Church Life Today
by OSV Podcasts
Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner.
Episodes
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Creation Has Limits, and So Do We, with Sr. Damien Marie Savino
If you have used any of the artificial intelligence tools that are everywhere now, you know how good they are with words. You ask, they answer, and the answer sounds like someone talking to you. Except no one is. It is the appearance of communication without a person on the other end, and I don’t...
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What Kind of Ancestor Am I Becoming? Family, Money, and Legacy, with Josh Gentine
Every family hands something on. Not just property or a business, but a way of speaking to one another, a set of habits, the things we talk about and the things we have silently agreed never to raise. Some of that was built on purpose. Most of it was not. And one day, without any announcement…
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Behold God’s Love: The Album, with Carolyn Pirtle
In the summer of 2024, about 1,300 people gathered at Saint Mary's College for the premiere of "Behold God's Love," an original Eucharistic musical in three acts: "Root," "Vine," and "Branches." Everyone else missed it. Now the whole world can listen. The full musical is now available as a…
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Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: A Catholic Journey
Every so often on this show, I set the conversation aside and simply read something. This is one of those episodes. Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. And in paragraph 213, in...
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John Steinbeck's East of Eden, with Michon Matthiesen
There is an old story we keep telling because we cannot stop living it. A brother brings his offering and it is received; another brings his and it is not; and in the space of that difference something curdles. We know how it goes. We have felt the heat rise in our own chests when someone else is...
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Envy: The Anti-Life Sin, and Its Cure, with Michon Matthiesen
There is a sin that has learned to survive by not looking like one. We have made room for it—quietly, in the way we work and compete and measure ourselves against the person beside us. We have given it respectable names: ambition, drive, a healthy edge. Everyone feels it, we tell ourselves. So...
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The Education of the Soul: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Project, with Shannon Valenzuela
Somewhere along the way, we started training young people to be merely operators. We teach them to manage the machine, to run the system, to handle the tool that does the real work—and we measure their learning by how well they can retrieve what they need at the moment they need it. It is an...
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Three Saints of the Sacred Heart
Your heart is restless. It wants more than this world can give. It longs for a love that will not fail, a peace that will not pass away, a home that cannot be taken from you. You know this—perhaps you have always known it—even when you try to silence the longing with lesser things. In the...
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Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo XIV on Artificial Intelligence, with Brett Robinson
What are we building? Pope Leo XIV puts that question to us in his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The title itself echoes Mary's Magnificat — the song of a humanity whose grandeur is recognized in being lifted up by…
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Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor, with Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando
When Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation, he chose a title drawn from the Book of Revelation: Dilexi te — "I have loved you." Those words, addressed to a community with little power and little standing, become in this document Christ's word to the poor of every age. The poor are…
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Luminor: Art with All Its Teeth, with Katy Carl
There is a lot of animosity out there, a lot of distrust, and a lot of fear and persistent anxiety about so many things. Where, in all that, can we go to find words that bring life? In particular, where might we find books that rise above the morass of the day to show us art that builds on the...
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The Little Rose Shop, with Raquel Rose
When you are a new parent, you may desire a genuine religious experience, but your young child often has other ideas. It’s not that the child is opposed to God per se; just sort of opposed to your plans and schedule and rhythm. You know what that’s like, right? The drama of the pew at Mass, the...
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The Marian Turn in Newman’s Thought, with Rebekah Lamb
“It is the one peculiarity of the Christian character to be dependent … It is the Christian’s excellence to be diligent and watchful, and yet to be in spirit dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission to do so; to be content to view himself in a subordinate place.” These...
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Introducing the ‘Gender Accompaniment Project’ — Part 2, with Abigail Favale
In this episode I continue my conversation with Abigail Favale, introducing the new podcast series she created and hosts called “The Gender Accompaniment Project.” If you missed the first part of our conversation, you can link to it in our show notes (or just see the episode that posted…
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Introducing the ‘Gender Accompaniment Project’ — Part 1, with Abigail Favale
What do we do with unmet desires? That is a deeply human question, but one that might not be addressed or attended to if we have a view of life that avoids such difficulty and tension. Some would seek to live the kind of life that tries to fulfill all desires, whenever they emerge. Some others...
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AI, Education, and Doing Hard Stuff, with Adam Kronk
This is the second of two conversations I share with Adam Kronk, the director of Outreach and External Engagement for Notre Dame’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good. If you missed the first episode, it was released immediately prior to this one. Thanks for listening in again, or for the...
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AI, Ethics, and the Common Good, with Adam Kronk
The University of Notre Dame received a $50 million grant from the Lilly Endowment to work toward developing a faith-based approach to AI ethics. That grant landed in the university’s Institute for Ethics and the Common Good, which is spearheading this work. My guest today is the institute’s...
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Why Literature Still Matters, with Jason Baxter
If I asked the question “Does literature matter?”, I suspect most people would quickly answer “Yes.” But if I asked “Why does literature matter?”, I think most of us would stutter in response. We probably don’t know how to give an account of the importance of literature, even if we have a sense...
