Ken Hallenius

Columnist

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Faith and Leisure: Don’t Just Do Something, Sit there!

It’s summertime, “and the livin’ is easy,” as the classic song goes. It’s the time of year for road trips, baseball games, family reunions, beach reading, and endless glasses of […]

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Zeal for Making God Known, Loved, and Served

I was recently invited to speak to sixth- and seventh-grade students at a local Catholic school about the charism of zeal and how it has played a role in my […]

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Diocese

‘Everything Is Interconnected’: Notre Dame Panel Discusses 10 Years of Laudato Si’

“The decisions that humans make are a bigger challenge than the science itself,” Jennifer Tank, the director of the Notre Dame Environmental Change Initiative, said during a panel discussion entitled […]

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Rejoice? In Lent?

We are well into the season of Lent, and I am reminded of this fact regularly as I mindlessly open a can of soda and begin to sip on it, […]

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Diocese

Bioethics Expert Discusses ‘What We Owe to Each Other’

“Who are we, and what do we owe to one another?” asked O. Carter Snead, the Charles E. Rice Professor of Law at the University of Notre Dame Law School, […]

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The Acceptable Time

Not to lay a guilt trip on you, but those good intentions with which you began 2025, how are you doing with them? Are you continuing to work out at […]

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God’s Dogs

I have a confession: I’m a dog man. And I married a dog woman. I’m not talking here about some sort of “Teen Wolf” situation, I merely mean that we […]

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‘O Come, O Come Emmanuel’

Whatever astrophysicists might theorize about how time slows as one approaches the edge of a black hole, the clock runs ever forward, 60 minutes every hour, day after day. And […]

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Thanks Be to God

Back in the early 1990s, a major fast-food chain lured patrons in by promising that they would encounter “Food, folks, and fun.” There was even a catchy little song to […]

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A Treat for Holy Souls

The so-called “spooky season” is well underway. The grocery stores are filled with huge bags of candy, houses along my commute are decorated with blow-up pumpkins and enormous spider webs, […]

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Better than a Thousand Words

My parish is getting ready to publish an updated photo directory, and my wife and I recently got dolled up to have our portrait taken for the book. We’re no […]

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Going Forward by Making a Retreat

My wife and I are preparing for our summer vacation, a weeklong road trip to Colorado to attend her uncle’s 90th birthday party. We’re taking our two golden retrievers along […]