Daniel P. Horan

Faith Seeking Understanding: News of a settlement for Flint residents poisoned by the water supply coincides with the 2020 Season of Creation, reminding us of the overlap between environmental and racial injustice.

Faith Seeking Understanding: The problem is that too many people refashion Christianity — its doctrinal teachings and moral guidance — into an idol of their own making in order to grasp a misguidedly simple and falsely clear message.

Faith Seeking Understanding: American society has long been skeptical of or outright hostile to anything that seems lazy or frivolous, but doing nothing is about reordering one's priorities, values, worldview, commitments and energies.

Faith Seeking Understanding: Over the years, I have come to see the dozens of daily benefits my perceived whiteness affords me, many of which are the ways I am spared of judgment, harassment, threats and discrimination.

Faith Seeking Understanding: Whereas over the years many white people might not have even stopped to look at or consider the symbolic significance of these public shrines to racist traitors, many people of color are regularly forced to confront again the grotesque history of a country that denied them of their very humanity. 

Faith Seeking Understanding: The phrase "gender ideology" is used in both religious and secular contexts, but I am most interested in how it is deployed in Catholic circles to cause grave harm to people already made vulnerable in an unjust society. 

Faith Seeking Understanding: The urgency of the moment demands honesty; therefore I will be blunt: The 2018 U.S. bishops' "Open Wide Our Hearts" pastoral letter on racism has proven to be a worthless statement.

Faith Seeking Understanding: If you don't like the current reality of widespread illness, death, economic collapse and rolling lockdowns, then you should really direct your energies toward combating climate change.

Faith Seeking Understanding: It's worth remembering that the Gospels consistently portray Jesus Christ reserving his harshest criticism and condemnation for religious hypocrites. We have to hold one another accountable.

Faith Seeking Understanding: A crisis of imagination is striking culture and politics, and the Holy Spirit's working in the church. As much as human imagination is a cognitive function, it is also a spiritual one.

Faith Seeking Understanding: I have often found myself struggling these last few weeks to do something that I am expected to do almost naturally by virtue of my life and profession: that is, pray.

Faith Seeking Understanding: It's true that Christ is uniquely present in the Blessed Sacrament, but it's not true that this is the only way God draws near to humanity and the rest of creation.

Faith Seeking Understanding: At its core, the communion of saints is an affirmation of the empowering, unifying and healing work of the Holy Spirit among all God's people and creation.

Faith Seeking Understanding: When we embrace an integral ecological approach to understanding the world and our place within the broader community of creation, what comes next?

Faith Seeking Understanding: A true sense of interconnectedness suggests that one cannot merely select a single ethical issue in isolation as if it were unrelated to all others.

Faith Seeking Understanding: While Black History Month is a time for people of African descent to celebrate their legacy, it offers a particular challenge and opportunity for white people like me.

Faith Seeking Understanding: The Eucharist is not simply a means by which humanity receives the sacramental presence of Christ, it is the privileged place where God is now present to our world as part of that world.

Faith Seeking Understanding: I thought about a column that imagined an optimistic decade ahead, and I wondered what it might look like to engage in a similar imaginative exercise for the church.

Faith Seeking Understanding: This Christmas may we recognize the cosmic significance of the Word becoming flesh, humbly recalling our place as fellow members of God's family of creation and working to respect, preserve, and protect our creaturely sisters and brothers in Christ.

While there are undoubtedly bad actors in our church and world, most people strive to do the right thing, seek a life of integrity, and wish to do no harm. So how do we end up with the messes we have before us?