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Margaret Brennan Institute

The Margaret Brennan Institute was established in 2016 to explore the areas of spirituality, Church and culture. At the heart of the Institute is the legacy of Margaret Brennan and the rich heritage of the IHM Sisters, the community of Catholic sisters to whom she belonged and whom she loved dearly.

MBI offers webinars, workshops, and conferences around pressing topics today, exploring them through spirituality and allowing them to inform our own life.

Upcoming Event:

event title What Would Thomas Merton Tweet: Finding spiritual intimacy in a socially distant world

presenter Dr. Daniel P. Horan, OFM

type webinar

date March 17, 2021 (auto adjust for user’s time zone)

time8 p.m.-9:30 p.m. EST (auto adjust for user’s time zone)

link Click here for more details

“Spirituality is what our faith looks like in everyday life. Spirituality is about getting to the bottom of our restlessness. It is here that God comes. It is here where God is.” — Margaret Brennan, IHM (Presentation at the Summer Pastoral Theological Institute at St. John Center for Youth and Family in Plymouth, Mich., on Aug. 12, 1999)

MBI welcomes research and collaborative efforts with spiritual seekers and people from all faith traditions and religious communities.

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From the Blog

When both our light and our darkness are integrated then our inner and outer lives are integrated. Losing ourselves and then finding ourselves again is the pattern of our journey through life.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, at St. Paul’s Retreat Center (May 11, 2009)

Prayer for me, then, has been an entering into my own heart and experience and finding its meaning in the experience of Jesus and of his Mother who is the perfect Christian and faith-filled believer.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

The experience of God and ways of knowing the holy are the same as our mode of knowing all other things. And that mode is sensuality.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 18)

You never come to the bottom, do you? How do you come to the bottom of coming to know God? God is so big that you just come to know different things about God all the time. As you learn more about the world you learn more about God.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in a voice recording on September 15, 2015

To resist evil and violence both within and outside us is to acknowledge ourselves as purposeful agents of salvation, and of responsibility, to ourselves and others, capable of moral discernment, courage, creativity and solidarity.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 79)

Spirituality is the capacity to live deeply in the concrete, creative order of things even as we stretch through and beyond them.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in Compass: A Jesuit Journal (Sept/Oct 1994, p. 19)

Prayer is … the challenge to find Jesus, to respond to him, to rejoice in his goodness, and mercy, and tender love … in the encounters of every day and in the challenging, often ambiguous signs of our times.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in New Catholic World (Jan/Feb 1977, p. 21)

I grew into a great love of the Church as the Mystical Body of Christ and of the liturgy, through which the life of the Church is most deeply expressed.

Margaret Brennan, IHM, in What Was There For Me Once: A Memoir (2009, p. 45)

Spirituality is what our faith looks like in everyday life. Spirituality is about getting to the bottom of our restlessness. It is here that God comes. It is here where God is.

Margaret Brennan, IHM (Presentation at the Summer Pastoral Theological Institute at St. John Center for Youth and Family in Plymouth, Mich., on Aug. 12, 1999)

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