How Late Can I Come To Mass?

Ever have one of those days where it’s just not going to happen. You press the snooze button one two many times… you forgot you left your clothes in the washer the night before and have to wait for them to dry… the kids are just not cooperating this morning… and when you finally get to the car you realize there’s a sheet of ice on the windshield that needs to be scraped off. Yeah. One of those mornings.

Unfortunately, these sorts of mornings do not observe the Sabbath, and we can find ourselves running a bit late for mass some Sundays. What do we do? How late is too late?

That is the topic for the first Catholicism in Focus of the season. Each Monday this spring I’ll be posting a new video on a topic of faith that might need a second look.

 2 Comments

 Posted on January 30, 2018 by

 Theology, Video

Six Reasons Religion Does More Harm Than Good

Yes, you read that title right: “Six Reasons Religion Does More Harm Than Good.” And I stand by it. This might require some explanation…

You see, I can across this article a few days ago listing six reasons that religion was bad for the world. It’s not the most nuanced or well-thoughtout articles being that it’s just a mix of straw man arguments and hasty generalizations. Not exactly something we should be worried about.

And yet, something about it made me want to respond. Maybe because the arguments were so ridiculous or because it was exam week and I wanted something easy to respond to, I decided to make it my vlog reflection for the week: more or less, “why this article is wrong.”

What you’ll find when you watch this week’s video, however, is that I decided on a completely different approach. Rather than spending a lot of time refuting the claims, I actually affirmed them. Whaa?? The more I thought about it, the more I realized that each of these points had a basis in truth. While it was completely unfair and logically false to come to the conclusion that the author did—that religions are inherently bad for the world—the evidence presented isn’t completely wrong. Religion can and has done more harm than good in the world at times. What I find useful in this article, and why I present the refection I do, is because these six points offer us a reminder and a warning of what we are capable of when we lose track of what our religion actually calls us to.

Bad religion does exist… and sometimes it’s closer than we think. Let’s not prove the article right.

 7 Comments

 Posted on December 16, 2017 by

 Theology, Video

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Catholics and the Big Bang Theory

It’s no secret that some in the religious world approach science with a lot of skepticism. Approaching the two disciplines with a polarized mindset, they feel that they have to pick between religion OR science, as if one is completely right while the other is completely wrong. This, we know as Catholics, is a rather short-sighted approach. As “non-overlapping magisteria,” science and religion represent ways of knowing that speak to different things: science explains WHAT is around us while religion explains WHY it exists and how we’re supposed to use it. These disciplines do not contradict each other, nor can they exist without the other. To have good faith, we need to be well informed about what is going on around us; to study the world around us, we need to have foundation of faith to know how to approach it.

For many, this topic is a bit worn out. An issue only to the most fanatic, the rest of us are left wondering why this is still a topic of debate and why Br. Casey continues to write about it. It’s fair to wonder that. But you see, in this week’s Catholicism in Focus I want to also address this issue’s opposite: scientism.

A topic that has received a lot of attention of late from Bishop Robert Barron, scientism is essentially the same imbalance in relationship between science and religion, except from the other side. Rather than denying that science has anything to offer people of faith, scientism proposes that science is the only thing that can offer knowledge. In other words, “If you can’t prove it, it doesn’t exist.”

What’s so unfortunate about this opinion is not that people take science seriously. Science is a wonderful discipline that allows us to know about the world, which, in turn, helps us to know about God. What’s so unfortunate is that it denies all of the other ways of knowing: history, poetry, literature, art, philosophy, and religion, to name just a few. When looking at a sunset, science can tell us why the colors are the way they are, how hot the sun is, its speed and distance related to the earth, and its effect on human life. Those are all good things. But is that all there is to know about the sun? What about how it makes us feel, the memories it evokes, how it teaches us lessons about life? Surely, when we look at a sunset our thoughts are not focused on the chemical reaction occurring 93 million miles away. No, we’re focused on the beauty of it all, the memory of past sunsets, the constancy of the earth’s turning, the wonder of the universe, and the meaning of life. These are not topics answered by science but captured and shared only by other disciplines. How could we say that all that matters—that the only things that could ever be held true—are the things that we can prove by observation?

