It was pretty awkward. They all just stood there staring at me. And the sweat just trickled down the back of my neck. Let me start by saying that it had been a long night. I was a freshly minted third-year medical student. Awash in book knowledge but bereft of experience, I began my internal medicine rotation at Abbott Northwestern Hospital with my short, white medical student coat stuffed with books, a stethoscope, and a reflex hammer. Of course, I would be on overnight call the first day and, as luck would have it, I would get the complicated late night patient admission: a seventy-three year old woman with new-onset thyroid storm. Susan (let us call her) came into my life with a plethora of complaints including sweats, weight loss, a racing heart, heart failure (and swelling from her toes to her…

St. John Henry Cardinal Newman, famous for his conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, is widely known as a gifted thinker and writer, with his powerful and incisive intellect demonstrated in closely argued scholarship, such as Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, A Grammar of Assent, and The Idea of a University. He was also a powerful preacher and writer of prayers and devotional pieces (many collected in Meditations and Devotions) that are readily engaging to any reader. What is perhaps slightly less well known is that he was also a poet and novelist. Newman is the author of Loss and Gain, an autobiographically-inspired story of a young man at Oxford becoming convinced of the truth of Catholicism, and of the historical novel Callista…

When Pope Francis declared 2021 to be the Year of St. Joseph, many of my Catholic friends expressed enthusiasm for the opportunity to focus more intently on the foster father to the Christ and spouse of Mary, the Theotokos. Although popes and bishops and saints, to a one, have expressed admiration and spiritual gratitude to Joseph (with some, like Teresa of Avila, declaring that petitions to St. Joseph always redound to the good), many Catholics will confess themselves a bit puzzled by that enthusiasm. In fact, they will say they are puzzled by Joseph himself, largely due to his perceived silence throughout Scripture, where none of his speech is quoted. “We don’t know him,” a colleague of mine said, as the dedicated year began. “It feels like everywhere you go in this diocese, you see another parish named for Joseph, but I’ve never…