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Many of you may be reaching the Coffeehouse at the URL http://crossfire.org, which currently redirects to http://crossfire.org/ch. I'll soon be changing that redirection for a new project.  To continue getting to the Coffeehouse, make sure you have a bookmark pointed to http://crossfire.org/ch

I've always enjoyed the chess games we've played here on the Coffeehouse, and last night  I started putting together a new website centered on chess alone that I intend to open up to a much wider community than our little covenant.  The Coffeehouse will NOT be closing, though I will ...

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Holy Impatience
Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap


Some years before he was elected pope, Joseph Ratzinger was asked what he thought about the health of the Church. He answered that she was doing very well; she was just a lot smaller than most people thought. He was exactly right. We need to think of the Church in our age as a seed of life embedded in layers of dead tissue. We also need to distinguish the Church in the emerging world from the Church in developed nations.

In the emerging world, the Church has few material resources. She rarely has adequate money for education, development, or ministry. She faces well-financed and aggressive Islamic growth, and cul...

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Well, the day is finally here!  I'm about 5 minutes away from leaving my house and heading for the polls before I go to work today.  It's been a long, tough road.  Historically, I don't think the country has been this divided since the civil war.  We're in for some serious culture shock in the next few days no matter which candidates win.  Politics has been everyone's primary focus for so long, we're all going to have to figure out what we did before this.  Again, no matter who wins, I'll be spending a lot of my time praying for our nation to return to a culture of life.