U.S. Catholic

1 week ago | uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter |Emily Sanna

This year, reading the gospels during Holy Week, I can’t help but put myself in Mary’s shoes. What must it have been like to see Jesus at the cross, her little boy arrested by the same government oppressing her people? This woman, who sang the Magnificat when she learned she was pregnant, who dreamed about overthrowing oppression and building a new world, must have been so proud of her son. He had taught people a new way of being together and fought to build the world she taught him about.

1 week ago | uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter

“It’s a weird job for a Jew in Tennessee, but somebody’s got to do it.” This is how A. J. Levine, a professor of New Testament and Jewish Studies at the Hartford International University for Religion and Peace, describes her 28 years teaching at Vanderbilt Divinity School. “I trained Christian ministers and religious educators,” she says. “I could not simply remain on the historical level of biblical interpretation.

1 week ago | uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter |Mike Mastromatteo

A new release from Boston-area novelist Jennifer Haigh ponders questions of causality and randomness in the lives of ordinary people striving for meaning in a seemingly “oblivious” cosmos. Rabbit Moon (Little, Brown and Company), released this April, describes the tribulations of a contemporary American family whose iconoclastic daughter disappears for a new life in Shanghai.

1 week ago | uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter |Kevin Considine

In the end, the world will be saved by beauty. This was one of Dorothy Day’s favorite quotes from Dostoyevsky. And it’s a fitting description of the experience of listening to U.K. artist Michael Kiwanuka. Kiwanuka is a gifted singer, musician, and songwriter who is not well-enough known on this side of the Atlantic.

2 weeks ago | uscatholic.org | Nathaniel Hunter |Celeste Kennel-Shank

Longing brought me back to the hope of the resurrection. A longing stronger than any I had known, in the midst of a loss unlike any that came before. Eighteen months earlier, when my father died three days after Easter, I didn’t feel the disbelief about his death that is so common among mourners, whether or not one sees and touches the body. In its place, I felt finality, nothing beyond.