As we approach the manger, remember God is with us →

Thirty-three years ago, on the night before the First Sunday in Advent 1986, I came home to the Catholic Church. Technically, that makes me a “revert,” but describing myself as one seems overly dramatic, since I had been physically absent from the Church for only four weeks. There are more than a few able-bodied Catholics who consider themselves practicing if they make it to Mass once a month.

But for me, those four weeks toward the end of my first term at Michigan State had been rough. I was lost, and I knew it.

To whom should we go? →

We ask for, and receive, the gift of faith at our baptism. We receive the grace to know Christ — not to know him as we know George Washington or Martin Luther, but as I know my parents and my sisters and my wife and my children. This is the substance of our faith: to enter into a relationship with Jesus, with the God-made-man who is not an abstraction but is as real as the faces gathered around our dining-room table at Thanksgiving.

No guarantees: Why parents must pray like St. Monica →

We can learn from the example of St. Monica and pray — not just that a child may come back to the Faith, but that he or she may never lose her love for the gift she has been given.

Imagine this: the consequences when we fail to feed our faith →

When we see with the eyes of faith, we don’t blindly accept something simply because the Church tells us it’s true; we know that it is true because the gift of faith allows us to experience the depths of reality that go beyond what we can see without that gift.

The best lack all conviction →

I keep returning to the works of Walker Percy because no other writer has understood so well the widespread loss of Christian belief in the modern world, and what is necessary to regain it.