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.

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.

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.

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.

What are we building? Pope Leo XIV puts that question to us in his new encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence. The title itself echoes Mary's Magnificat — the song of a humanity whose grandeur is recognized in being lifted up by God, not in seizing heaven for itself. That grandeur, the Pope insists, is revealed in its fullness only in Christ, and threatened today by new forms of dehumanization.

The encyclical takes its bearings from two biblical images: the Tower of Babel, where a unified language and a unified technology serve a project that aspires to reach heaven without God; and the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah, where a city is reborn through prayer and the shared responsibility of all. Pope Leo asks us which of these we are building. Technology, he reminds us, is never neutral. It takes the character of those who devise, finance, and deploy it.

Brett Robinson joins me today to help us read this encyclical. Brett is my colleague here in the McGrath Institute for Church Life, where he leads our efforts in Catholic Media Studies.

Follow-up Resources:

• Magnifica Humanitas, Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV
• "Dilexit Nos – Part 2, a conversation with Abigail Favale and Brett Robinson," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "Edge of Belief: UFO's, Technology, and the Catholic Imagination, with Brett Robinson," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "AI, Ethics, and the Common Good, with Adam Kronk," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "AI, Education, and Doing Hard Stuff, with Adam Kronk," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "The Next Wave of Artificial Intelligence and Our Humanity, with Stephanie DePrez," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "Dilexi Te: On Love for the Poor, with Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando," podcast episode via Church Life Today
• "Habemus Papam, with John Cavadini," 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.

When Pope Leo XIV issued his first apostolic exhortation, he chose a title drawn from the Book of Revelation: Dilexi te — "I have loved you." Those words, addressed to a community with little power and little standing, become in this document Christ's word to the poor of every age. The poor are not a problem to be managed. They are, the Pope insists, the place where Christ continues to speak.

But who exactly are the poor? That question turns out to be less obvious than it sounds. Poverty, as Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando helps us see in this conversation, is not one thing. It is material and spiritual, negative and positive, something suffered and — in a different sense — something chosen. Any serious reading of Dilexi te has to reckon with that complexity.

Fr. Cristian, who teaches at Santa Croce in Rome, joins me today following a lecture he gave on Dilexi te at the University of Notre Dame.

Follow-up Resources:

• Dilexi Te, Apostolic Exhortation by Pope Leo XIV
• “Anthropological concerns regarding digital technologies,” by Fr. Cristian Mendoza Ovando, journal article via Church, Communication and Culture
• “The Sacred Heart of the New Encyclical,” by Leonard DeLorenzo, article on Dilexit Nos in Church Life Journal
• “The Church is the Sacrament of the Preferential Option for the Poor,” by John Cavadini, article in Church Life Journal
• “The Eucharist Commits Us to the Poor,” by John Cavadini, 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.

There is a lot of animosity out there, a lot of distrust, and a lot of fear and persistent anxiety about so many things. Where, in all that, can we go to find words that bring life? In particular, where might we find books that rise above the morass of the day to show us art that builds on the foundations of truth, beauty, and goodness? Providing a place that does just this, where a community of thinkers, writers, and readers are engaged in the common mission of preserving literate culture for generations to come … is precisely the mission of the new imprint from Word on Fire, called Luminor.

By publishing novels, short stories, memoirs, poetry, and more, Luminor brings out buried riches from the treasury of Catholic literature and highlights fresh voices among writers formed by Catholicity in our time.

 Joining me today is Katy Carl, editor of Luminor, to share with us why this mission is so important today and what we can expect to find in this new imprint.

Links:

• Learn more about Luminor at https://www.wordonfire.org/luminor 
• “When Nobody Reads Anymore: Positionality, Prophecy, and the Artist’s Vocation” by Katy Carl, article via Church Life Journal
• “Why Literature Still Matters, with Jason Baxter,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Graham Greene’s ‘The End of the Affair,’ A Conversation with Josh McManaway,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Dilexit Nos—Part 1, a conversation with Josh 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

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 you are a new parent, you may desire a genuine religious experience, but your young child often has other ideas. It’s not that the child is opposed to God per se; just sort of opposed to your plans and schedule and rhythm. You know what that’s like, right? The drama of the pew at Mass, the irregularity of morning and nighttime rituals, the joyful uncertainty of a rapidly developing young human being who has urges and powers and interests of their own.

