Skeptical Faith

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...