The best book I read in 2023 is Millennial Nuns Reflections on Living a Spiritual Life in a World of Social Media. It’s a collection of essays written by the Daughters of Saint Paul, a religious order whose mission is to engage the world through media .
What makes Millennial Nuns so tonic is both the level of intelligence displayed by these young women and the fearlessness and wisdom with which they engage the world. It’s a great irony of the modern world: progressive atheists who have embraced a life of career and competition frequently show signs of depression and deep unhappiness, but women who have given themselves to Jesus Christ are fun, dynamic, joyful, and satisfied.
NIKKI HALEY'S 2024 CAMPAIGN MOMENTUM UNDER NEW SPOTLIGHT IN IOWA CAUCUSES
Also, our modern secular media is notoriously awful at covering religion. It gets basic terms wrong and zealously guards against any religious imagery or expression from making it into the paper or in the air. Yet if human beings have souls and spiritual experiences, isn’t it a mistake to not report on that?
Let me give an example. My old friend Dawn Eden Goldstein is a popular Catholic author and scholar. Raised in a Jewish family, she had a cool career covering rock music, even writing liner notes for albums. A few years ago, Dawn was promoting one of her outstanding books — she has written on healing sexual abuse in the Catholic Church and on several important Jesuits — at the Catholic Information Center in Washington. Here was a young Catholic with an amazing story, yet the Washington Post, whose office was two blocks from the Catholic Information Center, could not be bothered to do a profile. In ignoring the faithful, the media are missing a lot of stories.
You can find Dawn Eden’s books at one of the bookstores run by the Daughters of Saint Paul, which are dotted around the United States. Books on the theology of the body, the groundbreaking work of John Paul the Great on human sexuality as “an icon of the interior life of God,” may be in short supply at Barnes and Noble, but this work of genius is still available from Pauline Media , the publishing arm of the sisters. It would do more to heal the sexual sin and confusion in the West than 100 sex-ed lectures that reduce human souls to plumbing.
As I said, the sisters are no intellectual slouches. The first essay in Millennial Nuns is by Sr. Amanda Marie Detry. She was an accomplished young scholar at the University of Wisconsin on a full scholarship and headed for a possible Rhodes Scholarship when she felt called to religious life. Her words are wise: “When the idea of consecrated life suddenly flashed through my mind in the Warwick College Library, I was taken aback. This was not an invitation to schedule or accomplish something; it was an invitation to be someone….The thought of consecration did not connote a task or a goal; it whispers a promise.”
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Then there is the beautiful story of Sr. Maria Bui, who felt called to God at a youth retreat when she was 14. She was young and hungry for truth. “Because I wanted consistency and truthfulness, my ‘skater’ and ‘stoner’ friends were my favorite people," she wrote. "They didn’t compete with me in some backhanded, complicated way….Those years were dotted with risky behaviors that punctuated my search for meaning. They could have sent my life in a whole different direction if I hadn’t gone to that youth retreat where I found God; or rather, where I let him find me. Within that little host was an authenticity, a Presence, so true that it ordered the cosmos. Truth found me."
Sister Bui concludes that “love is fiercer than death.” That’s the ultimate reality. You might not discover that truth in today’s media, but it is being lived by the millennial nuns.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil's Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi . He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.
Love is fiercer than death: The countercultural Daughters of Saint Paul
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21.12.2023
The best book I read in 2023 is Millennial Nuns Reflections on Living a Spiritual Life in a World of Social Media. It’s a collection of essays written by the Daughters of Saint Paul, a religious order whose mission is to engage the world through media .
What makes Millennial Nuns so tonic is both the level of intelligence displayed by these young women and the fearlessness and wisdom with which they engage the world. It’s a great irony of the modern world: progressive atheists who have embraced a life of career and competition frequently show signs of depression and deep unhappiness, but women who have given themselves to Jesus Christ are fun, dynamic, joyful, and satisfied.
NIKKI HALEY'S 2024 CAMPAIGN MOMENTUM UNDER NEW SPOTLIGHT IN IOWA CAUCUSES
Also, our modern secular media is notoriously awful at covering religion. It gets basic terms wrong and zealously guards against any religious imagery or expression from making it into the paper or in the air. Yet if........
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