New Channel!

Folks… You don’t know what’s about to hit you.

Two months ago it was announced that Fr. Patrick Tuttle, OFM, my college campus minister, was being assigned to Macon, GA, 5 miles from where I live. The wheels in my head began to turn. Here’s an extroverted, holy, funny man, committed to the mission of Christ and completely without shame in front of a camera. How could I utilize this opportunity? How could we work together on something meaningful, something new?

What about a react-style channel?

And so began Upon Friar Review. Each Thursday, I wills how Fr. Pat videos from the internet and secular media, not to criticize or dismiss the world, but in an attempt to engage with it and, hopefully, call people from it to something deeper. Our hope is to reach people who would otherwise not watch a religious channel, providing them entertainment on a popular level… so as to give them some much needed theology.

If this is something you’d be interested in watching, I’d invite you to subscribe here, or to send this video to someone in need of a bit more levity in their lives!

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 Posted on October 15, 2020 by

 Upon Friar Review

Shrek: The Anti-Fairy Tale

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Click here to listen

Disney is one of the largest, most influential companies in the the entertainment industry. For decades, it has created imaginative uplifting stories for children, transporting them to another world, a fairy tale world.

It’s awful, really.

Not in the “magic-is-bad-we’re-polluting-our-kids-brains-with-anti-Christian-paganism” way that you might hear from evangelicals, a la Harry Potter, but in the “this-is-shallow-story-telling-that-is-white-washed-and-misogynistic-rarely-having-any-moral-import-for-our-world” sort of way. For Br. Tito and I, Disney fairy tales do precisely what our show seeks to avoid: providing an escape from reality.

Which is why we both like the movie Shrek so much. Basically an hour and a half of subverting Disney, everything about the movie seeks to use the common tropes of fairy tales to make fun them and show how ridiculous they are. The main character, Shrek, seems to embody our own voice, going through a fantasy world with skepticism and confusion, pointing out the absurdity of it all while the people around his cling to what makes a better story rather than what is real.

It’s a deep kids movie, I’ll give it that.

 2 Comments

 Posted on October 14, 2020 by

 podcast

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There’s No “Going Back to Normal”

After seven months of a pandemic, people are getting pretty restless. We just want to go back to the way things were, to when things were “normal.”

And I get that. I’m feeling just as restless and anxious as anyone.

But I do have a different perspective I think. For me, I want nothing to do with “normal” right now. Why? Because waiting for the past to come back is wasted time. Because what was “normal” before wasn’t necessarily even good. Rather, I want the Church to look at who we are right now, what we can do right now, and be Christ for the world right now. That’s the only normal we have.

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 Posted on October 12, 2020 by

 Video

How Often do you Need to Go to Confession?

In this week’s Catholicism in Focus, I take a look at an often-misunderstand law of the church, the requirement to go to confession. While many will say that it is required at least once per year, that is technically not the case for everyone.

As for how often one can or should go to confession, that’s a different story, so be sure to watch until the very end!

 Posted on October 9, 2020 by

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Little Miss Sunshine

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Click here to listen

There are two types of people in this world: winners and losers.

At least, that’s what the father in Little Miss Sunshine believes. He says so as the opening line of the movie, only to have it revealed immediately after that he himself is a loser. And so is every member of his family.

At least, they are by their own standards. They are by the standards of the world. They are when you look at them, hoping that they would be something they’re not. And that, right there, is the ironic twist in the movie: it is their fear of being losers that causes them to be loses. They care so much about what other people think of them, about conforming to outside expectations, that they fail to see the unique goodness in them all along.

Little Miss Sunshine isn’t the wise sage that it thinks it is, but it does offer at least a nudge in the right direction. While Br. Tito and I think that it takes its own advice to far, it’s advice, put simply, is true for us all: stop trying to be someone you’re not and love the person that you are.

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 Posted on October 6, 2020 by

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Breaking In The Habit

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