No, we need them all. Science is good. Science is wonderful, even. But science does not answer all of our questions. When we look to the marvels of the universe, something like the Big Bang Theory can be extremely helpful, and we should study it to know more about God, but it cannot give us answers to ultimate questions.

To watch this video, click here.

 Posted on December 5, 2017 by

 Theology, Video

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The Bible And Creation

“Why is there something rather than nothing?” This philosophical question, posed by Martin Heidegger in the 20th century, is one that reaches into the depths of our being. When we look around and see stuff—people, trees, rocks, Burger Kings, dust, light—we can often take it for granted. That stuff is just there. It always has been. It always should be. But is that really true? Why is anything here? For the philosophical mind, we realize that stuff didn’t have to exist, that there could be a “world” of nothing, a non-world in which nothing existed.

So, why is there something rather than nothing? Admittedly, this is not a question I can pretend to answer, but I think the question leads us to other ones. Like, “How did God create the universe?” or “How does God relate to what God has created?” We can’t truly know why God decided to create, but since we see that things do exist and we do believe in God, we can wonder how they fit together.

There are clues, no doubt, all throughout Scripture, but the most concentrated bits of evidence obviously occur at the beginning: Genesis. And while we can all probably give an account of what happened (God spoke and it came to be, God took a rib from Adam to make Eve, they lived in the garden), what might surprise you is that such a story is a combination of two creation myths found in Genesis. Yes, that’s right: Genesis contains two separate stories, complete with different details about the process of creation, different words to refer to God, and different theological conclusions about God.

What do we do with this? Well, that’s the topic of this week’s Catholicism in Focus, a look at Creation from a biblical perspective. For email subscribers, click here to watch.

 Posted on November 28, 2017 by

 Theology

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The Great Schism

A few years ago I took a class on Church history. Naturally, one of the major topics of study was the schism between the Churches of the East and West known as the “Great Schism.” But rather than just focus on the events of 1054 (the mutual excommunication of Pope and Patriarch), our professor brought us back hundreds of years to see how the seeds of division had been planted and nurtured well before that time. We learned how it was a complicated issue, how both sides had made their own mistakes, and how we as the Catholic Church needed to have the humility to recognize the major role we played in causing the problem.

It was a great moment of clarity and regret for me.

Most of all, though, I will never forget the interaction I had with a fellow student the moment we left the classroom. “Do you think that the Eastern people will ever come back to the Catholic Church?” he asked. Um… what?? Were you not just sitting there in class? Did you not see how it was not them who broke off from us but a tangled web of issues over the course of many centuries that produced a pretty mutual split? I was quick to answer: “Not with that attitude they won’t.”

Maybe a bit sharp, and I eventually explained what I meant and hopefully put together the pieces he had missed in class, but I stand by my statement: no unification will happen if we hold to the idea that we are the true Church without fault in the matter, and that they need to completely ascent to us. While the Protestant Reformation may have a different dynamic, the relationship between the Eastern and Western Churches, to me at least, is that of rival fraternal twin brothers: coming from the same mother, sharing the same history, and fighting all through our youth, we look different and have different perspectives but neither of us ultimately has a claim to being the more “true” brother. We share in our authentic status as the original Church of Jesus Christ and it is a great sin against the body of Christ that we remain apart.

Theological and practical issues do remain, and I am not saying that those do not matter or that one side cannot be more right than the other. What I am saying, and say quite emphatically, is that unification is not a matter of one side coming back to the other. From the start we were different, and different we will remain. But unification does not mean uniformity. When we look to history, we see that what separates us is not our language, culture, theology, or liturgical practice—these differences existed while we remained in communion with one another for centuries. No, sadly, history reveals that what most keeps us apart is our own desire for power and authority, the notion that we are the real and true Church that others must return to.

If you, like me, disagree with this very un-Christian notion that undermines the body of Christ and wish to see a more unified Church, then let’s begin by showing a little humility towards our Eastern brothers and sisters and work for something more than we have.

For more of a foundation in the issues that divided us a millennia ago, click here to watch this week’s video.

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 Posted on November 21, 2017 by

 Theology, Video

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Breaking In The Habit

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