MSI Press Blog

Dorothy Day began as a journalist and activist, driven by compassion for the poor and anger at injustice. She sought meaning through politics, art, and love — and found only fragments. After the birth of her daughter, she felt a longing she couldn’t name: gratitude so deep it demanded expression. That gratitude became prayer. Her conversion wasn’t sudden; it was incarnational. She saw Christ in the faces of the hungry, the homeless, the forgotten. The God she had resisted met her in the streets of New York. When she entered the Catholic Church, it wasn’t to escape the world but to embrace it more fully — to serve it with mercy. Dorothy Day’s transformation reminds us that faith can begin in the ache for justice and end in the discovery of grace.  She found that love, when lived completely, leads inevitably to God.   post inspired by A Believer-in-Waiting's First Encounters with God  by Elizabeth Mahlou. Book description: It begins with a single, transforming encounter wit...

  When Doah finally emerged from those first three dramatic years—doctors trying to gain custody so they could force procedures we knew were dangerous (and his pediatrician’s research confirmed it), stealing him out of the hospital to save him, coping with trachs and plugs and clinical deaths and daily CPR—we finally had a moment to look around and take stock. That winter, eleven other children with tracheotomies at that same hospital had died. Only two survived: Doah, because we fought for him, and Peter, an older child who had already lived with a trach for ten years. We knew, with a cold clarity, that if we had not been tenacious—if we had not researched, questioned, challenged, and sought alternatives—Doah would have been one of the eleven. And we wanted the hospital held responsible. We consulted a lawyer. He listened carefully, then leaned back and said something we did not expect: “A jury will struggle with the medical complexity. Doctors carry authority. They will be believ...

  Today's book excerpt comes from  An Afternoon's Dictation  by  Steven Greenebaum . This book has been in the Amazon top 100 among interfaith and ecumenical books on many occasions. PART ONE: THE CALL TO INTERFAITH CHAPTER FOUR   The call of Interfaith in no way rejects religion. It is a call to realize that our spiritual traditions are living, breathing entities that change over time, as does all of life. Still, “Seek truth in the commonality of religions, which are but the languages of speaking to Me. Worship not the grammar” took some living with. I began to imagine a sacred mountain for humanity. At the mountaintop dwelt the call of the sacred, the commonality that would hold the truths to living a meaningful life to which all of our sacred traditions seek to point us. Our differing spiritual traditions would be diverse paths up this sacred mountain that our differing eras and cultures had found helpful. The “grammar,” then, is the particular ritual and...