Joshua Brooks
Episode 360
29 DEC 2025
He is a seminarian in the Archdiocese of Philadelphia, attending St. Charles Borromeo Seminary. He was actually not born into the Catholic faith and, as he talks about here, his sights were actually fixed squarely on basketball, which he played as a youth, with a focus on making the freshman team at the high school he would be attending. He even later attended a basketball camp. In the seminary he participates in tournaments in billiards and chess. Listen for his thoughts on the 2025-26 NBA season thus far!
Notable guest quotes:
“My parents, they enrolled my sister and I into Catholic education. So, by spending time in Catholic education, that’s how I was introduced to the Catholic faith, and I learned about how God the Father, how God loves you, basic scriptural knowledge, essentially.”
“My seventh and eighth grade years, I spent practicing with a personal trainer, with my own shooting coach, just so I can make the high school basketball team.”
“When I asked out that girl, and when we began dating… I still felt incomplete. This was not the love that I was in search of. I was looking for a love that would transform me, renew me.”
“I looked at that crucifix, and … I said, ‘Lord, if she won’t wait for me, who will?’ And the whole time our Lord was just saying, ‘Josh, I’ve been waiting for you. I have the best love to give you. And I want you to share it, not just with one individual, but share it with the whole world, with the people that feel detached from it’.”
“You can tell if it’s from the Lord, if for two things; one, if it’s not easy, definitely know it’s probably from our Lord. And then also if it’s something that is beyond you, if it’s something that you find hard to even fathom, then that’s how you may know it’s from God.”
“One thing I love about Catholicism is that it always demands more from us. It demands us to be sacrificial as Christ is. It doesn’t call us to be mediocre, but to be self-sacrificing and to give our all and to actually unite ourselves to the suffering of Christ on the cross.”
“They supported my decision in converting to the Catholic faith and wanting to become a Catholic priest, and I think it was not really through my own efforts or my own work. It was through our Lord, through His divine call. He reached out to my mother, and He reached out to her through other Catholic lay people and through the Catholic clergy and the religious sisters.”
“As Catholics, we see our Lord working in our interactions with each other, whether it’s after Mass, whether it’s at a parish Bible study or after adoration or while praying together.”
“Hopefully, God willing, in 2031, I will be able to be ordained a priest for the Archdiocese of Philadelphia.”
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