Skeptical Faith

Google Image Back in 2006, Author Dannagal Young sprinkled her husband’s bath towel with holy water while he was showering. She got the holy water from a friend, who tried the same thing on her husband, who also had cancer, and he survived. So Young decided to try it as well. A former Catholic, Young describes herself and her husband, Mike, as agnostics, but, she wrote in a recent issue of the New York Times about the holy water, “It couldn’t hurt, right?” She said she “tapped into my childhood Catholicism and faith in a benevolent God as I pictured the magic water covering him with a protective layer.” She did this without his knowledge and acknowledges he “would have been very annoyed” had he known.    Mike had what Young describes as “ a benign tumor that had nonetheless taken over his midbrain,” and he died several months after the failed “holy-water therapy.” She describes her frustration with medical solutions at the time but says she now realizes that “science and m...

Google Image I’ve written about sexual subjects only a few times in the 12 years I’ve been writing this blog. Why? Shouldn’t every aspect of life be included among topics meant to help people searching for God? Yes, but when it comes to religious teachings, I believe sexual values have traditionally been overemphasized. “Morality,” in fact, has often been used solely to refer to sex. But current sexual mores – at least as portrayed on TV, in movies and streaming video – are, in my opinion, hard to sync with Christian or Jewish ideas of right and wrong and with the goals of people searching for God. Dramas, sitcoms, crime shows inevitably view sex as little more than recreation. Whenever romance is portrayed, it almost always includes one or more sex scenes, often on first encounters or dates. Merely Reflecting Reality? Producers of these shows will undoubtedly say they are merely reflecting contemporary reality. That’s partly true in so much as their shows portray a segment of s...

Google Image Years ago, a young work colleague told me she had stopped going to church and no longer considered herself a Catholic. She wasn’t very specific about her objections to her former faith. She simply didn’t see the need and was disenchanted with the church, which was under siege because of the revelations about priests who abused minors and bishops who covered it up. When I asked if she had ever considered the church as family, she looked puzzled. I mentioned that I had begun to think of it that way after the embarrassment and disgust I felt about the priest revelations. Tension, Disagreement, Conflicts I told her I thought about a typical American family and the interactions among its members, the tension, disagreements and conflicts as well as the mechanisms many families have for holding the family together. Those dynamics are different from those we use when dealing with non-family members. In most cases, at least when families are “functional,” we cut much more s...

Google Image I was a latecomer to “The Chosen.” I finished watching season 4 only a couple of weeks ago. I had thought it was probably just another pious portrayal of Jesus that was long on devotion and short on history. I’m glad my resistance didn’t persist.   For those of you unfamiliar with it, “The Chosen” is an historical  television series “created, directed, and co-written by filmmaker Dallas Jenkins ,” according to Wikipedia. “I t is the first multi-season series about the life  and ministry  of Jesus of Nazareth . Primarily set in Judaea  and Galilee  in the 1st century, the series depicts Jesus' life through the eyes of the people who interacted with him, including the apostles, and disciples  of Jesus, Jewish religious leaders, Roman  government and military officials, and ordinary people. “The series stars Jonathan Roumie  as Jesus alongside Shahar Isaac, Elizabeth Tabish, Paras Patel, Noah James, and George H. Xanthis, a...

Google Image I grew up on Sacramento Street in St. Joseph, Mo., and it only recently occurred to me how the street probably got its name. St. Joseph, if you recall, was the starting point of the Pony Express, that odd service that 165 years ago carried mail by relays of horse-mounted riders  from St. Joseph to Sacramento, CA. And even though I grew up Catholic, it never occurred to me that “sacramento” means “sacrament” in Spanish. Most of us, in fact, never give a thought to the religious meanings of lots of places in the U.S., like Los Angeles (The Angels), San Francisco (St. Francis), San Diego (St. James or Jacob), San Antonio, TX (St. Anthony), Santa Fe, NM (Holy Faith). Those places, of course, were named by the early Spanish-speaking settlers. But what does “sacrament” mean? Like me, many Catholics of my era may recall the lengthier catechism definition. But at the risk of oversimplification, I believe a sacrament is basically a sign of something holy. Catholics and some...

Google Image David Brooks, one of my favorite writers - who was considered a conservative until the Trump era - believes the president is the archetype of contemporary paganism. I know this may offend some religious people, but I think what Brooks has to say is close to the values of the gospel. “The pagan values of ancient Rome celebrated power, manliness, conquest, ego, fame, competitiveness and prowess,” Brooks wrote in a recent New York Times column, “and it is those values that have always been at the core of Trump’s being — from his real estate grandiosity to his love of pro wrestling to his king-of-the-jungle version of American greatness.” But Brooks acknowledges it’s not just Trump. “It’s the whole phalanx of authoritarians, all those greatness-obsessed macho men like Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It’s the tech bros (the macho tech workers in places like Silicon Valley). It’s Christian nationalism, which is paganism with worship music.” Christian Nationalism (Christian Nation...