As we saw last time, antique atheists like Bill Maher still imagine that people who take the Bible seriously must read it literalistically, as he does. However, there is a difference between literalistic interpretation—which is the habit of all fundamentalists, whether atheist or Christian—and the literal sense of Scripture. The Catechism
Bill Maher is on the loose with his new film Religulous. Proving yet again that within the breast of every dimestore atheist beats the heart of a Christian fundamentalist crank, the latest pop paladin of Truly True Scientific Atheist Thought sallies forth to combat the ravages of faithheads like Louis Pasteur
For some folks, it takes a lot to dispel the myth of the hyper-controlling Church that only permits Bible study among the faithful after the insertion of the Vatican Orbital Mind Control Laser Platform chip in the frontal lobe of the brain. Indeed, it may come as a shock to
Jesus famously said, “Seek first the kingdom of God and all these things will be added to you as well.” Elsewhere, he restated this principle using a different image and adding a negative corollary: “Take heed what you hear; the measure you give will be the measure you get, and
We noted last time that one of the principal problems of trying to treat Scripture as a purely human book is that, though God can supernaturalize nature, we cannot naturalize the supernatural. God can assume a human nature and join it to his divinity. But we cannot take a supernatural
Discussing the moral sense of Scripture would seem easy. After all, we’re talking The Good Book here. Even when they were busy abandoning Christianity as supernatural revelation from God, Americans for the past couple generations still tended to treat the Bible as a Solid Moral Code Enshrining Tested Values with
Bound up with the biblical understanding of God from the get-go is the conviction (one almost wants to call it the foregone conclusion) that God knows the future. This isn’t always necessarily the case with those delightful works of pagan imagination called “the gods”. In some pagan myths, one gets
When it comes to evangelism, there’s one commandment of Christ most of us obey: “Go and tell no one” (Mark 1:44). That’s because we think evangelism is a lecture, and we’re no lecturers. After all, evangelists are always portrayed as stump orators proclaiming something called the Good News to silent,
One of the more fascinating media phenomena of the past four years has been the ABC adult drama Lost. It follows the fortunes a number of survivors of Oceanic Flight 815, which has crashed on an island somewhere in the Pacific and left them, well, lost. If there is any single word
Before I was Catholic I often met ex-Catholics who did the standard schtick about “Catholic guilt” and told me all about how going to confession instilled in them this deep-seated guilt that they are only now working through. Blah, blah, etc. Sorry. Not buying it. I was raised in a
Many people have the idea that the Church functions according to the principle: “That which is not forbidden is compulsory.” But this is not the case. The Church has relatively few dogmatic teachings, particularly when it comes to the interpretation of a biblical text. Almost never will the Church say
In Striking the Rock, the theme of the biblical readings was water. Water in the wilderness in Exodus. Water at the well in John. Water from the struck Rock. Water that ultimately points to the water from the wounded side of Christ and, beyond that, to baptism. Elsewhere in John, the
A notable feature of much ancient literature is its almost childlike willingness to believe that, of course, We the Authors are superior and stainless while They the Foreigners are subhuman. This sort of attitude informs virtually every ancient culture from Egypt (whose official records do not tend to record the
I run into lots of Catholics who feel bad about the divided state of Christendom yet also feel powerless to do anything about it. “After all, this is the 20th Century. Don’t most Protestants know what we believe already?” they say. “So why should I talk about my faith with
As is my custom, I got an email from a total stranger who took time out of her busy day to send the following: Dear Mark, just came from your Website and have some questions. It sounds like you were a “Protestant” before becoming a Catholic? I don’t know which
Some people speak of hell as something that can “befall” you–like a safe out of a third story window. You’re just walking along, being a nice person and boom! You go to hell! “I missed mass this morning because I overslept and then had to work. Am I going to
On January 11, 2009, we went to Noon Mass at Blessed Sacrament parish in Seattle. It was being celebrated by our visiting priest, but after he processed up to the altar, we were astonished to see that Fr. Tom Kraft had taken a seat beside him. Fr. Tom is one of the
A couple of years ago, in Seattle, some tourist returned from the former Soviet Union with an odd souvenir of the old regime: a ten ton statue of Lenin. Shortly thereafter, this eccentric person died and the statue somehow wound up in the hands of the city, whose Wise Elders
The last Sunday of the liturgical year is the Feast of Christ the King. To mark that, the Church reminds us that history, like the year, ends in triumph and a crown. But what a strange triumph! And what a strange crown! In the first reading for that Feast for
Up until very recently (the past 100 years or so) very little thought was given to how children think, feel and perceive the world. “Children’s literature” for instance is largely a 20th Century phenomenon. Grimm’s Fairy Tales were not written for kids but for adults. Indeed, the late 19th Century is where
I was a (tentative) supporter of the war in Iraq, because I feared Saddam Hussein might give weapons of mass destruction to a terrorist organization for use on an American city. These fears were stoked by statements from Vice President Dick Cheney: “Simply stated, there is no doubt that Saddam
G.K. Chesterton once remarked that one of the principal disasters of the breakup of Christendom was not that it loosed Christian sins on the world, but that it loosed far more dangerous Christian virtues. For it is virtue, untethered from the governance of God and running amok which can do vastly
Some years back, I was privileged to hear a tape of some original music recorded by several friends of mine. Singing on the tape were four women with well-trained voices and an astonishing gift for harmony. And though it was done on a shoestring (the whole thing was put together
George Weigel once remarked that it seemed to him Pope John Paul II was the most fearless person he’d ever met. And it seemed to him that John Paul was fearless, not because he’d been through this or that experience, but because he had somehow managed to internalize the reality
One of the most interesting books in the Old Testament is Jonah. Controversy and confusion have swirled around it for centuries. People have mistaken it for history. (It isn’t. It is a kind of Jewish literature called a midrash or instructive tale.) People have thought Jonah was swallowed by a whale. (He
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