All around you, wherever you live, there are quiet heroes. I’m sure you could come up with your own personal list: A mother struggling to maximize the potential of a child with autism, a husband tenderly caring for a dependent and querulous wife with Alzheimer’s disease. Or perhaps you know people whose love for Christ moves them to do something out of the ordinary—say, a gifted scientist who leaves a lucrative corporate job to teach in an inner-city school. More »

Every now and again, God’s mercy touches a person in a way that cries out to be shared with others. My mother, Adeline Lapierre, had an experience like this and told about it often. More »

Very early one November morning in 1535, as the light cast soft shadows on the austere Castilian landscape, twenty-year-old Teresa de Ahumada y Cepeda stole away from her home in Avila. Her destination—the Carmelite Convent of the Incarnation in the same city. Her heart ached that morning at the thought of leaving her widowed father behind. “It seemed that every bone in my body was being sundered,” she later wrote. More »

In Thérèse’s day, many people had a mistaken idea of holiness and thought that sanctity was a matter of willful effort well beyond the ordinary person. The mistaken idea of holiness often suggested was that sanctity was a matter of willful effort well beyond the ordinary person. More »

The archangels we celebrate on September 29 act as God’s messengers to his people, and there are many biblical examples of their work in salvation history. But did you realize that the most important role of the angels of God is to praise him before his throne? More »

Who is the number one exemplar, or model, that the Spirit uses to inspire us? It is Jesus, of course. But Jesus cannot model response to Jesus! More »

In 2007, a new book about Mother Teresa was published, grabbing headlines and causing people around the world to look at her in a completely new light. More »

Tourists on a glorious spring day in 2003, my husband and I took a short metro ride to the outskirts of Rome to Ostia Antica, the ruins of a once great port city. For several hours we roamed this large, preserved site of antiquity. More »