Skeptical Faith

Google Image Of all the news of the past few weeks, none so moved me as the conviction of Dylann Roof in the murder last year of nine people at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston. I wasn’t moved so much because he was convicted. The evidence was overwhelming and included Roof’s confession. No, it was the retelling of the horrific crime, the powerful reminder about the degree to which racism can infect us and an overwhelming feeling of solidarity with my fellow Christians who were the victims of Roof’s terror. Just looking at their faces in the photo above breaks my heart. As you may recall, Roof, who was 21 years old, entered the church during an evening Bible study. For nearly an hour, he sat among a dozen people before opening fire during the participants’ final prayer. Testimony during his trial revealed that Roof was filled with racial hatred and spent months planning to murder black people. According to a National Public Radio accoun...

Google Image In 1971 when he was down on his luck, Larry Stewart was given a free breakfast from the owner of the Dixie Diner in Houston, Mississippi. He had been fired just before Christmas two years in a row, in 1978 and 1979. Around Christmas of 1979, while nursing his wounds at a drive-in restaurant during a very cold day, he noticed a waitress working the cars outside. “It was cold and this car hop didn't have on a very big jacket,” he recalled, “and I thought to myself, 'I think I got it bad. She's out there in this cold making nickels and dimes.'" He gave her $20 and told her to keep the change. "And suddenly I saw her lips begin to tremble and tears begin to flow down her cheeks. She said, 'Sir, you have no idea what this means to me.'" That experience was part of what turned Stewart into the famous “Secret Santa” of Kansas City. Another part is that he made a lot of money in cable TV and long-distance calling. Before his ...

Google Image As a kid, I wasn’t a fan of Sundays. After Mass, my family took it easy. Usually, a big Sunday dinner with roast beef or chicken was followed by my parents’ nap. I had little appreciation for their need for rest. I wanted activity, fun, action. The last thing I wanted was rest. So the traditional Christian idea of “eternal rest” in the afterlife had little appeal to me. As I grew older, I had a much greater appreciation of the idea and joining the ranks of the elderly, I have an even better understanding of it. Many older people, even if happy with their lives, are less enthused about hanging around in a world that’s become foreign to them. Many look forward to “eternal rest.” And you can certainly understand the appeal of rest in earlier centuries when the vast majority of people spent their days in endless physical toil. Hectic Activity and Stress But rest can appeal to even young people today. Being retired, I easily ignore the challenges and fatigue th...

Google Image A friend recently described to me his near-death, or out-of-body experience. Like many who have had such experiences, he said he is a changed man. He is religious in a way he never was before and he doesn’t fear death. I've written about this in these blogs before, recounting that as a journalist back when the subject was less well-known, I interviewed three or four people who said they had near-death experiences. All seemed to be sincere and all believed their experiences were real. And all of them, including the man with whom I spoke recently, described the great, white light they saw – some say in which they were enveloped. The 2014 movie, Heaven Is For Real – about a boy who told his parents he had visited heaven while he was having emergency surgery – elicited skepticism but revived the topic among the public. The media reports that there is a remarkable similarity in experiences among people who have had such experiences. An on-line article in the ...

Google Image For almost a year, construction crews have been busy around our house, which abuts a street being reconstructed. Some of the work is on our property or on property we recently sold to the city for construction. The supervisor on the site is a 6ft. 5 in., 250-pound seasoned worker named Larry. He has a big mustache partially hiding a sun- and wind-weathered face. I would guess he’s in his early to mid-60s. His voice is deeper than the sound of the bulldozers whose drivers he oversees. He seems never to rest, always on the job, consulting with workers and gently directing them. I use the word “gently” above advisedly because Larry is a Teddy Bear. I’ve had to meet with him at least once a week, often with his supervisors or workers, and I’ve never heard him raise his voice or speak with anything less than courtesy and kindness. Early on he provided me with his cell phone number and often urges me to contact him with any concerns. Much to his credit, ...

