Church Life Today

OSV Podcasts
  • 4.8 (36)
  • Christianity
  • Updated 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. 4d ago

    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.

  2. 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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. 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.

  6. 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.

  7. Jun 15

    Three Saints of the Sacred Heart

    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 VisitorChurch 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. May 27

    Magnifica Humanitas: Pope Leo XIV on Artificial Intelligence, with Brett Robinson

    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 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.

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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
    266
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © 2026 Church Life Today
  • Show Website
    Church Life Today

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