Christopher Chiyan Tin (born May 21, 1976) is an American composer of art music, composing for film, television, and video game soundtracks. His work is primarily orchestral and choral, often with a world music influence. He is a two-time Grammy Award winner. 

He has composed a number of songs for Video Games, using Sacred Texts from various Spiritual Traditions as his inspiration.

Baba Yetu is a powerful piece. More importantly, Baba Yetu is the Swahili “Our Father”. Be transformed! 

Nine or so years ago, I have the amazing privilege of visiting Haiti and spending a few days with Fr Rick Frechette. Fr Rick is an ordained Passionist, and served in Mexico and Peru. He returned to the States to become a doctor, figuring he could do more back in Haiti. It’s a remarkable story of endurance, faith, love, persistence, hope, and health.

It was a sobering experience. Each morning started with mas, and the bodies of those who had died overnight, mostly children, were laid in front of the altar.

They were then placed in storage, and every two weeks, Fr Rick and the team would bury those who were unclaimed in, as he says, a potter’s field.

Fr Rick sends our an occasional newsletter. Its not for the faint hearted. Life in Haiti is at its most brutal. Here is his latest newsletter

More on his life is this video

Someone I follow on social media is Judge Frank Caprio. He is on YouTube and Facebook. Basically he’s a municipal court magistrate who deals with speeding fines, low level public disorder and so on. He deals with cases with a great deal of kindness and compassion. Judge Caprio is a devout Catholic.

Through him, I learnt the story of Fray Tormenta. 

Fr Sergio Gutiérrez Benítez is the real life basis for the film, Nahco Libre. I haven’t seen the film, its looks like corny humour to my taste, but here is a video that tells his story. The first half of this video talks about the film, this video takes up when he talks about his life.

A drug addict and an alcoholic, and inspired by a priest he meets, he turns to the Church and desires to become a priest. He is told that the Church isn’t a rehab centre (Please discuss!!!) His resilience and hard work leads him to open an orphanage. With no money, he turns to Lucha Libra, a highly artistic and flamboyant style of Masked Mexican wrestling. Its just a great story.

If you’re Spanish is good, you can view a longer version of the story here, and this is a news story on him which is easy to follow and quite warm. Auto generated English Subtitles can be enabled.

Author : Timothy Egan

Published: 16 June 2020 · Penguin

Timothy Egan’s A Pilgrimage to Eternity is part travel memoir, part Church history, part spiritual quest—and surprisingly funny in places, too. Egan, a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist and lapsed Catholic, decides to walk the ancient pilgrim route from Canterbury to Rome—the Via Francigena, some 2,000 kilometres—asking a question many modern Catholics carry quietly: Is there anything left to believe in?

Egan’s isn’t a soft-focus spiritual journey. Raised Catholic and long estranged from institutional religion, Egan brings a refreshingly honest and unorthodox lens to his pilgrimage. This is not a devotional journey in the traditional sense—it’s a pilgrimage laced with scepticism, grief, and the haunting echoes of Europe’s bloody past. For readers who live in that liminal space between belief and unbelief, this book offers a surprising kind of companion: one who walks beside you without trying to convert you.

Egan’s path treads through Flanders fields, where poppies still grow over mass graves. He weaves history and personal story with unflinching clarity: Crusades launched in God’s name, pogroms against Jews, inquisitions, wars, genocides, and betrayals—often committed not in spite of religion, but under its banner. The pages are haunted by martyrs and monsters: charismatic popes and cruel inquisitors, saints who lived love and reformers who died for truth. And in this carnage-scarred landscape, Egan keeps asking the question that haunts many modern believers: What kind of God walks with us through this?

Yet, if this book were only a chronicle of religion’s failures, it would be exhausting. What redeems it—what elevates it—is Egan’s ability to find grace not just in the saints (Francis of Assisi, Hildegard of Bingen, and Thomas Becket make star appearances), but also in the quiet, unexpected places: the open kindness of a stranger, a roadside chapel at dusk, a shared laugh in a grimy hostel, the comfort of prayer returned from childhood.

“The human spirit is bruised, yes,” Egan writes, “but also unbroken.”

And so is his own. Throughout the journey, Egan reflects on the illness and death of his devout mother, and his aching desire to pass on some form of belief to his own children. This longing gives the narrative emotional ballast—it is, in the end, a deeply personal pilgrimage, one that readers may find unexpectedly moving, especially if they have wrestled with faith, grief, or questions of meaning.

“The human spirit is bruised, yes,” Egan writes, “but also unbroken.”

And it’s absolutely a book to read with your iPad open. You’ll want to ‘Google’ every town, abbey, saint, ruin, and roadside café he mentions. It’s part of the pleasure. This book isn’t just read—it walks with you.

What stands out? Flanders Fields

One of the most moving chapters is Egan’s quiet walk through the cemeteries of the First World War. No preaching—just the haunting reality of crosses, names, poppies, silence. And the human ache that keeps asking: What does faith mean here?

The Menin Gate, Ypres, a town saved by the Australians The Last Post is still sounded every night. Before the gate are he images of the countless millions who died.

Assisi and St Francis

In the chaos of religious history, the peace and humility of Francis stands apart. Egan doesn’t gush—but you can tell something lands deep here. Francis becomes a kind of gentle companion on the final stretch.

Rome

Egan reaches Rome not with a triumphant conversion, but with tired feet and a more open heart. No fireworks. Just a kind of quiet peace. A willingness to keep walking, not because he’s arrived—but because something has changed.

St John Lateran Basilica – The popes lived here for a thousand years. The heads of St Peter and t Paul are in reliquaries above the Altar

The tone will resonate with broad-minded, honest Catholics—especially those who love the Church but carry real questions. Egan is irreverent at times (but never disrespectful), full of humour, and unafraid to name the darkness. But he also finds light—in relics, ruins, saints, beauty, and above all, kindness.

He writes: “I wanted to believe in belief.”

It’s one of those lines you sit with for a while. That’s really what the whole book is—a longing for something worth trusting again.

Is it worth reading?

Absolutely. For those who’ve wrestled with faith, or wondered how to stay Catholic with integrity, or who carry grief or cynicism about the Church—this book doesn’t fix anything. But it walks with you. And that’s something sacred.

You won’t finish with certainty. You’ll finish with something better: a deeper humanity, and maybe, a little more courage to keep walking.

Reviewed by Fr. Tom McDonough, C.P.