BY SUSIE LLOYD Talk about temptation. Two baseball buttons, a small boy, and a pocket just the right size. Joey had brought me the buttons while enduring a visit to Sew Bored, the fabric store. I had said they were not in the budget. Now…

BY SUSIE LLOYD When Immaculée Ilibagiza first published her 2006 memoir Left to Tell, it was with the modest hope of sharing the book with friends. Her agent, however, told her to quit her job. The book tells in harrowing detail about the…

BY SUSIE LLOYD 'Twas the night before Christmas, and the children were nestled all snug in their beds. Nope. Not us. We were going to Midnight Mass. The sun had gone down at 4:30 p.m., and the dark hours which followed made Christmas Eve…

by Susie Lloyd Audrey Assad is more than a vocalist; she is a voice. Her music expresses a search for God that is at once inspiring and confounding. One moment ethereal and delicate as a butterfly born aloft on a gentle wind, and the next…

by Susie Lloyd The tiny plane dropped from a leaden sky as the young flight student struggled to keep it steady against the erratic wind. He sailed over the telephone wires which he could see, and doing so, he narrowly missed a fence which…

by Susie Lloyd When I was 8 days old, my parents carried me to the baptismal font and gave me the gift of faith by proxy. Nobody asked me first. My godparents were my oldest brother Jon and my grandmother. It was their job to recite my…

John isn’t exactly a funny name to us but when St. John the Baptist was born, his relatives were scratching their heads over it. “Where did that come from? Nobody else in the family has that name.” “Elizabeth dear, shouldn’t the boy be…

This is the tale of two holy lives and two ... not so holy ones. Sts. Theodulus and Agathopodes (died 303, feast day April 5) were members of the clergy in the church at Thessalonica (aka Salonica) in Greece. The bustling city was part of…

We interrupt this Eastern Rite calendar to bring you St. Joseph. Why? Because St. Joseph (feast day March 19 on the Western calendar, patron of the universal Church) does not have a separate feast day on the Eastern calendar. This may lead…

After having the benefit of 2,000 years of Christianity, we sometimes take the teachings of the Gospel for granted. There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither slave nor free person, there is not male and female; for you are all one in…