Brandon McGinley, Author at Catholic Herald

Brandon McGinley

In an age of loneliness and self-doubt, only vulnerability can break the cycle

September 25, 2020

I remember the first time I realised I had grown-up friends. I had a few friends from school and college, but after I moved back home to Pittsburgh, they were all out of the picture. I was busy working in politics, which for better or worse mitigated the loneliness. In the meantime, my wife and

What it means to be an American Catholic

August 22, 2019

What is America? Is it a land, molded by geology and industry, and pregnant with legend? Is it a people, shaped by a common history and a shared destiny? Is it a social contract, defined by its founding documents and their principles? It’s a complicated question, especially for Catholics, who have been suspected and often

American Catholics made a deal with liberalism. It hasn’t worked out

June 07, 2019

“What do I do if my parents won’t take me to Confession?” Those of us who have taught catechism classes, and heard questions like this, become aware of a strange paradox. Most of the students attend only because their parents force them to, but those same students get no reinforcement of the Faith at home.

America’s Catholic enclaves have vanished. But I can imagine a beautiful future

November 01, 2018

A gauzy cultural Catholicism is no match for secularism. For the US Church to flourish, we need to act like full-time followers of Jesus

After cultural Catholicism

November 01, 2018

When I think about the future of the Church in America, I like to close my eyes. When I do, I see Marian processions, like the ones held by the Latino Catholics one neighbourhood over from me, but integrated and teeming. I hear the Angelus bell like the Islamic call to prayer. I see the Divine

A radical plan for building Catholic communities

October 04, 2018

Building the Benedict Option by Leah Libresco, Ignatius Press, 163pp, £13 The concept of authenticity has gained much cachet recently. In politics, the popularity of figures as disparate as Donald Trump and Jeremy Corbyn has been ascribed to their authenticity. In popular culture, the emergence of academic theories of gender and sexuality into the mainstream

What is a Catholic to make of Jordan Peterson?

March 02, 2018

We do not need to be more politically incorrect, but more authentically Catholic

The agnostic evangelist

February 22, 2018

Jordan Peterson’s two-and-a-half hour lecture entitled “Introduction to the Idea of God” has been viewed nearly 1.6 million times in the nine months it has been online. That’s more than three times as many views as the most popular video by the Church’s biggest Anglophone social media star, Bishop Robert Barron—and that clip is a

‘Catholic’ must be more than just a brand name

May 11, 2017

Catholic Social Thought Edited by David O’Brien and Thomas Shannon, Orbis, £30 There are 687 pages in this collection of Church documents, roughly 635 of which are freely available on the Vatican website. So the consumer spends £30 for 50 or so pages of introductory material and indices. This is, it turns out, as bad

Sorry, no search matching search results found. Please try again.