Daniel P. Horan

Faith Seeking Understanding: It's worth remembering that the Gospels consistently portray Jesus Christ reserving his harshest criticism and condemnation for religious hypocrites. We have to hold one another accountable.

Faith Seeking Understanding: A crisis of imagination is striking culture and politics, and the Holy Spirit's working in the church. As much as human imagination is a cognitive function, it is also a spiritual one.

Faith Seeking Understanding: I have often found myself struggling these last few weeks to do something that I am expected to do almost naturally by virtue of my life and profession: that is, pray.

Faith Seeking Understanding: It's true that Christ is uniquely present in the Blessed Sacrament, but it's not true that this is the only way God draws near to humanity and the rest of creation.

Faith Seeking Understanding: At its core, the communion of saints is an affirmation of the empowering, unifying and healing work of the Holy Spirit among all God's people and creation.

Faith Seeking Understanding: When we embrace an integral ecological approach to understanding the world and our place within the broader community of creation, what comes next?

Faith Seeking Understanding: A true sense of interconnectedness suggests that one cannot merely select a single ethical issue in isolation as if it were unrelated to all others.

Faith Seeking Understanding: While Black History Month is a time for people of African descent to celebrate their legacy, it offers a particular challenge and opportunity for white people like me.

Faith Seeking Understanding: The Eucharist is not simply a means by which humanity receives the sacramental presence of Christ, it is the privileged place where God is now present to our world as part of that world.

Faith Seeking Understanding: I thought about a column that imagined an optimistic decade ahead, and I wondered what it might look like to engage in a similar imaginative exercise for the church.

Faith Seeking Understanding: This Christmas may we recognize the cosmic significance of the Word becoming flesh, humbly recalling our place as fellow members of God's family of creation and working to respect, preserve, and protect our creaturely sisters and brothers in Christ.

While there are undoubtedly bad actors in our church and world, most people strive to do the right thing, seek a life of integrity, and wish to do no harm. So how do we end up with the messes we have before us?

Faith Seeking Understanding: Thanksgiving, while typically viewed as a secular holiday, offers Christians a liminal moment to pause between the then and now, the old and new, the already and not yet.

A broader sense of synodality is about proper recognition of the place of all the baptized faithful in the prudential discernment about church decision-making and governance. It is what the church might look like at its best.

Newman's theological corpus presciently lays a foundation for the kind of discussions about and development of theology and church discipline seen as most contentious in recent months. 

Faith Seeking Understanding: In addition to the directly identifying white supremacy and engaging with key theologians in the field, El Paso Bishop Mark Seitz's pastoral letter not only names the sin of racism but also names the sinners.

Faith Seeking Understanding: While media attention in the coming weeks will inevitably be preoccupied with those issues seen as most contentious and controversial at the synod, another kind of history-making shift may be underway shaping how the church understands itself and engages other traditions.

Faith Seeking Understanding: St. Francis called all creatures — and not merely those nonhuman animals we classify as sentient, but rocks and trees alike — his sisters and brothers because, in a real sense, they are.

Faith Seeking Understanding: While I agree with the intellectual and moral integrity of the consistent ethic of life principle, which upholds that every human life — born and unborn — is inherently valuable, dignified and must be protected, ​we live in a time when a more fundamental issue threatens all life.

Faith Seeking Understanding: St. Joseph Sr. Helen Prejean's memoir shows there is no singular point of decision in the Christian life. Rather, there is a constant need for ongoing conversion, growth and change guided by the Holy Spirit.