Fr. Nate Wills has been the chaplain for the Notre Dame football team since 2018. He’s been along for exhilarating triumphs and devastating losses. He’s seen and felt the energy of packed stadiums and the nervous focus of the pregame rituals. He’s watched young men try and fail, then recover and succeed. But through it all, maybe the most important thing of all is simply this: he’s been there. He’s been present. And because of that, he’s witnessed the presence of God in unexpected and otherwise unseen places, and he’s helped other people to take note, too.

After collecting stories of these rich and humbling experiences, Fr. Nate has crafted these stories into short, illuminating reflections for the rest of us. His new book, Pray Like A Champion Today, opens up for us stories of the Notre Dame football program as seen in relation to the Gospel, with a call to prayer. Fr. Nate joins me today to talk about culture, character, and the presence of Christ as seen from the sidelines and beyond.

Follow-up Resources:

• Pray Like a Champion Today, by Fr. Nate Wills, C.S.C.
• Follow ”Pray Like a Champion Today” on Instagram
• Check out the hugely popular “Saturdays with the Saints” lecture series, where a public lecture on a saint is offered (in-person, plus available online) every Notre Dame home football Saturday.

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Many of us have learned to see the world differently because of C. S. Lewis. But how did Lewis learn to see the world the way he did? From whom did he learn to see the marriage of the spiritual and material, of heavenly things right along with scientific things? If we go in search of answers to such questions, we find ourselves plunged into the Medieval world and encountering, among others, Dante.

In his book, The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis, Jason Baxter helps us uncover the influence of great books on Lewis’s great mind. Dr. Baxter joins me to continue our conversation which began on his work of translating Dante, to move now from Dante to Lewis, who was himself a man who lived in modern times but was not of those times.

Follow-up Resources:

• The Medieval Mind of C. S. Lewis: How Great Books Shaped a Great Mind, by Jason M. Baxter
• Learn more about Dr. Baxter’s work at https://www.jasonmbaxter.com/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.

Translating Dante is not a matter of rendering words in one language for words in another language. Indeed, no act of translation is so direct or basic. But as with Dante’s Comedy when the style itself is part of the art – the sound of the thing, the movement, the embodiment – the translator needs to feel as much as think, relying on sense along with knowledge. Why? Because the hope of giving us – the readers of a translation – an encounter with the great good found in the art depends on the more holistic, more full-bodied work of scholarship and personality, at once.

Jason Baxter has studied Dante for years and written on him before, including with his marvelous and illuminating book, A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy. Now he is completing the work of translating the master’s poem for English readers that brings us into not just what the poem says, but what it feels like.

Follow-up Resources:

• Inferno, A New Translation by Jason M. Baxter
• Purgatorio, A New Translation by Jason M. Baxter
• A Beginner’s Guide to Dante’s Divine Comedy, by Jason M. Baxter
• Learn more about Dr. Baxter’s work at https://www.jasonmbaxter.com/

Church Life Today is a partnership between the McGrath Institute for Church Life at the University of Notre Dame and OSV Podcasts from Our Sunday Visitor. Discover more ways to live, learn, and love your Catholic faith at osvpodcasts.com. Sharing stories, starting conversations.