How should Christians approach suffering, especially in Lent when it takes on a renewed focus through prayer, fasting, and almsgiving? This question is even more important as our culture seems to see suffering as something to avoid at all costs or something that only distracts from our purpose, flourishing, or meaning. Lent, however, allows us […]

By Lucia A. Silecchia “The seaweed is always greener in somebody else’s lake.” Thanks to the Disney franchise’s uncanny ability to generate memorable movie tunes and some time spent recently with a young “Little Mermaid” fan, this line keeps running through my mind. Like any good jingle, it has wormed its way into my ears. At […]

By William Saunders, IHE Scholar and Director of the MA in Human Rights Around the turn of the century, I met Saint Josephine Bakhita amid a forgotten and ignored conflict in a foreign land. However, this meeting requires a word of explanation since she died long ago in 1879.  In the late 1990s, at the behest […]

By Lucia A. Silecchia In these past few weeks, I — like so many others — saw the winter’s first snowfalls. Since weather is a perennially popular topic for small talk, it did not take long to see that snowfall receives very different receptions from all those on whom it falls. Some welcomed the snowfall as […]

It happens all year — the requests for donations for all manner of charitable causes.

By Lucia A. Silecchia Every year, as Advent and Christmas approach, I seem to have the same conversation with one of my students. When I ask how the semester is wrapping up, invariably one of my students will tell me how busy they are preparing for final exams, writing course papers, and putting the finishing […]

By IHE Graduate Scholar Jeanne Michelle Datiles All Saints and All Souls: twin feasts that mark the start of November. Perhaps the familiar roll call of ‘apostles, martyrs, confessors, virgins’ from the Litany of Loreto pulses in our mind when we think of All Saints. While those ancient categories still stand, they’re given depth, fleshed […]

My team did not make it to the World Series.   They got close — very close.  Alas, the playoffs did not end well for them. I am not the most devoted fan since I usually do not follow the team’s progress until the excitement of the later part of the season when the stakes are […]