Church Life Today

OSV Podcasts
  • 4.8 (36)
  • Christianity
  • Semimonthly

Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner. 

  1. Nov 2

    All Souls’ Day: Communion with Our Faithful Departed

    Today, the day this episode is released, is the Commemoration of All Souls. I have long been fascinated by the mystery we observe today, which I understand to be a mystery of longing in Christ. It is a longing of the living for their beloved dead and, if we can say such things, the longing of the dead to be living. It is a day clouded by unknowing but pierced by hope. It so happens that my first and constant academic interest is in precisely what we, as a Church, uplift in our liturgy today: the question and promise of communion between the living and the dead. More than an academic matter, though, this is a question and promise that touches each of us, at some point, whether we confront it or not. It is the question and promise of finding re-union or ongoing union across the chasm of death. I couldn’t let this day pass without observing it, since it happens to fall on one of our regularly scheduled release days. So here’s what I want to do. I wrote a book several years ago called Our Faithful Departed: Where They Are and Why It Matters. I am going to share the opening chapter of that book with you here. In a different episode a while back, I shared a different portion of the book. I hope that this will be of some interest, or perhaps even inspiration or curiosity, to you as you listen and after you listen, whether today on the Commemoration of All Souls or sometime hereafter. Here it goes. FOLLOW-UP RESOURCES: Our Faithful Departed: Where They Are and Why It Matters, by Leonard J. DeLorenzo (Ave Maria Press, 2022)Our Faithful Departed Discussion Guide, a free resource for parishes, schools, families, and friends“Our Faithful Departed, special episode,” podcast episode via Church Life Today (June 2025), featuring the book’s epilogue on five pastoral priorities for fostering communion with the dead“Belief in the Communion of Saints Isn’t Optional,” by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, Church Life Journal“Día de los Muertos and the Prayer Over the Offerings,” by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, Church Life Journal (an excerpt from Our Faithful Departed)“The November Night Before Advent,” by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, Church Life JournalWork of Love: A Theological Reconstruction of the Communion of Saints, by Leonard J. DeLorenzo (University of Notre Dame Press, 2017)“Praying for the Dead, with John Cavadini,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“Heaven in the Midst of Death, with Laura Kelly Fanucci,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“Life is changed but something ended, with Stephanie DePrez,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“Life in Death in Life, with Robert Cording,” podcast episode via Church Life TodayChurch 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.

  2. Oct 19

    Creation Has Limits, and So Do We, with Sr. Damien Marie Savino

    If you have used any of the artificial intelligence tools that are everywhere now, you know how good they are with words. You ask, they answer, and the answer sounds like someone talking to you. Except no one is. It is the appearance of communication without a person on the other end, and I don’t think we have reckoned with what it does to us to get used to that. My guest today, by contrast, is convinced that creation itself communicates, and that learning its language is slow, personalizing, spiritual work. Creation does not grow without limit, the way our technologies are built to do. It has boundaries and seasons. A seed goes into the ground and dies before anything comes of it. To live within that for a while changes you. You begin to accept that you are a creature, limited and even wounded, and that this is not where life ends but where it starts. You find you can hope again when you cannot force the outcome. You start to say thank you. Pope Francis wrote in Laudato Si’ that the external deserts are growing because the internal deserts have become so vast. My guest shows us interior renewal is linked to our exterior engagement with creation, because we are called at once into three interrelated relationships: relationship with God, with one another, and with the earth, all . My guest is Sr. Damien Marie Savino, a Franciscan Sister of the Eucharist, an environmental engineer, and a theologian. She is the Melchor Visiting Professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering and Earth Sciences here at Notre Dame, with a concurrent appointment in the McGrath Institute for Church Life. She is the author of Learning the Language of Creation, which you will find linked in our show notes along with a number of related episodes and resources. Follow-up Resources: Learning the Language of Creation: Catholic Social Teaching and Integral Ecology, by Damien Marie Savino, FSE (Liturgical Press)Laudato Si', Encyclical Letter of Pope Francis on Care for Our Common HomeMagnifica Humanitas, Encyclical Letter of Pope Leo XIV“Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo XIV on Artificial Intelligence, with Brett Robinson,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“The Next Wave of Artificial Intelligence and Our Humanity, with Stephanie DePrez,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“Abbot Austin Murphy, OSB, on Monastic Life and Human Ecology,” podcast episode via Church Life Today“Human Dignity Can’t Be Separated from Ecological Awareness,” by Terry Ehrman, C.S.C., article via Church Life Journal“Laudato Si’ and Environmental Works of Mercy,” by John C. Cavadini, article via Church Life JournalChurch 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.

