Book Review: The Catholic Worker Movement – Intellectual and Spiritual Origins by Mark and Louise Zwick

(My husband showed me this book in a half-price bookstore a couple of years ago and after reading it my life has never been the same. This book introduced me to the Catholic Worker movement, which I barely knew beforehand. It now stands as the first of many books I have read about the movement [...]

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Sacrifices, Solidarity and Moderation on Thanksgiving Day

I heard this morning on the TODAY Show that an average Thanksgiving meal contains 5,000 calories and I wondered if we have missed the point of the holiday when we just look forward to stuffing ourselves to the point that we can’t walk.
Thanksgiving Day is a holiday that my family and I adopted a couple [...]

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Voluntary Poverty and Solidarity

The Case for Utopia
The world would be better off
if people tried to become better.
And people would become better
if they stopped trying to become better off.
For when everybody tries to become better off,
nobody is better off.
But when everybody tries to become better,
everybody is better off.
Everybody would be rich
if nobody tried to become richer.
And nobody would be [...]

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Shopping Ideas for this Christmas Season

As you know, I don’t agree with the consumerism that characterizes the Christmas season, but the truth is that 2000 years ago we received the best gift we could have ever been given: the gift of God becoming man and so the Christmas season is about a gift and about joy. As human beings [...]

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Christmas and Consumerism

I heard this morning on the news that retailers are worried, because they don’t expect a significant turnout this upcoming holiday season. They are reducing prices significantly to attract buyers, but they are not very optimistic.
And then I thought: that is exactly what Christmas has turned out to be–all about shopping. I always [...]

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This Week’s Meditation: On Necessities and Superfluities

This examen is straight from Fr. Dubay’s book Happy Are You Poor. He says that we all have different needs so we “cannot know whether a need is real or illusory” for certain people, but these set of questions are at least a good start. Some may think this is a bit too rigorous… but [...]

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Wealth and the Heavy Fur Coat

No servant can serve two masters. He will either hate one and love the other, or be devoted to one and despise the other. You cannot serve God and mammon.” (Lk 16:13)
…echoes from last Sunday’s Gospel. What a beautiful selection of readings we had this past Sunday. The message of the Prophet Amos is hardly [...]

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You notice them, but do you really see them?

(This post was originally written by my boyfriend, Michael Joseph, at our former blog)
You’ve noticed him, but do you really see him? That is, do you see a person? The homeless, the hungry and the forsaken are all around us. Jesus promised us that, but he did not choose it to be so: “The poor [...]

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In Search of the Simple Life

(I originally wrote this in Evangelical Catholicism, but I will continue these series on this blog) 
I graduated Summa Cum Laude from College three years ago. I had a job lined up with one of the top ten Fortune 500 companies a semester before graduation. With relatively low experience in my field, my salary was still higher than [...]

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What Gospel Poverty is Not

For quite a while now I have been searching for more direction as to how to live voluntary poverty in the midst of a society immersed in consumerism and individualism in which I found myself being an active and exemplary participant for many years. I have read Sacred Scriptures and the saints’ writings, but I [...]

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