By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute Welcome to 2021. We are so grateful to have you here with us. As we launch into a new year, we want to assure you that you won’t find any list of predictions here. Any prognosticator who didn’t just quietly retire after the surprises of 2020 has lost all touch with reality. But you will find a promise. And here it is: We are going to do our very best to help all of you, our readers, better connect your faith to your lives in 2021. If that happens, we will definitely be going against a trend. Active religious practice has been consistently declin...

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By Dave Coe Master Facilitator It was a sunny, early Saturday morning when the retreat master entered the room. After greeting the retreatants, myself included, he asked this question: “Are you happy?“ There was a collective, yet restrained, “Yes we are.” He asked the question again. This time our answer was a little louder: “Yes! We are.” His tongue-in-cheek response was: “Then please notify your face.” After our Blessed Mother Mary was told that she was pregnant with Jesus by the Holy Spirit, the Gospel tells us that ”as quickly as she could she visi...

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By Owen Phelps, Ph.D. Director, Yeshua Institute In a decade or two, when historians look back on 2020, they will see it as a year when the human race displayed the raw, redemptive power of collaboration and technology. And 2021 will be the first year in a decade when we reaped the harvest of that redemptive power. Unless … The iconic climax of 2020 was the development of not one, but many vaccines to push back the terror of Covid-19. The abundant harvest of 2021 will be all the suffering alleviated, the lives spared and the economies revived by the widespread sharing and application of those vacci...

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By Dr. Dan R. Ebener Fellow, Yeshua Institute Editor’s Note: This is the eighth in a series of articles by Dan Ebener on leadership in the Catholic Church. They are excerpts from his latest book, Pastoral Leadership: How to Lead in a Catholic Parish. Lay engagement means that parishioners are intrinsically motivated to fully participate in the life of the parish. To get engagement, leaders need to change hearts and minds. Like any other matter of the heart, engagement cannot be dictated.  Stewardship and evangelization are signs of lay engagement. Stewardship is giving from the heart. Evangelization ...

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