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ND Folk Choir releases first live CD

The live album, From Gethsemani to Galway, charts the 30-year journey of the Folk Choir.

Flights of Fancy

In a world where the supernatural is threatened with extinction, the sacred may survive in the lands of fairies, fantasy and fable.

Reading, 'riting, 'rithmetic? Try tobacco, piraters and lumberjacks

Women & Spirit tells lovingly documented stories about faith-filled women who sacrificed family ties and material comfort to serve and lead and help shape our nation into something ennobling and entirely new.

And so then I say

I grew up in the house and the town in which my dad grew up, which meant my family hosted dozens of visits from his six siblings through the years. Whenever aunts and uncles came, they always made a trip to the cemetery to visit the family graves.

Women & Spirit

Women & Spirit is organized by the Leadership Conference of Women Religious, which represents 95 percent of Catholic sisters in the United States.

Look who's watching

“You are the eyes and ears of the neighborhood,” the police chief tells us at the neighborhood watch meeting. “Law enforcement counts on you to report any unusual activity.”

Believing: Waiting for the fire

Perhaps even more than most other mammals of the northern hemisphere, human inhabitants of the cloud-shrouded Saint Joseph River valley long for the vernal equinox. I certainly do. And this was Palm Sunday. The earth had begun its warming tilt toward the sun three weeks before, the moon was swelling night by night, and the forsythias my wife had planted two years ago were blazing into flower.

Great God, It’s the Great God Debate

On April 7, a sold-out audience in Notre Dame’s Leighton Concert Hall watched this year’s edition of “The God Debate.”Before a packed house, “New Atheist” Sam Harris and philosopher of religion William Lane Craig argued whether God is the source of morality.

Into the Deep

At the end of this life on Earth, we all face a journey into the mysterious unknown.

A sacrament of food

I think often of Saint Maximilian Kolbe, the Polish priest who offered himself up to starve to death in another man’s place at Auschwitz. I think of his sacrifice, of the terrible phenomenon of depriving people of food. And it occurred to me recently that perhaps the one more corrupt torture vis-à-vis food would be to make people eat.

A death in the family: Father Ernan McMullin

A leading philosopher of science, recruited out of his doctoral studies at Belgium’s University of Louvain in 1954 by a young Father Ted Hesburgh, CSC, and remembered by colleagues as “one of the giants of Notre Dame,” has died.

My Church Home?

Many African-American Catholics still wonder if the faith is a place of their own. Here’s what some of them had to say.

The Brothers Dunne

One is a priest, a world-class theologian and revered teacher who has influenced generations of Notre Dame students. But to his brother, Patrick, a lawyer, teacher and writer, he is Scribner.

A musical feast on film

Professor Margot Fassler wanted to make a film about the Copts, ethnically Egyptian Orthodox Christians, to give people a taste of their “glorious” music.

Seven ideas for a sacred music renaissance

Domers like their traditions, which means that music Professor Peter Jeffery should feel right at home at Notre Dame. Jeffery is an authority on Gregorian chant.

Master singers workshop

Here, student Priscilla Weaver leads the workshop through 19th century composer Josef Rheinberger’s “Abendlied.”

From Leahy to Our Lady

A priest who believed in teamwork launched a religious order that now spans the globe.

The Doorway to Sainthood

André Bessette, the Holy Cross brother who was a doorkeeper at Notre Dame College in Montreal, ascends the altar of the saints.

Holy Week in Tequepexpan

When a priest heads to a remote Mexican village for Easter, he discovers a people whose embrace is warm and a world full of unexpected trouble and grace.

The economy of grace

Like a carnival barker with holy water, the priest generously dispensed the heavenly graces while pilgrims held high their rosaries, holy cards and plastic replicas in order to receive the divine droplets in the August sun.

Anywhere at home

Parts of relocating never get easier. I inevitably realize that I have no idea what to do with myself in a place which is now home but has none of the familiarity of home. One way I start is to find my new church.

$1.7 million grant targets the ‘problem of evil’

An infant dies of starvation. An earthquake leaves a million people homeless. A guerrilla fighter murders civilians in front of their children. How could an omnipotent, benevolent God permit such evil and suffering?

Concelebrating Mass at the border

During the Feast of All Souls, I had the great privilege of concelebrating Mass at the border between Ciudad Juarez in Mexico and Anapra in New Mexico. Each year Mass is offered for all those who have died trying to cross the border.

As it was in the beginning

Outmoded and pointless: That’s the philosophical judgment of many who think a belief in God as Creator is an artifact from a less enlightened age.

The commemorations last year of the birth of Charles Darwin (1809) and of the publication of On the Origin of Species (1859) offered us a stark reminder that scientific advances in evolutionary biology and cosmology have long served as the basis for that increasingly pervasive philosophical outlook, which dismisses divine agency.…

Stirring vocations

A Tuesday in May. The Basilica of the Sacred Heart had its usual congregation of students, faculty and staff on a prayerful break. As could only happen at Notre Dame, they walked into an ordinary weekday liturgy and found it concelebrated by six bishops and more than 20 priests. The National Black Catholic Congress was on campus for “Stir into Flame — A Symposium on the Vocation to the Catholic Priesthood in the African American Community.”

Believing: Mantra for Mary

“Bourdon” is a rare and splendid word, not the sort of word you use every day, but certainly a word to lift your hat to, as Emily Dickinson once said of the word “phosphorescence.”

A pastoral welcome

The Notre Dame community officially welcomed its new bishop during a special Mass of Thanksgiving on Tuesday evening, February 9, in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart.

A zest for living

My colleagues on the Notre Dame faculty were amazed when they heard I had signed up to travel with students on the “Short Trip” to the Jan. 22 March for Life in Washington, D.C

Learning to talk to God

“I want to thank God for the things we have and things we don’t have,” my daughter began at dinner one night. My husband and I looked at each other, intrigued. Lately our 5-year-old had begun to improvise grace before meals.

What Time Shall I Pray?

When my friend Barbara said she had a meeting later in the day that could result in a lucrative consulting project, my mother’s stock response rolled right off my tongue. “What time shall I pray?”