Thirty years ago, in both Evangelium Vitae and his Letter to Women, John Paul II issued a clear call for the genius of women to be “more fully expressed in the life of society as a whole, as well as in the life of the Church” (Letter to Women 10). Throughout his papacy, in fact, JPII emphasized women’s “prophetic character,” calling on them to be “witnesses” and “sentinels” — guardians of the sacred gift of life and the order of love (Mulieris Dignitatem 29; Homily at Lourdes 2004).

This vision for women, clarified and proclaimed in the late twentieth century especially, has yet to be fully realized. Catholics in contemporary America face distorted narratives about women from both poles of our divided culture. By revisiting and extending John Paul II's thought we come upon the opportunity to offer a positive countervision to, on the one hand, the growing anti-feminism in some Catholic circles and, on the other hand, the widely-held perception that the Church is anti-woman.

The McGrath Institute for Church Life is hosting a conference that aims to help develop that positive countervision.

“True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture” will take place March 26 to March 28, 2025, on the campus of the University of Notre Dame. It boasts a stellar roster of speakers, including Helen Alvare, Sr. Ann Astell, Erika Bachiochi, Angela Franks, Sarah Denny Lorio, Sr. Theresa Alethia Noble, Leah Libresco Sargeant, and my guest today, Abigail Favale. Abigail and I are colleagues in the McGrath Institute, and she is the conference convener and orgranizer.

Registration for the “True Genius” conference is now open, and we have links to more conference information and registration available in our show notes.

Show Notes:

• “True Genius: The Mission of Women in Church and Culture” conference information and registration
• “Can the Feminine Speak?” by Abigail Favale, article in Church Life Journal
• “Hildegard of Bingen’s Vital Contribution to the Concept of Woman,” by Abigail Favale, article in Church Life Journal
• “No Woman Is Only Woman: Distilling the Feminine Genius from Stereotypes,” interview with Sr. Theresa Aletheia Noble on The Catholic Woman

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.

You can’t take a souvenir from Hell into Heaven; likewise, you can’t fit the realities of Heaven into Hell. That is Gospel truth for C. S. Lewis, especially as he imagines the separation between Heaven and Hell, vice and virtue, corrupt loves and the fullness of joy in his brief, brilliant eschatological novel, The Great Divorce.

As we make the turn from Lent and Passion Week to the glory of Easter, Josh McManaway returns to the program to share a conversation with Leonard DeLorenzo about a book they both love.

Follow-up Resources:

• Learn more about The Inklings Project, a new intercollegiate initiative that invites people to pursue meaning and joy by entering the world of C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and the other Inklings at inklingsproject.org.
• “Giving Up Descartes for Lent,” by Josh McManaway, essay in Church Life Journal
• The Chronicles of Transformation: A Spiritual Journey with C. S. Lewis, edited by Leonard J. DeLorenzo (Ignatius Press, 2022)

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.

“The Gospel is not some vague palliative, it’s a man raised from the dead.” The Pro-Life Movement has, for several decades now, remembered the dead, principally those children lost to abortion, with a hope for a new culture of life raised from those tragedies. And yet the story of the Pro-Life Movement is primarily told by its enemies, who regularly reduce the movement to caricatures and sound-bites, leveling into a collection angry objections and hostile tactics. The story of the pro-life movement––both its past and its present unfolding into the future––has not really been told as a coherent and full narrative. And so my guest today and his collaborators have set out to chronicle America in the age of abortion and emphasize the response of the pro-life movement as an unparalleled model for social and political resistance. It is a work that seeks to reckon with our dead in obedience to the man raised from the dead.

Praise Her in the Gates – Dispatches for a Pro-Life Nation is a longform (multi-episode, multi-season) audio journal released on January 22, 2025. Its creator, the artist Brian Kennedy, joins me today to talk about the original work and what it offers to us, whether we count ourselves as members of the pro-life movement or not. It is a work arising from the Catholic imagination, with which things otherwise neglected or forgotten are perceived, revered, mourned, and praised.

Follow-up Resources:

• Lydwine Substack, home of Praise Her in the Gates (first episodes released January 25, 2025)
• “The Ghost Outside,” essay by Brian Kennedy
• “Vandals at the Golden Gate, Part One,” essay by Brian Kennedy
• “How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 1, with Tricia Bruce,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “How Americans Understand Abortion, Part 2, with Tricia Bruce,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Mary O’Callaghan on Disability Selective Abortions,” 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.

Agentic AI is a term that will be new to many people. If we were to think of artificial intelligence in waves, the first wave was about making predictions and the second wave was about generating content. This third wave, known as Agentic AI, is far more sophisticated. It is about AI agents performing complex tasks and making decisions. That might sound like the beginning of a dystopian novel or an apocalyptic film, but in reality it has much more to do with how we engage in the consumer marketplace or with service providers, or really just about how we go through our day-to-day lives doing our day-to-day tasks.

Our episode today is the beginning of a conversation about what is taking place with the increasing integration of AI into our society and, in light of this, what is important for our own human and interpersonal development. My guest is my longtime friend who has been on our podcast before, Stephanie DePrez. For the past couple years, Stephanie has been working for a company investing heavily in Agentic AI, while also continuing to pursue her career in opera and comedy in Germany. She reached out to me after listening to our recent episodes on the encyclical Dilexit Nos, which is of course all about the Sacred Heart of Jesus, to talk about what the growth in Agentic AI means for our humanity.

