The podcast I did for Catholic Spotlight on the new Prove It: You book is now online. You can hear it right here.
The interview I did about the Pope’s Apostles book and the discussion guide is here.
Prove It: You is essentially a book on discipleship for young people. I begin by exploring the questions – who is God?
The next section is about Jesus and what faith in Christ means.
Followed by, at last, the more practical sections – but everything that’s preceded it is groundwork. I begin this section with a chapter on time – how time is a gift, and how, frankly, it is a sin to waste it, exploring in practical terms, what wasted time means. Then I move on to honesty, not only because this is a fundamental component to the life of a Christian, but because my experience with teens tells me casual, pragmatic dishonesty without a shred of guilt is a huge problem.
Then the book moves onto the usual – love, sex, the body, life issues and issues of justice and charity. As I mentioned before, I I begin and end with Pope Benedict. At the beginning of the book I quote something he said in Cologne on World Youth Day:
I know that you as young people have great aspirations, that you want to pledge yourselves to build a better world. Let others see this, let the world see it, since this is exactly the witness that the world expects from the disciples of Jesus Christ; in this way, and through your love above all, the world will be able to discover the star that we follow as believers.
And I end with part of his homily for Midnight Mass, 2006:
Yet now further questions arise: how are we to love God with all our mind, when our intellect can barely reach him? How are we to love him with all our heart and soul, when our heart can only catch a glimpse of him from afar, when there are so many contradictions in the world that would hide his face from us? This is where the two ways in which God has “abbreviated” his Word come together. He is no longer distant. He is no longer unknown. He is no longer beyond the reach of our heart. He has become a child for us, and in so doing he has dispelled all doubt. He has become our neighbour, restoring in this way the image of man, whom we often find so hard to love. For us, God has become a gift. He has given himself. He has entered time for us. He who is the Eternal One, above time, he has assumed our time and raised it to himself on high. Christmas has become the Feast of gifts in imitation of God who has given himself to us. Let us allow our heart, our soul and our mind to be touched by this fact! Among the many gifts that we buy and receive, let us not forget the true gift: to give each other something of ourselves, to give each other something of our time, to open our time to God. In this way anxiety disappears, joy is born, and the feast is created.
And then I really end with Pope John Paul II: