One of the side effects of the pandemic has been a boom in the homeschooling in the U.S. - the Census Bureau found that the number of families educating their children at home doubled between spring and autumn last year. While the shift during the widespread school closures of last year is perhaps self-explanatory, the numbers appear to be mostly sticking, even as in-classroom education opens back up.

Pope Francis has ruled that Cardinal Rainer Maria Woelki should remain in charge of Germany’s Cologne archdiocese after a Vatican investigation into his handling of abuse cases, the Holy See announced on Friday. The Holy See said on Sept. 24 that the pope had asked the 65-year-old cardinal to continue leading the archdiocese in western Germany following a apostolic visitation...

During the last many decades, Catholic life has been dominated by the question of tradition: what it is, whether and how it is important, and how it should take its place in the life of faith. This has not just been an occupation of academic theologians; questions concerning Catholic tradition have increasingly been taken up in popular books and talk shows, on the internet and in podcasts, and these conversations involve...

Samuel Clemens, also known as Mark Twain, was born in Florida, Missouri in 1835. Four years later, he and his family moved to the river town of Hannibal in the same state. There he was sent to Sunday school and received a strict Presbyterian-Calvinist religious formation.[2] As a result, he had great familiarity with Holy Scripture...

Awareness of your sins I argue is perhaps one of the most valuable charisms a person can possess. The ability to renounce sinful behavior and embrace an active relationship with Jesus Christ is what St. Paul would describe as the way not be conformed to this world but instead be transformed by the renewal of your mind...

Galileo did not prove that the Earth moves. He did not invent the telescope. He was not excommunicated, tortured or burned. So where do these ideas originate? Unfortunately, all too often they have originated with seemingly respectable, scholarly sources; who else would talk about a 17th-century scientist? Even recently a number of respectable-seeming books have been published that promote what Pope St. John Paul II once called the “myth” of Galileo...

The Gospel for the 26th Sunday of Ordinary Time gives a very basic, and therefore very powerful, way to understand the Christian life. The friend of my friend is my friend; the enemy of my friend is my enemy. We know that instinctively on the natural level. Jesus wants us to see that it is also true on the supernatural level. It all starts when John makes the error we do.

You may have heard that “good fences make good neighbors.” This is particularly true when you are hoping to keep a bull and your neighbors are hoping you will keep it on your own property. For longer than thirty-eight seconds. More on that in a moment. The famous saying is, of course, often attributed to Robert Frost, who used it in a poem...

By diligently tracing dashcam footage from a particularly spectacular fireball seen over central Europe in February 2020, a team of scientists identified the possible source of the space rock.

If Christian prayer plummets dim but real reflections of eternal glory in the passing shadows of the world, it is because God has fashioned the world to contain mysteries beyond what is material and visible. By faith, everything becomes a sacrament that gives us God, even the most painful circumstances...