As the Catholic Church around the world prepares to celebrate and support Pope Francis’ World Mission Sunday (October 24), Word on Fire Communications Director Will Sipling interviewed Monsignor Kieran Harrington, National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies, who provided some interesting facts and compelling comments about evangelization and the Great Commission.  Will Sipling: What are the Pontifical Mission Societies? How […]

The following piece, “What We Stay Alive For: Dead Poets Society and the Crisis of the Humanities” first appeared in the Autumn 2021 issue of Evangelization & Culture, the quarterly journal of the Word on Fire Institute. You can learn more and become a member today to read more pieces like this. It is a strange thing to return to a […]

There are times when, all too innocently and because we have not been mindful of what is before us, we give too much license to a dead past that cannot be changed, and then we lose our handle on things. Like the Sorcerer’s Apprentice, we conjure from the ether of our past a solitary-but-sharply-outlined idea, and then, one after another, […]

“This the new me, so get used to me.” So raps Kanye West on his long-awaited tenth studio album Donda, named after the rapper’s late mother, who passed away in 2007. It’s a fitting tagline because by now, many of Kanye’s old fans probably expected him to stop being so Christian, and many of his newer Christian fans probably expected […]

The following is the introduction to the Gospel of Luke from The Word on Fire Bible (Volume I): The Gospels, the first installment of the forthcoming collection. You can find the Bible in three different styles here in the bookstore: https://bookstore.wordonfire.org/collections/bible  What are we to make of the Gospel of Luke—a Gospel traditionally believed to have come from the hand […]

Midnight Mass is a seven-part, supernatural horror series for Netflix about a predominantly Catholic island, long in decline, that is suddenly and miraculously reinvigorated. Creator and director Mike Flanagan’s previous offerings for streaming include The Haunting of Hill House (2018) and The Haunting of Bly Manor (2020), along with feature films including Doctor Sleep, the sequel to The Shining. Flanagan […]

It was pretty awkward. They all just stood there staring at me. And the sweat just trickled down the back of my neck. Let me start by saying that it had been a long night. I was a freshly minted third-year medical student. Awash in book knowledge but bereft of experience, I began my internal medicine rotation at Abbott Northwestern […]

St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, famous for his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, is widely known as a gifted thinker and writer, with his powerful and incisive intellect demonstrated in closely argued scholarship, such as Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, A Grammar of Assent, and The Idea of a University. He was also a powerful preacher and writer […]

When Pope Francis declared 2021 to be the Year of St. Joseph, many of my Catholic friends expressed enthusiasm for the opportunity to focus more intently on the foster father to the Christ and spouse of Mary, the Theotokos. Although popes and bishops and saints, to a one, have expressed admiration and spiritual gratitude to Joseph (with some, like Teresa […]

Faithful parents are rightly stressed about handing on the faith to their children—an always risky proposition, for we have no idea whether the story of salvation will take root in good soil or somehow end up amid rocks as yet unseen—and hence, the need for guidance in the art of religious parenting.   Only decades ago, families felt confident that the […]