Follow-up Resources:

• “Dilexit Nos – Part 1, a conversation with Joshua McManaway and Melissa Moschella,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Dilexit Nos – Part 2, a conversation with Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “In Search of a Full Life: A Spiritual and Practical Guide,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Life is changed but something ended, with Stephanie DePrez,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• Find out more about Stephanie DePrez’s work in opera, comedy, voice coaching, and writing at stephaniedeprez.com.
• “What is Man that AI Is Mindful of Him?”, by Jeffrey Bishop, essay 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.

When people hear about the undergraduate theology program at the University of Notre Dame they are genuinely astonished. They had no idea that that many students were choosing to study theology. Each year, the number of students grows. What is going on? Why are students so interested? What does this tell us about evangelization, and hope for the Church, in the Church?

My guest today is my friend and colleague, Professor Anthony Pagliarini, who is the director of the undergraduate theology program at Notre Dame. In this capacity, not only does he teach hundreds of students annually in the classroom, he also meets with, learns from, and advises all the students who declare theology majors or minors at Notre Dame. He’ll help us learn about what is going on in Notre Dame’s theology program and why it is happening.

Follow-up Resources:

• Notre Dame Theology Department website
• “What happened to these Catholic college students after they took a required theology course,” article in Aleteia by Leonard DeLorenzo
• “Encouraging students to ‘Take a Second Look’ at Notre Dame,” about a new initiative with Notre Dame theology to re-propose the Catholic faith

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.

For years now, modern-day sexual ethics has held that “anything goes” when it comes to sex—as long as everyone says yes, and does so enthusiastically. So why, even when consent has been ascertained, are so many sexual experiences filled with frustration and disappointment, even shame?

The truth is that the rules that make up today’s consent-only sexual code may actually be the cause of the sexual malaise—not the solution. In Rethinking Sex, reporter Christine Emba shows how consent is a good ethical floor but a terrible ceiling. She spells out the cultural, historical, and psychological forces that have warped the idea of sex, what is permitted, and what is considered “safe.”

Reaching back to the wisdom of thinkers like Thomas Aquinas and Andrea Dworkin, and drawing from sociological studies, interviews with college students, and poignant examples from her own life, Emba calls for a more humane philosophy, one that starts with consent but accounts for the very real emotional, mental, social, and spiritual implications of sex.

With a target audience that clearly includes sexually active young adults, Emba tries to help us imagine what it means to will the good of others and thereby discover greater affirmation and fulfillment.

Follow-up Resources:

• Rethinking Sex: A Provocation, by Christine Emba
• “In Search of a Full Life: A Practical and Spiritual Guide,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, with J.P. DeGance,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Letter to a Young Catholic: How to have sex,” article by Leonard J. DeLorenzo in Our Sunday Visitor
• “The End of Friendship, with Jennifer Senior,” 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.

Flying is impossible. Well, not strictly impossible, because we fly in airplanes and hot air balloons, but you know what I mean: human beings can’t fly. It’s impossible.

Except here’s the thing: a good number of people –– hundreds, maybe thousands –– have sworn, upon penalty of damnation, that they have witnessed people flying, or at least levitating. People like Teresa of Avila and Joseph of Cupertino. About saints like these, a nearly overwhelming number of testimonies say the same thing over and over: “they flew”.

If flying is impossible, then the history of saints who flew is a history of the impossible. And that is the book my guest wrote. The book is They Flew: A History of the Impossible. The author and my guest is the esteemed scholar Dr. Carlos Eire, the T. L. Riggs Professor of History and Religious Studies at Yale University.

Professor Eire joined us at the University of Notre Dame to deliver a lecture in our Saturdays with the Saints series, and a link to the recording of that lecture is included in this episode’s show notes.

Follow-up Resources:

• They Flew: A History of the Impossible, by Carlos Eire
• Saturdays with the Saints lecture.
• “The Trouble with Levitation and Bilocation,” by Carlos Eire, journal article in 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.

Notre Dame professors Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson join me today to talk about Pope Francis’s new encyclical, Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ. This is the second of two conversations on the encyclical that we are featuring on Church Life Today, each with faculty colleagues of mine from the McGrath Institute for Church Life. In this episode, we will talk about poetry and symbolism, artificial intelligence and algorithms, the importance of memory, the human person as a living union, and more.

Abigail Favale is Professor of the Practice at Notre Dame, where her academic expertise brings her to the intersection of theology, literature, and women’s studies.

Brett Robinson is Associate Director of Outreach and Associate Professor of the Practice in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. He leads a number of initiatives in our institute, especially ones related to Catholic media studies.

Follow-up Resources:

• Dilexit Nos: On the Human and Divine Love of the Heart of Jesus Christ
• Part 1 of the conversation on the new encyclical, with Melissa Moschella and Joshua McManaway, podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “The Sacred Heart of the New Encyclical,” by Leonard DeLorenzo, essay in Church Life Journal
• “Some Human Beings Carry Remnants of Other Human Beings in Their Bodies,” by Kristin Collier, essay in Church Life Journal
• On the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus by the Sisters of Carmel

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.