstin Valdez Quade’s ‘The Five Wounds’
‘The Five Wounds’ causes the reader pain. Call it compassion. Call it empathy. Call it the Christian experience of being heart-stretched.