 The conversation on our show today is about the desires of faith and the practice of parenting. It is about creating beautiful things for small hands and new eyes; of building up the basic habits of a life of faith; and even of parents and children, older folks and the youngest folks, coming to share their lives together more deeply around things that help you to think, move, and rest in sacred ways within ordinary life.

My guest is Raquel Rose, founder and creative director of The Little Rose Shop, which seeks to bring the faith into everyday life with Catholic and Christian gifts and books.

Follow-up Resources:

• Find ways to bring the faith into everyday life at thelittleroseshop.com 
• My First Examen (board book) at The Little Rose Shop
• Morning Offering Prayer Catholic Mug at The Little Rose Shop
• Learn More about the McGrath Institute for Church Life’s program on childhood and the liturgical imagination, Contours of Wonder
• “Grace for the Hard Days of Early Motherhood, with Jessica Mannen Kimmet,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Parenting as Complex and Beautiful Vocation, with Holly Taylor Coolman,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “The Joy of Life, with Maggie Garnett,” 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.

“It is the one peculiarity of the Christian character to be dependent … It is the Christian’s excellence to be diligent and watchful, and yet to be in spirit dependent; to be willing to serve, and to rejoice in the permission to do so; to be content to view himself in a subordinate place.”

 These are words preached by St. John Henry Newman in a sermon on the “Communion of Saints.” He speaks to and indeed proclaims where the true meaning of Christian life is found: it is in receiving from God and responding in tune, or in the words of Jesus in St. Luke’s Gospel: “to hear the Word of God and act on it.” Newman discerned this fundamental obedience as the inner heart of sanctity, but not only that. It was also and surprisingly the inner heart of history, not just an individual’s history, but the world’s history, salvation history. That is a profound and revolutionary thought, if we grasp it. But for Newman, it was not merely a thought; rather, it was first a life, a person, a model … indeed, a mother. It is Mary—first among all the saints—who breaks open in her own unflinching duty before the Word of God, the true meaning of being a contingent and limited creature: a true human being. Everything about her points to her Son, and everything about him reveals her beauty. What Newman discerned is that this exchange is the true meaning of history, which all the saints themselves testify to.

I myself learned to recognize and understand this remarkable truth better by listening to my guest today, Dr. Rebekah Lamb, who is Lecturer in Theology and the Arts in the School of Divinity at the University of St Andrews, Scotland. She joins me today in studio as part of her visit to Notre Dame to deliver a lecture on “The Marian Turn in Newman’s Thought,” which is the topic of our conversation today.

Follow-up Resources:

• “C. S. Lewis on Education and the Theological Imagination, with Rebekah Lamb,” podcast episode via Church Life Journal
• “Doctor of the Church for Our Times,” by Rebekah Lamb, essay via Church Life Journal
• “It’s More Effective to Attract than to Simply Chastise (on St. Philip Neri),” by Leonard DeLorenzo, 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.

In this episode I continue my conversation with Abigail Favale, introducing the new podcast series she created and hosts called “The Gender Accompaniment Project.” If you missed the first part of our conversation, you can link to it in our show notes (or just see the episode that posted immediately before this one in our show’s feed). We are going to talk more now about Abigail’s scholarship and her encounter with the people featured in her new project, and we will eventually end up talking about what is required for conversion in Christ, for all of us.

Follow-up Resources:

• Learn more about The Gender Accompaniment Project and the new podcast
• The Genesis of Gender: A Christian Theory, book by Abigail Favale
• “The Genesis of Gender, with Abigail Favale,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Sex, Gender, and Feminism, with Abigail Favale,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “The Eclipse of Sex by the Rise of Gender,” by Abigail Favale, article via Church Life Journal
• “Gender, Bodies, and the Space of Responsiveness, with Angela Franks,” podcast episode via Church Life Today
• “Transhumanism and Human Nature, with Mary Harrington,” 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.