Mary Ward, that great Christian educator of the 17th century, used to tell her sisters: “Do your best and God will help.” The notion that God can and will help us in our predicaments is axiomatic to Biblical faith. It sets the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, the God made compassionate flesh in Christ Jesus, apart from the Unmoved Mover of philosophy. God’s helpfulness expre...

My soul is overwhelmed with sorrow. As Passiontide kicks in and we look to Holy Week, in yet another time of war, I have been thinking how our culture tells stories about despair. The horror-fantasy TV show Stranger Things, which drew to a close recently after a decade-long stretch of five seasons, is a pretty good measure of this.

Set in a small town...

On New Year’s Eve 1938, Edith Stein was smuggled into the Netherlands for her safety. On September 14, 1939, two weeks after Germany invaded Poland and started World War II, she wrote the following to encourage her fellow sisters to deeper faith and hope in the fire-quenching love of God.

Hail, cross, our only hope!—this is what the holy church summons us to e...

The nadir of David’s reign was reached when he orchestrated the death of Uriah the Hittite to conceal his adultery with Bathsheba. Among the consequences prophesied by Nathan was the grim decree that “the sword shall never depart from your house” (2 Sam 12:10). Only a few chapters later, this prediction begins to materialize: David's beloved son, Absalom, rises in revolt and ...

The Architect of Love has built the door into heaven so low that no one but a small child can pass through it, unless, to get down to a child’s little height, he goes in on his knees.
—Caryll Houselander

I propose the person of Mary as the key to understanding the “narrow gate” of the Gospel teachings in Matthew 7:13-14 and Luke 13:22-30. Christ’s depiction of sal...