Church Life Today

Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner.

Church Life Today is a religion podcast hosted by Unknown Host, with 265 episodes on record and a Required Pod Score of 80.

Unknown Host hosts Church Life Today, a religion show with 265 episodes published.

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  Church Life Today

  Behold God’s Love: The Album, with Carolyn Pirtle

  Sep 21, 202644 min

  In the summer of 2024, about 1,300 people gathered at Saint Mary's College for the premiere of "Behold God's Love," an original Eucharistic musical in three acts: "Root," "Vine," and "Branches." Everyone else missed it. Now the whole world can listen. The full musical is now available as a recorded album, from the manna in the desert, to the Last Supper, to a house church in Corinth. Today, its creator and composer returns to the show to listen to a few tracks with me. We talk about what they reveal, how performing a role becomes a way of dwelling in Scripture, and how listeners can use the music to pray their way back to the Word and the altar. Carolyn Pirtle is Program Director of the Center for Liturgy in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and the writer and composer of "Behold God's Love." Follow-up Resources: Behold God’s Love album and resources page via McGrath Institute for Church Life “That we might behold,” article by Leonard J. DeLorenzo via OSV News. Behold God’s Love: A Eucharistic Musical , earlier podcast episode with Carolyn Pirtle via Church Life Today Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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  Church Life Today

  John Steinbeck's East of Eden, with Michon Matthiesen

  Aug 2, 202650 min

  There is an old story we keep telling because we cannot stop living it. A brother brings his offering and it is received; another brings his and it is not; and in the space of that difference something curdles. We know how it goes. We have felt the heat rise in our own chests when someone else is favored, praised, chosen—when the good that lands on them seems, by some dark arithmetic, to be subtracted from us. Cain rises up against Abel in a field, and the first human death is not an accident but a killing born of comparison. Why does this story refuse to stay in the past? Perhaps because it is not really about two men long ago. It is about the fault line that runs through every family, every generation, every heart—the temptation to believe that another's blessing is our loss, and that the answer is to strike. John Steinbeck understood this. In East of Eden he takes the Cain and Abel motif and lets it echo down through generations, refiguring it in new fathers and new sons, as if to say: this is the inheritance, this is what we hand down. But he also found, buried in the ancient text, a single word that breaks the spell. Timshel—thou mayest. Not thou shalt, not thou must, but thou mayest. You are not fated to strike. You may yet choose otherwise. That word is where despair and hope divide. And it is where a great novel becomes a school for the soul. My guest today is Michon Matthiesen, Associate Teaching Professor in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, who reads East of Eden with her undergraduates in a course on the theology of envy. She returns to the show to help us see what Steinbeck saw: how the oldest sin keeps rewriting itself across generations, and how a single word might set us free. Links: "Aquinas and the Limits of Forgiveness: A Case Study in Anna Karenina," by Anna Bonta Moreland, article via Church Life Journal "Graham Greene's 'The End of the Affair,' A Conversation with Josh McManaway," podcast episode via Church Life Today "C. S. Lewis’s ‘The Great Divorce’, a discussion with Josh McManaway," podcast episode via Church Life Today “The Lord of the Rings, Sickness, and Health, with Kristin Collier,” podcast episode via Church Life Today "Why Literature Still Matters, with Jason Baxter," podcast episode via Church Life Today Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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  Church Life Today

  Envy: The Anti-Life Sin, and Its Cure, with Michon Matthiesen

  Jul 20, 202639 min

  There is a sin that has learned to survive by not looking like one. We have made room for it—quietly, in the way we work and compete and measure ourselves against the person beside us. We have given it respectable names: ambition, drive, a healthy edge. Everyone feels it, we tell ourselves. So perhaps it cannot be helped. And what cannot be helped, we assume, cannot really be a vice. But the Christian tradition never granted it that cover. It saw this thing as anti-life. It traced it back to Satan himself—not his first sin, but the bitter fruit of his pride, the refusal to bear that another might be beloved. It warned that this sin shrinks the heart, isolates the soul, and turns its poison first upon the one who harbors it—that to give way to it is, in the old and startling image, to lay the hangman against your own heart. It corrodes friendships and families, churches and nations. And it does all of this while convincing us it is only natural. What feeds it is a lie: the fear that there is not enough love to go around, that another's blessing must mean my own diminishment, that I am the less-favored child. And if that is the lie, then the remedy is not merely to try harder to be good. It is to be brought somewhere we can finally see the truth—that before God there is no greater and no lesser, only beloved children, and that the gift given at the altar is not divided when it is shared but multiplied. My guest today has spent years unveiling this sin and naming its cure. She is Michon Matthiesen , of the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, and her work traces it through Scripture and the Fathers, through Aquinas and Dante, all the way to the one place she believes it can finally be undone: the Eucharist. Links: Sacrifice as Gift: Eucharist, Grace, and Contemplative Prayer in Maurice de la Taille , by Michon Matthiesen (Catholic University of America Press) Find an archive of Michon’s work at Adoremus, including essays on the liturgy and Eucharistic sacrifice: https://adoremus.org/author/michon-matthiesen/ On envy in the Summa Theologiae (II-II, q. 36), Thomas Aquinas: https://www.newadvent.org/summa/3036.htm "Hunger, Poverty, and the Eucharist," by Bishop Daniel Flores, article via Church Life Journal “The Joy of Hate Watching,” by Luke Burgis, article via Church Life Journal Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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  Church Life Today

