Christmas is a weird time of year. No other season is such a potent combination of stuff happening. You have family traditions and maybe drama…definitely a whole lot of feelings. There’s consumerism and anti-consumerism. Heck there’s a whole soundtrack we share and bicker over. Plus, for Catholics and other Christians, there's the whole Jesus as God incarnate thing. To help host Mike Jordan Laskey sort it all is the great writer Simcha Fisher. Simcha is a columnist for America Magazine and a cou...
Dec 22, 2021•42 min
Acclaimed memoirist and poet Mary Karr joined the Jesuit Book Club to talk about her most recent poetry collection, "Tropic of Squalor." The Zoom gathering turned into a deep spiritual conversation, full of Mary's sharp insight and humor. We hadn't planned on running the book club meeting as an AMDG podcast, but it was too good not to share. Learn more about Mary: https://www.marykarr.com/ Learn more about Jesuit Book Club facilitator Nick Ripatrazone: http://nickripatrazone.com/ Join the Jesuit...
Dec 15, 2021•31 min
Fr. Brian Paulson, SJ, began his ministry as president of the Jesuit Conference of Canada and the United States in September. He comes to us in DC after seven years as the provincial of the USA Midwest Province, headquartered in Chicago. Fr. Brian talked to host Mike Jordan Laskey a bit about Advent and this period of transition for him, plus Fr. Brian's big-picture vision for the Society of Jesus in the world today. Fr. Brian is a deeply spiritual and thoughtful person who absolutely loves his ...
Dec 08, 2021•57 min
Why do some "secular" music or art experiences feel sacred? Guest Tom Beaudoin, Ph.D., is a theology professor at Fordham University has spent a lot of his career exploring this question. He joins host Mike Jordan Laskey to talk about encountering the divine in music, plus a conversation on Tom's new research project on the effects the ancient Pantheon temple (now a church) in Rome has on its visitors. Learn more about Tom: https://sites.google.com/site/tmbeaudoin/ AMDG is a production of the Je...
Dec 01, 2021•59 min
Thanksgiving is a time of tradition. How we celebrate the holiday today probably has a lot to do with how we celebrated the holiday growing up. The foods we place on the table. The special napkins we pull out of the closet. The signature cocktail we serve our guests. The dessert – pies and brownies and more. Take a moment: How much of your Thanksgiving experience reflects the Thanksgivings that have come before, perhaps even before you were born? Tradition is important and forms us in countless ...
Nov 24, 2021•46 min
Today's episode is about storytelling, imagination and prayer -- three things St. Ignatius of Loyola saw as interconnected. Fr. Bill Cain, SJ, has a rather intimidating bio: He’s a Peabody and Writers’ Guild award winning screenwriter who has worked on several films and television shows, including Nothing Sacred, Thicker Than Blood, and more. His work for theater includes Equivocation, 9 Circles, Stand-Up Tragedy and How To Write A New Book For The Bible. He received the 2009 and 2010 Steinberg/...
Nov 17, 2021•46 min
Last month, Pope Francis officially launched a two-year process of reflection and listening called a Synod of Bishops. Synods bring church leaders together to discuss and act on important topics related to the life of faith, and this edition is about the concept of synodality itself. Synodality is a big, obscure word, and our guest, Sr. Nathalie Becquart, is one of the most qualified people in the world to explain it. Sr. Nathalie is a Xaviere sister from France and has a background in youth min...
Nov 10, 2021•38 min
The early days of November give us ample opportunity to celebrate holy women and men. November 1st is All Saints’ Day; November 2nd is All Souls Day. And November 5th is the Feast of All Saints and Blessed of the Society of Jesus. But how many Jesuit saints do you really know? If you went to a Jesuit school, you can probably name a few – maybe you lived in Gonzaga Hall or went to class in a building named Campion. But for many of us, our familiarity with Jesuit saints begins and ends with a guy ...
Nov 03, 2021•43 min
The sculpture looks so much like a homeless man, people have called the cops on it. It’s a life-size sculpture of a person huddled under a blanket on a park bench. Get close to the artwork in any cities that have a copy of it, like Toronto or Rome, and look at the feet. You’ll find two wounds carved into the bronze, the only signs that the person show here is Jesus himself. It’s a powerful and challenging sculpture inspired by the 25th chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus tells his disci...
Oct 27, 2021•52 min
Jesuit-educated actress Siobhan Fallon Hogan has had an incredibly busy acting career over the last three decades, from appearing in Saturday Night Live and Seinfeld in the early 1990s to roles in movies like Forrest Gump, Men in Black and the Lars Von Trier musical drama Dancer in the Dark. Most recently, she made her screenwriting debut with a movie called Rushed. Siobhan also stars in the film as an Irish Catholic mother in upstate New York who has to figure out how to respond to a tragic fra...
