Talks List

(Ave Maria Press, 2021) Rest is not a luxury; it is a spiritual discipline. It is gift.

Rest is a promise.

We dispose ourselves to receive the promise of rest through a disciplined desert process common to God’s people from the beginning. The biblical Exodus story is a map through this desert process, showing us the disciplines that offer “dew” – God’s renewing presence in the desert that leads us to the superabundance of rest in thoughts, emotions, body, and soul.

(Ave Maria Press, 2019) Mary doesn’t sing the Magnificat, Mary is the Magnificat. Follow Mary through her song of the Church, and learn how to be a magnificat, too. Wonderful for women’s events.

(Ascension Press, 2019) Pope Francis once called Mary the “mother of listening,” because she didn’t just hear (or read) the word, she understood how to interpret it in light of her own relationships, circumstances, and habits.

LOVE the Word® invites Our Blessed Mother to guide each of us in her personal “listening” practice. We learn how to LOVE the Word® like Mary, from Mary. She teaches us a powerful way of interpreting the word we hear and read through the landscape of our lives.

(Ascension Press, 2018) Learn how to share your faith concisely. Discover the Old Testament tabernacle as the perfectly packaged biblical model for conveniently understanding and explaining seemingly arbitrary Catholic beliefs and practices that baffle and frustrate both fallen-away and non-Catholics. Wonderful for apologetics events.

(Franciscan Media, 2017) The Bible will ignite a fire in your soul when you understand its who, what, where, when, why, and how. Explore God and His people as the “who” of the Bible, covenant love as the “what,” the Holy Land as the “where,” salvation history as the “when,” love as the “why,” and liturgy as the “how” of worship. Ignite is a practical guide to reading, praying, and understanding the Bible like never before.

(Ave Maria Press, 2016) Learn to recognize the methods the devil uses to keep you enslaved to fear, anxiety, and depression. Assemble scriptural tools that help you understand and conquer the demons of sin, Satan, self, and sloth. Immerse yourself in a profound contemplation of love, which is the only possible weapon against the spirit of fear.

(Ave Maria Press, 2015) Everything in the universe repeats in patterns. So does everything in my life. Could the Holy Spirit really be working in the repeats of my habits, relationships, circumstances, and desires? Discover your patterns and how to be UNLEASHED!

By virtue of the Sacrament of Baptism, every Christian has spiritual gifts that build up the body of Christ (1 Cor 12). “The [spiritual] gifts also have a personal usefulness, because their service of the common good favors the growth of charity in those who possess them . . . In the essential work of new evangelization, it is now more than ever necessary to recognize and value the numerous charisms capable of reawakening and nourishing the life of faith of the People of God” (Iuvenescit Ecclesia). 

A scriptural study of God as our “Abba” through the five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, Dolorosa explores some of the deficits that proceed from woundedness – anger/rage vs. rest; rebellion vs. faith; revenge vs. forgiveness; abandonment vs. presence; perfectionism vs. grace; fear vs. love. We experience what it means to have a safe place to acknowledge weakness and receive strength. We explore worship as trusting-love-in-sacrifice, in which we reach beyond our deficits to God, and learn from Jesus how to climb into the bosom of a loving Heavenly Father (John 1:18). In following Jesus’s own path through suffering, we discover the fire of the Father’s love burns away all that hides His goodness in the world.

Love is the ultimate mystery, isn’t it? Love is both the primary human need and the fundamental motivation of every human act: we’re always, always, always either trying to get love or trying to give love. It’s that basic. We need to be cherished and to cherish.

Because it’s as fundamental as the philosopher’s “first cause,” when our attempts to love or be loved are rejected or twisted, or when we are not loved well, we suffer the deepest possible suffering. On the other hand, because it’s so fundamental, only love heals.

Look at the saints, any of them, all of them. Name one, and I insist that saint is one who has been healed by inexhaustible Love. Cherished.

A saint is one who has embraced his neediness, his deficits, his feelings of unworthiness, and dared to approach God anyway, trusting that what the Bible, the Church, and the saints all say is true: God is love. And in so doing, they experienced God, they felt His love, and it healed them.

You were made to be cherished, ravished, and overwhelmed by Love. Do you dare? The language in the Bible regarding divine intimacy is extreme enough to make one uncomfortable, but oh the glory of the experience for those who dare to press into the “King’s chamber” with faith!

If we talk about physical healing in the Catholic Church at all, we do so in terms of healing Masses and healing prayer. But healing is a process. An enormous body of research to this point shows that 80% of all our physical issues are rooted in emotional, mental, and spiritual issues, usually trauma or built up stress responses.

Physical symptoms are information; they are the body’s way of communicating a need for healing, what needs to be healed, and even how to heal. Much of the automatic physical reaction we experience in stressful situations is ultimately ignored because we mark it down to “stress” (unavoidable!) without actually listening to what it’s trying to tell us. But dismissing physical symptoms because they are “stress” causes a build-up of stress-emotion-energy — fight or flight energy that was never discharged. Over time, this build-up is extremely unhealthy and destructive to the body, as it can never relax, heal, and grow. Listening to our bodies is the first step to healing them!

None of us is born an adult. We have to learn everything as we grow. To prevent our brains from having to relearn skills from start to finish, over and over, we develop muscle memory and psychological memory. But psychological memory develops when we are children with a child’s immature coping abilities; such coping mechanisms continue to operate through psychological memory long after we have grown into adulthood when they have become outdated and even destructive. We find our selves handling adult problems like children. This can be particularly problematic when we have experienced trauma and continue to live from that experience. Learn to reconnect to your inner child to heal and reparent immature coping mechanisms so that you live in freedom, creativity, and love.

Come with me as we explore the lives of seven people so completely daring in their faith that their heroism is recorded for all of history in the Hall of Fame of Faith. Throughout your study of Hebrews 11, you will feel as though you are following the path blazed by some Spiritual Greats who continue to beckon us to risk everything in believing God: Abraham, Moses, Joseph, David, Mary, Peter, and Paul. Learn the secrets of how God strategically forms the faith of leaders and be inspired to a heroic pursuit of God yourself! Great for men’s and leadership functions.

How do I deal with anger in a holy way? A study of some Biblical people who were angry with God – including Cain, Elijah, Saul, Jonah, the prodigal son, and Paul – the Scriptures allow us to “eavesdrop” on their frank conversations with God regarding strong negative emotions, and how God dealt with them as their Heavenly Father to help move them beyond their anger to love.