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Augustine on the Psalms, with Josh McManaway
Josh McManaway joins me again for the second of a two-part conversation on reading Scripture. This time, we focus on St. Augustine as reader and preacher of the Psalms. Josh teaches us Augustine’s principles for reading the psalms, which Augustine discovers throughout the Psalter, and what...
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To Find Christ on Every Page, with Josh McManaway
What would it mean to read Scripture well? At minimum, it would mean reading it as a whole. That sounds like a tall task when you think about it, because there are a lot of pages and many of them feature seemingly uninteresting prose. We might prefer to pick-and-choose our favorite passages…
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St. Claude, the Jesuits, and the Sacred Heart, with Tim O’Malley
The saints reveal the fulfillment of Christ’s promises. As I promised a couple episodes back, we want to treat you to a series of reflections on the particular witness of particular saints through a series of episodes on our podcast. These episodes follow from the wildly popular “Saturdays with…
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A Very Little Office of Compline, with Bo Bonner
I’m really tempted to open by saying that this episode it is about teaching your children how to die. Now I’m not saying that; all I’m saying is that I thought about saying that so you know it was an option. Why might I have said that? Because, as my guest will share, guiding your children toward...
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St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Devotion to the Sacred Heart
Every fall, the McGrath Institute for Church Life hosts the wildly popular “Saturdays with the Saints” lecture series. For one hour on the morning of Notre Dame home football games, a scholar typically from Notre Dame delivers a public lecture on a saint. The room is always full and, in fact…
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What is College Really for? Notre Dame's Experiment in Holistic Education, with Bill Mattison
What if a university included among its common learning goals for its students, cultivating the practice of disciplined attention and becoming active participants in your holistic formation? That would mean, I suppose, that such a university would be interested and invested in not just what their...
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Emotional Holiness, with Abbot Austin Murphy, OSB
Have you ever considered the divine plan for your emotions? We might think God’s plan would be for us to get rid of our emotions or ignore them, but the wisdom of the Christian tradition says otherwise. So, too, does the Son of God, who took on our human emotions when he took on our flesh. The…
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Hoops, Hope, and Holiness, with Fr. Pete McCormick, C.S.C.
Hoops, Hope, and Holiness, with Fr. Pete McCormick, C.S.C. Everybody at Notre Dame knows Fr. Pete. He’s the director of campus ministry, who’s responsible for leading a team that cares for the spiritual needs of our student body. He lives in a Notre Dame residence hall, where about 250 young men...
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Notre Dame Football and Faith, with Fr. Nate Wills, C.S.C.
Fr. Nate Wills has been the chaplain for the Notre Dame football team since 2018. He’s been along for exhilarating triumphs and devastating losses. He’s seen and felt the energy of packed stadiums and the nervous focus of the pregame rituals. He’s watched young men try and fail, then recover and...
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C. S. Lewis from Dante and the Medieval World, with Jason Baxter
Many of us have learned to see the world differently because of C. S. Lewis. But how did Lewis learn to see the world the way he did? From whom did he learn to see the marriage of the spiritual and material, of heavenly things right along with scientific things? If we go in search of answers to...
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The Heartbeat of Dante’s Comedy, with Jason Baxter
Translating Dante is not a matter of rendering words in one language for words in another language. Indeed, no act of translation is so direct or basic. But as with Dante’s Comedy when the style itself is part of the art – the sound of the thing, the movement, the embodiment – the translator…
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A Pilgrim’s Thirst, special episode
On our last episode, I welcomed two of our Sullivan Undergraduate Saints Fellows to talk about the pilgrimage through France that our cohort completed at the start of summer. The final destination on that pilgrimage was Lourdes. As follow up to that episode, I want to share with all of you a...
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A Saints Pilgrimage, with Two Notre Dame Student Leaders
Arising from the McGrath Institute for Church Life, the Sullivan Undergraduate Saints Fellowship forms Notre Dame students as leaders in the study and spirituality of the saints. We launched this fellowship in 2025 with an inaugural cohort of 12 students selected from a pool of many, many...
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Our Faithful Departed, special episode
Hi everyone. For today’s episode I do not have a guest joining me; instead, I am just going to share with you directly. You see, my dad died a few weeks ago and just last week we celebrated his funeral Mass. I’ve written a few books over the years and I dedicated one of those books to my dad, who...
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Working for the Inklings, with Three Belmont University Students
In our previous episode of Church Life Today, I was joined by Professor Christie Kleinmann of Belmont University, who talked with me about her fascinating and truly original course on Strategic Public Relations for the Inklings (specifically, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers).…
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Habemus Papam, with John Cavadini
“Habemus Papam.” We have a pope. We have a papa. We have a father. The announcement of a new pope is a startlingly joyous and even spellbinding moment, when not just the faithful but also many who seemingly have no interest in the Church stop and cheer together. What is being proclaimed? What is...