  3. Oct 5

    What Kind of Ancestor Am I Becoming? Family, Money, and Legacy, with Josh Gentine

    Every family hands something on. Not just property or a business, but a way of speaking to one another, a set of habits, the things we talk about and the things we have silently agreed never to raise. Some of that was built on purpose. Most of it was not. And one day, without any announcement, you find that you are no longer the one receiving the culture of your family. You are the one responsible for it. My guest today puts the question this way: what kind of ancestor am I becoming? Josh Gentine advises families who own businesses and manage shared wealth. He is hired for governance and succession and estate planning, but none of it works until a family can actually talk honestly to one another. Corporations spend millions building psychological safety on their teams. Almost no one spends anything building it at home. Most families, Josh says, are not broken. They are circling each other at altitude, waiting for someone to go first. What draws me back to Josh's newsletter is that the human heart is always at the center. The complexity is financial and legal, but underneath it is the same thing underneath every family: we would rather keep the peace than risk the conversation, and that peace is not really peace. So this episode is for business leaders, certainly. But it is just as much for parents, for anyone caring for aging parents, for anyone who has moved from being mentored to being the mentor, and for anyone who suspects that what they will pass along is the life they lived rather than the advice they gave. Josh Gentine is the founder and president of Bench Consulting, where he guides enterprising families through generational change. He is a third-generation owner and board member at his family's company, Sargento Foods, and he teaches part-time with the Family Enterprise Center at UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School. He studied finance at Notre Dame and later spent a year at Moreau Seminary discerning the priesthood, a story he tells in this episode. He is also, I am proud to say, my classmate in the Notre Dame Class of 2003. He and his wife, Meredith, are raising their two children in Charlottesville, Virginia. Follow-up Resources: Bench Consulting, where Josh and his team work with enterprising families on alignment, transitions, and conflict.Read Josh's newsletter, Family Matters, including the "Monetary Policy" edition that prompted this conversation."The Monastery, the Boardroom, and Daily Life, with John Cannon," (also class of 2003, by the way) podcast episode via Church Life Today"What is College Really for? Notre Dame's Experiment in Holistic Education, with Bill Mattison," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Nationwide Study on Faith and Relationships, with J.P. De Gance," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Envy: The Anti-Life Sin, and Its Cure, with Michon Matthiesen," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Jesus Changes Everything: What About Wealth?" by Stanley Hauerwas, article via Church Life Journal"Día de los Muertos and the Prayer Over the Offerings," by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, article via Church Life JournalChurch 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.

  4. Sep 21

    Behold God’s Love: The Album, with Carolyn Pirtle

    In the summer of 2024, about 1,300 people gathered at Saint Mary's College for the premiere of "Behold God's Love," an original Eucharistic musical in three acts: "Root," "Vine," and "Branches." Everyone else missed it. Now the whole world can listen. The full musical is now available as a recorded album, from the manna in the desert, to the Last Supper, to a house church in Corinth. Today, its creator and composer returns to the show to listen to a few tracks with me. We talk about what they reveal, how performing a role becomes a way of dwelling in Scripture, and how listeners can use the music to pray their way back to the Word and the altar. Carolyn Pirtle is Program Director of the Center for Liturgy in the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame, and the writer and composer of "Behold God's Love." Follow-up Resources: Behold God’s Love album and resources page via McGrath Institute for Church Life“That we might behold,” article by Leonard J. DeLorenzo via OSV News.Behold God’s Love: A Eucharistic Musical, earlier podcast episode with Carolyn Pirtle via Church Life TodayChurch 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.

  5. Aug 17

    Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings: A Catholic Journey

    Every so often on this show, I set the conversation aside and simply read something. This is one of those episodes. Earlier this year, Pope Leo XIV published his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the age of artificial intelligence. And in paragraph 213, in the middle of an argument about the small and steadfast acts of fidelity that stand as a bulwark against dehumanization, the pope quotes a wizard. The wizard is Gandalf, and this is what he says: "It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succour of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know, so that those who live after may have clean earth to till" (The Return of the King). I have to say I wasn't surprised. Some years ago I wrote a long essay about why The Lord of the Rings is a Catholic book — not because there is any religion in it, because there isn't any, but because of what Tolkien absorbed into the story. An account of power. An account of hope. An account of discernment and responsibility. And an account of what goes unseen. When I read what Leo had written, I wanted to go back to that thought about Tolkien's Catholic work. So that is what this episode is: that essay, read for you start to finish, bringing forth some of Tolkien's Catholic vision, embedded in and absorbed into his Lord of the Rings. Links:  "'The Lord of the Rings': A Catholic journey," by Leonard J. DeLorenzo, In Focus article via Our Sunday Visitor"Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo XIV on Artificial Intelligence, with Brett Robinson," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Tolkien's Creative Imagination, with Holly Ordway," podcast episode via Church Life Today"The Lord of the Rings, Sickness, and Health, with Kristin Collier," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Public Relations for C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Dorothy Sayers, with Christie Kleinmann," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Why Literature Still Matters, with Jason Baxter," podcast episode via Church Life Today"Tolkien's Literary Output: Fundamentally Religious and Catholic?" by Holly Ordway, article via Church Life JournalChurch 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.

  6. Aug 3

    John Steinbeck's East of Eden, with Michon Matthiesen

    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 TodayChurch 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.

  7. Jul 20

    Envy: The Anti-Life Sin, and Its Cure, with Michon Matthiesen

    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 JournalChurch 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.

  8. Jul 6

    The Education of the Soul: C.S. Lewis and the Inklings Project, with Shannon Valenzuela

    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, 2026Follow Shannon Valenzuela’s new Adoro Te film series and sign up for updates: https://millefioristudios.myflodesk.com/eucharistChurch 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.

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About

Hosted by Dr. Leonard DeLorenzo, of the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame (http://mcgrath.nd.edu), Church Life Today features conversations with pastoral leaders and scholars from around the country and covers issues that matter most to Church life today. Church Life Today is an OSV Podcasts partner. 

Information

  • Creator
    OSV Podcasts
  • Years Active
    2018 - 2026
  • Episodes
    268
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Church Life Today
  • Show Website
    Church Life Today

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