TOBET Blogs

Blog Archive

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...

Rejoicing In Boundaries

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

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?

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

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...