Oct 20, 2021•31 min
The National Basketball Association season starts next week. If you flip on a marquee matchup on ESPN or ABC sometime this fall, you’ll probably hear the voice of today's guest: play-by-play announcer Mike Breen. Mike is widely regarded as one of the best announcers in the world in any sport. He informs without overexplaining. He shows excitement and love of the game without being cheesy. He perfectly captures the energy in the arena for those of us watching at home. It’s no surprise he has anno...
Oct 13, 2021•26 min
"Every child matters," reads Rosella Kinoshameg's fluorescent orange tee-shirt. The shirt is part of a national movement to recognize the harmful history of Indigenous residential schools in Canada. Rosella's shirt commemorates the thousands of children who were compelled to attend these schools, where practicing Indigenous cultures or languages was forbidden in an effort to assimilate children into white culture. Indigenous communities in Canada and the U.S. are still grappling with the impacts...
Oct 06, 2021•55 min
Today’s guest might make you reexamine everything you think you know about the current state of the Catholic Church in the USA. Fr. Tom Gaunt, SJ, is a Jesuit priest and the executive director of the Center for Applied Research in the Apostolate (CARA). Since it was founded in 1964, CARA has conducted hundreds of social science studies of the Catholic Church. If you want to know how many priests were ordained last year, or how many Catholics go to Mass weekly vs. once or twice a year, CARA is th...
Sep 29, 2021•55 min
During this Ignatian Year—this 500th anniversary of the conversion of St. Ignatius—a lot has been said about “cannonball moments.” The phrase comes from Ignatius’ own life story: he’s struck in the leg by a cannonball at the Battle of Pamplona. It’s that injury and its subsequent, painful recovery that confines Ignatius to bed and ultimately presents him with the opportunity to read and reflect on the life of Christ and the saints. We talk about this cannonball moment because it’s so jarring; it...
Sep 22, 2021•53 min
There’s a series of Star Wars books called From A Certain Point of View. Two have been released to date, each to celebrate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars: A New Hope and Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back, respectively. Each book contains 40 short stories from 40 different authors assuming the perspective of 40 different, minor characters from those classic films. The whole idea is to give readers a new glimpse into an old story—to retell that classic tale “from a certain point of view.” The ...
Sep 15, 2021•59 min
Back in the innocent days of February 2020, host Mike Jordan Laskey sent a Twitter message to author Nick Ripatrazone in reply to a tweet Nick posted about reading the Graham Greene novel "The Power and the Glory" for Lent, which is something he does every year. What if we invited others to read along with us and talk about it online? Mike asked. Nick was up for it and the Jesuit Book Club was born. Since then, the Jesuit Book Club has hosted a series of live events featuring conversations with ...
Sep 08, 2021•46 min
Nobody in the history of swimming has been as good at freestyle as our guest today is. Katie Ledecky is the literal GOAT (Greatest Of All Time), as she is the world record holder in the women's 400-, 800-and 1500-meter freestyle. (If you're an American who prefers yards to meters, Katie also has the fastest-ever times in the women's 500-, 1000-, 1500- and 1650-yard freestyle events.) Katie is just back from her third Olympics, where she won two gold medals and two silvers. In addition to dominat...
Sep 01, 2021•25 min
It was only a few weeks ago that Fr. Jean Denis Saint-Felix — the superior of the Jesuit community in Haiti – was our guest on this podcast. He shared with us his reflections on the assassination of the Haitian president. Tragically, a lot has happened in Haiti in just these few weeks. On August 14, a 7.2-magnitude earthquake devastated Southwestern Haiti — an earthquake even stronger than the one so many of us remember from 2010. Fr. Jean Denis encouraged us to hope — and trust in the Haitian p...
Aug 25, 2021•30 min
It’s cliché to say but Ignatian Pilgrimage: There’s an app for that. It’s called “Journey with Ignatius” – and it’s a cool new project developed by the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies at Boston College. On today’s episode, Fr. Casey Beaumier, SJ, director of the Institute for Advanced Jesuit Studies, shares the thinking and reflection that went in to developing this app. But the conversation doesn’t stop there. The app itself is meant to be a pilgrimage, an experience of Ignatian spiritual...
Aug 18, 2021•33 min
It’s not every day you crack open a copy of the New Yorker Magazine and find a long profile of an incredibly impressive, inspiring young Catholic woman. But that was the case in the February 8th issue, where you can find an article headlined “How a young activist is helping Pope Francis Battle Climate change. That young activist is Molly Burhans, and she’s today's guest. Molly is the founder and executive director of GoodLands, an organization created to enable the Catholic Church to use its ext...