  The Education of the Soul: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Project, with Shannon Valenzuela

  Jul 6, 202638 min

  Somewhere along the way, we started training young people to be merely operators. We teach them to manage the machine, to run the system, to handle the tool that does the real work—and we measure their learning by how well they can retrieve what they need at the moment they need it. It is an efficient arrangement. It is also a strange one, because the things we most admire in a person—the capacity to think clearly when the air turns thick, to imagine, to judge well, to hold fast to what is true when someone is bending the meaning of words—none of these can be outsourced. They have to be formed. That is an older word for what school was once for: formation. Not the acquisition of data, but the slow shaping of a soul—its memory, its loves, its capacity to perceive what is real. And there may be no better guide to recovering that vision than C.S. Lewis, who hid an entire philosophy of education inside stories we hand to children, and who knew that the adventure itself is the formative thing. My guest today is Shannon Valenzuela, a writer, director, and producer working in the same imaginative tradition of Lewis, and an Affiliate Assistant Professor of Humanities at the University of Dallas. This past year she served as a Fellow of our Inklings Project—the McGrath Institute's fellowship that gathers educators from around the globe to read deeply in the company of Lewis, Tolkien, and the great sources behind them. We talk about what the Chronicles of Narnia teach us about forming the whole person, about memory and mastery and Aslan as the model teacher, and about where the Inklings Project is headed next—including a new fellowship opening to middle school and high school educators. Follow-up Resources: Learn more about the Inklings Project , which is currently inviting Middle and High School Educators to apply for its fellowship program by August 1, 2026 Follow Shannon Valenzuela’s new Adoro Te film series and sign up for updates: https://millefioristudios.myflodesk.com/eucharist Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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  Church Life Today

  Three Saints of the Sacred Heart

  Jun 15, 202622 min

  Your heart is restless. It wants more than this world can give. It longs for a love that will not fail, a peace that will not pass away, a home that cannot be taken from you. You know this—perhaps you have always known it—even when you try to silence the longing with lesser things. In the seventeenth century, Jesus revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque the answer to that longing. He showed her his Sacred Heart: aflame with love, wounded by ingratitude, yearning for souls who would console him through their devotion. What she saw was not simply a vision but an invitation. Christ was opening his heart to her—and through her, to us—saying in effect: This is what you have been seeking. This is where you belong. The Sacred Heart has become a home for many saints over the ages. In this episode, I want to share with you, briefly, three saints who fostered a devotion to the Sacred Heart. I add this to a previous episode where I shared a longer reflection on St. Margaret Mary Alacoque herself. These reflections are taken from my new book, The Rule of the Sacred Heart: Finding Rest in a Restless World . I crafted this book as a 33-day devotional, leading us, step by step, toward intimacy with Christ in his Sacred Heart and responding to his mercy in our lives. Over the 33 days, we meditate on biblical scenes, probe the revelations of the Sacred Heart to Christ’s saints, and give our minds and hearts little by little to the Sacred Heart each day, all while taking on small but intentional devotions. What I share with you today are short introductions to three saints that accompany the devotions in the third week of the devotional journey. I hope you enjoy. Follow-up Resources: The Rule of the Sacred Heart: Finding Rest in a Restless World by Leonard DeLorenzo (OSV) “St. Margaret Mary Alacoque and the Devotion to the Sacred Heart,” podcast episode via Church Life Today “Drawing close to feel the beating of the Sacred Heart,” by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, article via Our Sunday Visitor Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

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