as if you are a child lost on the water in a boat cast off from its lines

I am grateful for all the poets who submitted their work for the contest. Every year we get poems from all over the United States, and even across the world, about any number of topics.

I am a bishop, but before anything else, I am a human being who understands the severe toll of mental illness, especially when it is left untreated.

'City of Dignity,' by Sean T. Dempsey, S.J., tells a story of how progressive religious leaders, organizations and institutions worked to shape Los Angeles into a city where dignity flourished through their grassroots organizing and activism in the decades after World War II until the mid-1990s.

In 'Vigil Harbor,' Julia Glass shares a complex tale about a town’s history of close encounters with violence, but also about the open and helpful community that unintentionally enables some of the calamities that ensue.

Our society lacks the moral conviction that the unborn deserve protection in law. Pro-lifers must work to show that opposition to abortion is part of a moral vision, not mere political alignment.

Some of Ms. Smith’s posts get upward of 500,000 likes, including many people sharing about friends or family whom they have lost.

’The air was still. The silence felt like a cloak enfolding the room.‘

In his weekly general audience, Pope Francis uses St. Francis Xavier as an example of missionary zeal who spread the Gospel to people who had never heard it before.

The combination of religious faith and prophetic political action that marked César Chávez’s hunger strikes would become typical of many other moments in his long career as a labor organizer turned American icon.