TOBET Blogs
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
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 Anniversary of JPII’s Theology of the Body
Blessed feast of the Nativity of Mary, the Theotokos, whose body carried God made flesh. 43 years ago this week, Pope St. John Paul delivered the very first audience of his Theology of the Body (TOB), his greatest contribution to our Church and our culture. Having...
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
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...
Rejoicing In Boundaries
“Catholic doctrine and discipline may be walls; but they are the walls of a playground.” - G.K. Chesterton People in our culture today—and I am by no means excluding Catholics from this observation—are both fascinated and repulsed by the idea of boundaries. We abhor...
Roe No More
On June 24th, 2022 Roe V Wade was officially overturned by the Supreme Court of the United States.“Monica, pull over here. I want to buy something,” Norma McCorvey (“Roe” of Roe v. Wade) said to me as I was driving her back to Dallas after she had given an...
Is St. Joseph a Father?
Catholics often think of St. Joseph as the obvious exemplar for fatherhood. However, like many Christian mysteries that we take too easily for granted, I think we often overlook how counterintuitive it is to place St. Joseph as the model of fatherhood. First, the...
Jesus’ Sacred Heart
June is traditionally the month dedicated to the Sacred Heart of Jesus. Devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus comes to us most popularly through St. Margaret Mary Alacocque, a 17th century French nun. She experienced visions of Jesus in which He shared with her the...
Motherhood and Life: Gift or Right?
Our recent celebration of Mother’s Day and the Church’s dedication to Mary during May stand in a certain paradoxical contrast to the current media obsession regarding Roe v. Wade. That is, the contemporary public discourse seems to be almost exclusively rooted in a...