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Public Relations for C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, with Christie Kleinmann
Have you ever thought about becoming a brand expert for C. S. Lewis or J. R. R. Tolkien? On the one hand, these seem like authors who need no introduction. On the other hand, how many people today really know the work of these towering 20th Century authors, beyond what made its way onto the…
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The Evangelizing Brilliance and Errors of Matteo Ricci, with Anthony Clark
When we say the name “God”, have we assumed too quickly that we know what we mean? We use that word quite regularly, without much strain or prolonged consideration, as if the meaning of the word were self-evident. But what if you had to explain – indeed, translate – the word “God” into a language...
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Healing Wounds, with Bishop Erik Varden
By his wounds. His wounds are the source of healing. Our wounds are the wounds that are healed by his wounds. Our wounds may even become the source of healing for others because we have been healed by his wounds. What an unimaginable mystery. Wounds heal. Healing from wounds. Have we considered…
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Edge of Belief: UFO’s, Technology, and the Catholic Imagination, with Brett Robinson
How should Catholics think about UFOs? How can the Church respond to evolving scientific discoveries? What are the boundaries for Catholic belief? These are the kinds of questions at the heart of a new documentary short film produced by The McGrath Institute for Church Life. "Edge of Belief…
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Marian Preaching Competition, with Msgr. Michael Heintz
The McGrath Institute for Church Life, together with the John S. and Virginia Marten Program in Homiletics and Liturgics, is hosting a homily contest on preaching the Blessed Virgin Mary. We invite ordained Catholic bishops, priests, and deacons to submit a five-to-seven-minute homily (in either...
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True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture, with Abigail Favale
Thirty years ago, in both Evangelium Vitae and his Letter to Women, John Paul II issued a clear call for the genius of women to be “more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church” (Letter to Women 10). Throughout his papacy, in fact, JPII emphasized...
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Church Life Today Rewind: C.S. Lewis's ‘The Great Divorce’: a discussion with Josh McManaway
You can’t take a souvenir from Hell into Heaven; likewise, you can’t fit the realities of Heaven into Hell. That is Gospel truth for C. S. Lewis, especially as he imagines the separation between Heaven and Hell, vice and virtue, corrupt loves and the fullness of joy in his brief, brilliant...
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Praise Her in the Gates: Telling the Pro-Life Story, with Brian Kennedy
“The Gospel is not some vague palliative, it’s a man raised from the dead.” The Pro-Life Movement has, for several decades now, remembered the dead, principally those children lost to abortion, with a hope for a new culture of life raised from those tragedies. And yet the story of the Pro-Life...
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The Next Wave of Artificial Intelligence and Our Humanity, with Stephanie DePrez
Agentic AI is a term that will be new to many people. If we were to think of artificial intelligence in waves, the first wave was about making predictions and the second wave was about generating content. This third wave, known as Agentic AI, is far more sophisticated. It is about AI agents...
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How Many Students Are Studying Theology?!, with Anthony Pagliarini
When people hear about the undergraduate theology program at the University of Notre Dame they are genuinely astonished. They had no idea that that many students were choosing to study theology. Each year, the number of students grows. What is going on? Why are students so interested? What does...
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Rethinking Sex, with Christine Emba
For years now, modern-day sexual ethics has held that “anything goes” when it comes to sex—as long as everyone says yes, and does so enthusiastically. So why, even when consent has been ascertained, are so many sexual experiences filled with frustration and disappointment, even shame? The truth…
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Saints Who Flew, with Carlos Eire
Flying is impossible. Well, not strictly impossible, because we fly in airplanes and hot air balloons, but you know what I mean: human beings can’t fly. It’s impossible. Except here’s the thing: a good number of people –– hundreds, maybe thousands –– have sworn, upon penalty of damnation, that…
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Dilexit Nos – Part 2, a conversation with Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson
Notre Dame professors Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson join me today to talk about Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ. This is the second of two conversations on the encyclical that we are featuring on Church Life Today, each…
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Dilexit Nos – Part 1, a conversation with Joshua McManaway and Melissa Moschella
Notre Dame professors Melissa Moschella and Joshua McManaway join me today to talk about Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ. The encyclical is a call to renew our devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and, thereby, to become more...
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The Catholicity of Montessori Education, with Beth Capdevielle
In her 1936 book, The Secret of Childhood, Maria Montessori writes that “We must wake up to the great reality that children have a psychic life whose delicate manifestations escape notice and whose pattern of activity can be unconsciously disrupted by adults.” The approach to education that...
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The Vigil Project, with Andrew Goldstein
The Vigil Project is a nonprofit Catholic apostolate and collective of musical artists dedicated to leading people to an encounter with God through music. Their work stretches from the liturgy to everyday life, from Sunday worship and Feast Days to Tuesday afternoons waiting in a carpool line....
About this show
Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner.
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