Google Image Back when our daughter, Maureen, was almost two, I ran over her with my car. I was parked in our driveway and was leaving to go somewhere – I don’t recall where. Leaving the house, I hugged and kissed her at the front door and went to get in my car, unaware that she had followed me. Just as I was backing out of the driveway, she was walking behind the car. She was so tiny I didn’t see her when I checked the rearview mirrors. She was in the middle of the bumper area, between the right and left set of wheels, when the car passed over her and I heard screams from a neighbor. I immediately suspected what had happened and dreaded getting out of the car. I found her pinned under the differential, the large gear train located between the two front wheels. She didn’t have so much as a scratch. The fact that she was so tiny and happened to be walking behind the car between the wheel sets of a car with a high frame saved her. Divine Providence? I’m leaving out wh...

Google Image My Dad, Leo “Pat” Carney, died in 1995 at the age of 94. A native of Emmetsburg, Ia. – named after Irish patriot Robert Emmet and once a magnet for Irish immigrants – my Dad wasn’t flawless but was a great father to whom I’m eternally grateful. My mother died much younger, so her aging is not fresh in my mind. But I now see my Dad when I look in the mirror. I see his wrinkles, his receding and thinning hair, and a face that exaggerates the worst aspects of my appearance. I’m him when I struggle to come up with a word or name I thought I knew well. I’m him when I fail to overcome a long-held bias or when I’m tempted to criticize young people for the way they dress or talk. I’m him when I worry about not living up to expectations about being an “active, vibrant elderly person.” I’m him when undergoing those occasional age-related humiliations. His Last Driver's Test I accompanied him, at around age 88, to his last driver’s test. The examiner stood ...

Martin Luther/Google Image Growing up Catholic, I was not a fan of Martin Luther or the Reformation. Reformers  attacked my beloved church and removed millions of people from the Kingdom of God as I imagined it. As a seminary student, I began to see Luther and the Reformation differently. Luther, a 16th century Catholic monk and priest who saw firsthand and up-close the corruption that had eaten into the church like flesh-eating bacteria, gained greatly in my esteem. And I have to ask, would Luther initiate a Reformation as a member of today's Catholic church? Judging by what the extent to which the Catholic Church has reformed itself and Luther's own words late in life, I doubt it. It's i nteresting how people who are considered geniuses and great personalities in history often come to see their work differently in old age. Last Thoughts of My Patron Saint I often think about what are reported ...

Google Image I’ll bet as you go about your daily chores, you think about how the universe is expanding and how it affects you, right? No? Well, Tom Siegfried, writing in Science News, calls the expanding universe “the greatest intellectual upheaval in the human conception of the cosmos since Copernicus,” who lived about 500 years ago. I see a couple of parallels here between science and religion. The first is that scientists are constantly making inferences about the universe from their observations. They don’t actually see the universe expanding. They infer it from what they can see and from mathematical calculations based on their observations. And that’s the case for lots of other cosmological discoveries, like the Big Bang and black holes. Religion does something similar. Few people, if any, have actually seen God. But there are plenty of reasons to infer his/her existence. Among them is the fact that virtually all civilizations have had some idea of God. Similar...

Google Image You know how you can have an experience that you’ve had many times before, that has become almost routine, and then, out-of-the-blue, it brings a new insight? I’ve had that kind of “aha” moment watching sports on TV. One of them was when I first saw a slow-motion version of a major-league pitcher in the process of throwing a fast ball. After seeing it – how unnatural it appears, how it stretches the flexibility of the human body to its limits – I realized how hard it would be to hit and how vulnerable the pitcher is to injuries just from the act of pitching. I had one of those kinds of moments while attending Mass recently. Let me say at the outset that I understand that this was a subjective experience and that some people may never have such insights at religious services. Can Bring Insights It’s just that I write plenty about the problems of belief and religion, and when writing about God and religion for people who may have given up on them, I shouldn’t ...