I was born into a Conservative Jewish home. My parents, while not overly “religious,” did their best to follow the Jewish customs and traditions. My mom kept a kosher home
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Dr. Paul Thigpen, a member of The Coming Home Network, joins Marcus Grodi this week to discuss 1 Thessalonians 4:16-17. Paul was a pastor in a tradition that believed in
Father Bill grew up in a Catholic family in St. Charles, Missouri. In college he became involved, beginning with Yoga, in Eastern meditation and eventually the New Age Movement. He
Sean was raised in a nominally Christian church hopping family. His father was Episcopalian and his mother Catholic. Sean was baptized Catholic and had his first confession but was not
Caroline Burt was born in England into an atheist family and, later in life, delved deep into the New Age Movement. One day, she was unexpectedly drawn into a Catholic church as she was passing by and her life has never been the same.
Kelly Nieto grew up in a home where God and religion had no place. As a result, for the first 35 years of her life, Kelly battled with an emptiness
“I was fighting so many demons that I lost track of where they came from and how they were manifested. I became enslaved to spiritual poverty, sexual depravity, and a greed for money that would take its toll on my emotions and psyche for years to come. Everything in life seemed easily disposable, especially my money, which I spent lavishly to maintain my steady diet of alcohol and drugs that would salve my emotional pain.”
A 27-year-old graduate student of philosophy at Franciscan University of Steubenville, JonMarc resides in Steubenville, OH, with his wife Teresa and two young children. While completing his undergraduate degree at
I was born in the ghettoes of Chicago’s South Side in 1961. My first memories are of dilapidated apartments, window frames without windows, trash strewn on the streets, urine-soaked alleys, and a neglected-derived independence. As a three-, four-, and five-year-old, I remember many times coming and going from the apartment my mother, siblings and I shared while my mother, an active alcoholic at that time, had friends over from morning till night — days filled with card games, cigarette smoke and all the beer and vodka they could want. When I was about seven years old, my father, whom I had only met once, came to the apartment announcing that my six siblings and I were going with him. It was the last time I would see my mother for years. Much later, my father told us my mother told him she was moving and leaving us at the apartment, and warned him that if he didn’t come get us, we would be abandoned.
I lacked any experience of the Catholic Faith growing up as a child and had little until about six years ago. I was introduced to Jesus and the Christian faith
A Feminist Rebellion
I was raised in the Grace Brethren Fundamentalist branch of Protestant Christianity during the 1960’s and 70’s. I am grateful for a lot of the Bible-based teaching I learned there and from my mother; for the steeping and memorization of Bible passages; for all the wonderful stories that engrossed me; for the hearing the words of Jesus and His pure love. But my rebellious bent began to grow as I reached 15 and became skeptical about the manner of this branch of Christianity and the hypocrisy I witnessed around me and inside me. I wanted nothing to do with youth group. I had a strong dislike of the “saving of souls” that took place at the end of the preaching during particularly sad hymns. I took to sneaking out of the church and driving around in my parents’ car during the service. My absconding intensified when my pastor claimed to know when the world was going to end and picked a day that came and went while he remained at the pulpit.
Brennan was a California kid who had no faith formation. His spirituality was Neo-pagan and the philosophy of Nietzsche. In graduate school he was exposeded to the Catholic faith in