Aug 11, 2021•53 min
Jamie Kralovec’s work is deeply rooted in his faith and Ignatian spirituality, but he’s not a theologian or a youth minister. Jamie is an urban planner by trade, and he’s on the show today to convince you that caring about cities and urban parks and transit and zoning is a deeply Catholic endeavor. Jamie first saw the connections between urbanism and Catholicism while a high school student at St. Ignatius College Prep in Chicago, and he has turned interest in that convergence into a career. In a...
Aug 04, 2021•42 min
On July 31st, the Church celebrates the feast of St. Ignatius of Loyola, founder of the Society of Jesus, better known as the Jesuits. And this year, the feast is extra special. Why? Because we’re in the midst of an Ignatian Year, a celebration of the 500th anniversary of the cannonball strike that shattered Ignatius’ legs and ultimately set him on the path to conversion. Today’s guest, Cameron Bellm, has been doing a lot of reflecting on the life and legacy of St. Ignatius—both in her own praye...
Jul 28, 2021•38 min
What are you willing to risk for what you believe? Fr. Steve Kelly, SJ, is a peace activist and a member of the Plowshares movement, a largely Catholic movement of pacifists that protests nuclear weapons by damaging weapons and military property. He has spent at least a decade of his life behind bars for his witness, and was just released recently for what was called the Kings Bay Plowshares action. On April 4, 2018, Fr. Kelly and six other Catholic activists cut a hole in a security fence at th...
Jul 21, 2021•47 min
On July 7, one week ago today, in the early hours of the morning, the president of Haiti, Jovenal Moise, was assassinated in his home. The exact details of his death are still clouded in mystery, but the impact on the country is stark and tragic: Haiti, still recovering from the devastating 2010 earthquake, still reeling from the COVID-19 pandemic, plagued by violent gangs, economic insecurity and a widening gap between the haves and have-nots, now faces a future of uncertainty. But it’s far fro...
Jul 14, 2021•31 min
Last month, Georgetown University professor of history Dr. Marcia Chatelain was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for her book “Franchise: the Golden Arches in Black America." The book reveals the hidden history of how fast food became one of the greatest generators of Black wealth and power in American and the costs of this success story. Host Mike Jordan Laskey asked Professor Chatelain what it was like to hear she won the Pulitzer, and then they discussed the book and some of the most interesting th...
Jul 07, 2021•52 min
When Fr. Bill Barry, SJ, passed away late in 2020 at the age of 90 years old, he left behind a long and storied legacy as a spiritual director, author and Jesuit priest. Though he wrote many, many books, mentored generations of Jesuits and guided countless retreatants, there was one consistent theme that everyone who encountered Fr. Barry walked away with: God desires a friendship with each of us. His final book, “God’s Great Story and You” – published by Loyola Press earlier this year – returns...
Jun 30, 2021•42 min
June is high school graduation season, and today's guest is one of the most impressive grads from the Jesuit Schools Network: Carlos Smith, who just finished his time at Loyola High School in Detroit. Loyola is an all-male Jesuit high school known for its rigorous academic standards and strong commitment to faith, and it serves about 150 predominantly Black young men. For the past 11 years, Loyola has achieved 100 percent college acceptance among its graduates. Carlos won two incredibly impressi...
Jun 23, 2021•27 min
In the year 1838, the Jesuits of the Maryland Province sold at least 272 enslaved men, women and children to a plantation owner in Louisiana, in part to provide financial support to Georgetown University, which was struggling at the time. The Jesuits have long been aware of this shameful history, but living Descendants of the 272 enslaved persons have only learned about their ancestors over the past five years thanks to meticulous genealogical research. More than 10,000 living Descendants have b...
Jun 16, 2021•47 min
As more and more of us are going back to Mass for the first time in over a year, today's episode is a celebration of our faith. Today's guest is the renowned theologian and teacher Dr. Thomas Groome, who serves as a professor of theology and religious education at Boston College’s School of Theology and Ministry. He has an incredible ability to make difficult concepts clear and engaging, often using his fabulous Irish storytelling skills in his work. In his conversation with host Mike Jordan Las...
Jun 09, 2021•53 min
Today’s episode is a challenging one. We take a deep dive into the tragic events gripping the people of India, and we reflect on the tremendous loss of life that has resulted from the second wave of COVID-19. According to Vatican News, as of May 29, there have been 27.7 million reported cases of COVID-19—second only to the US – and 322,512 deaths, placing India at the third highest death count after the US and Brazil. And these are just the cases that have been reported. In India, at least 400 o...
Jun 02, 2021•57 min
