TOBET Blogs

Blog Archive

Your Mama Knows Best

Your Mama Knows Best

Do you remember your childhood days when your mom would guide you in moderating your helpings for a meal or dessert? “Only two pieces of candy.” “Only one helping of spaghetti.” “Only two helpings of ice cream.” (How good that two helpings of ice cream were allowed!)...

Lent: Making Sense of Sensing the Senses

Lent: Making Sense of Sensing the Senses

Last week while giving a retreat to middle school students, I had them bring a notepad and pencil into the chapel. After some quiet and prayer, I asked them to notice everything in the chapel and to draw it, be it candles, stained glass, air conditioning vent, pews,...

TOB and Safety First?

TOB and Safety First?

We are a safety-obsessed culture. One need only recall the world’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic to see just how much people are willing to sacrifice for the cause of bodily health. Or consider how the phrase “safety is our top priority” is the standard jargon we...

Pope Benedict: Good and Faithful Servant

Pope Benedict: Good and Faithful Servant

A special blog by Monica Ashour, honoring Pope Benedict XVI’s death and thus his entrance into eternal life. When my friend and colleague, Sheryl Collmer, texted me this morning, “Rest in eternal joy, dear Benedict,” I smiled and said, “Well done, good and faithful...

Happy 21st Birthday, TOBET!

Happy 21st Birthday, TOBET!

December 8, 2001 is the day TOBET was officially founded by nine of us eager, young adult Catholics who had been changed by Jesus Christ through St. John Paul’s vision of the human person known as Man and Woman: He Created Them: A Theology of the Body. We had no idea...

John Paul II’s Feast Day

John Paul II’s Feast Day

October 22, 2022Happy Feast Day, St. John Paul! “Are you Monica Ashour?” a stranger said to me. We were on a train to Rome for St. John Paul’s Canonization on April 28, 2014. Shocked, I said, “Yes. Do I know you?” She said, “I’m Mary Sladek, and this is my husband,...

What St. Michael Teaches Us About the Body

What St. Michael Teaches Us About the Body

September 29 is the Feast of the Archangels, but this day has also traditionally been called “Michaelmas,” and has a long history of religious and harvest celebrations connected to it (start looking up those Goose recipes!). The traditional story of St. Michael as the...

The Body and Your Spiritual Life

The Body and Your Spiritual Life

If you’ve been a Catholic for longer than five minutes, you probably take for granted terms like the “spiritual life,” or “spirituality.” A close friend might have asked you recently: “How has your spiritual life been going?” And perhaps you have a “spiritual...

Receiving Knowledge of Christ

Receiving Knowledge of Christ

I’m slowly making my way through Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast. Not his newest one, mind you—I’ve just passed the halfway mark for last year’s podcast. Sometimes I go weeks without listening, but I keep coming back because gosh darn it, at some point I...