“One of the things I find most appealing about the award-winning writer and poet Mary Karr is her forthright, almost brutal, honesty.”

This week on “The Spiritual Life,” Father James Martin speaks with former Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg about faith, fatherhood and his “Jesuit background.”

Father James Martin reflects on his conversation with actor and comedian Whoopi Goldberg about the importance of “laughing and dancing and and acting the fool” before God.

Father James Martin reflects on his conversation with Cardinal Timothy Radcliffe, O.P., who, he says, “changed how I looked not only at friendship, but also, the church.”

Suddenly I heard the most beautiful noise I have ever heard in my life: the sound of tens of thousands of people cheering as they saw the white smoke pouring from the chimney atop the Sistine Chapel.

The choice of a papal name is said to be the new pope’s first important decision.

Much of what you hear about who the next pope will be, spoken with enormous confidence by people in the know, is often completely contradictory.

Dozens, perhaps hundreds, have told me that this time of transition makes them feel unsure, unsettled and uncomfortable, three difficult feelings. Some people have even told me that they are afraid. To which I say: Fear not!

All of Pope Francis' gestures, meetings and desires for encounter were themselves a form of “teaching.” And L.G.B.T.Q. Catholics and their families have told me repeatedly what a difference this change in approach has meant. 

“Pope Francis entered the papacy as a Jesuit, governed as one and died as one,” Father James Martin writes.