Start by saying yes: to God’s love, to engaged citizenship, to service to what is right, and courageous resistance to what is wrong.
Francis, leader of the world's 1.2 billion Roman Catholics, urged people to see the defenseless baby Jesus in the children who suffer the most from war, migration, and natural calamities caused by man today.
In the midst of fear and despair, Jim Wallis finds comfort and joy through living and trusting Christmas.
“I am so pro-protest and call-out and raising hell. I feel it coming,” one Auburn graduate and Alabama native, who recently moved to Minnesota, told me.
"I think the opportunities to act on these convictions for the good of others will continue opening. I hope they do. I’m ready for them.”
2017 was a year in which people were all too often treated as means to an end.
Perhaps in 2018 we can inscribe a different kind of a lesson.
2. Bringing Light to Our Nation’s Very Dark Night
“We feel the chill in our souls. We taste the darkness all around us. It’s important to remember: It’s only temporary. The light is still there – dimmed but never extinguished, ready to warm and lead us all over again, if we let it.”
A gorgeous photo essay featuring Bjorn Nilsen, the man who drives 125 miles every day to deliver mail to the residents of the isolated Lofoten Islands. “Among older residents, who suffer most from isolation, he might be the only person they see for days."
The U.S. State Department announced that it will drastically cut down the number of refugee resettlement offices across the country since the Trump administration's plans to sharply reduce refugee admissions into the U.S., according to a Reuters report.
The successors of St. Francis of Assisi, who invented the nativity scene, craft a different scene each year outside the basilica in the Italian hill city of Assisi, the burial place of the 13th-century patron saint of peace and the environment.
Kevin L. Ladd, a professor of psychology at Indiana University South Bend, said it makes sense that, as society grows less religious in the traditional sense, fewer people are turning to prayer.
Mullally’s gender pleases those seeking evidence of growing equality for women in the church — her predecessor Richard Chartres did not ordain women priests. But while she supports traditional church teaching on marriage being between a man and a woman, she is also said to be supportive of greater equality for gay people.