REVEREND JOSEPH M. ESPER is a priest of the Archdiocese of Detroit and pastor of Immaculate Conception parish in Anchorville, Michigan. He received his Master of Divinity degree from St. John's Provincial Seminary in Plymouth, Michigan. Through the years, Father Joe has lectured at Marian conferences, appeared on EWTN, spoken on Catholic radio, and written more than a dozen articles for This Rock, The Priest, Homiletic and Pastoral Review, and other publications. He is also the author of numerous books, including Saintly Solutions, More Saintly Solutions, After the Darkness, Lessons from the Lives of the Saints, and Why Is God Punishing Me? In addition to Amazon, many of his most recent books are available through Queenship Publishing.
Toward the end of the 19th century a man in North Carolina named William Sydney Porter was convicted of embezzlement or stealing from his employer, and sent to prison. Though a convicted criminal, his short life ended up having a happy ending—for it...
There’s an inspiring book called The Hiding Place which was written many years ago by a Dutch woman named Corrie ten Boom. It tells the story of how she and her family lived in Holland before and during World War II. They were Christians who took...
A priest living in Washington D.C. went to the airport to pick up a visitor from Africa whom he had befriended while serving as a missionary there. It was a cold, winter day; there was no snow on the ground, but everything was gray and bare. When...
Once there was a woman—we’ll call her Sarah—who suffered from a very unfortunate condition: she could never see the good in other people. You’ve heard the expression that some people aren’t happy unless they’re complaining about something? This...
A minister serving as pastor for a small Protestant congregation was visited one afternoon by two missionaries from the local Evangelical church. The visitors boasted about how their religion was based on the promises of Jesus that His followers...
An experiment was once held in which four small groups of people were asked to build the tallest possible structure of pieces of uncooked spaghetti, using only cellophane tape to hold everything together—and most of the groups were certain they’d...
Spiritual warfare is a reality. As Pope Francis has insisted on many occasions, the devil exists and is constantly waging war against us—a teaching the Holy Father takes directly from Scripture and the wisdom of the Tradition of the Church. Those...
A young woman preparing to bake a ham sliced off the ends before putting it into the cooking pan. Her little daughter was watching her, and asked, “Mommy, why did you do that?” The woman answered, “Because that’s the way my mother always did it...
