Skeptical Faith

Google Image Among its best-read stories of 2018, America Magazine lists “Deployment to Iraq Changed my View of God, Country and Humankind. So Did Coming Home” by Phil Klay. Klay is a U.S. Marine Corps veteran of the Iraq War and the author of the short story collection Redeployment, which won the 2014 National Book Award for Fiction. In 2018 he received the George W. Hunt, S. J., Prize for Journalism, Arts & Letters. I read his story with the readers of this blog in mind. Though few of us have experienced the trauma of war, Klay appears to have struggled with faith problems shared by many who are searching for God. He started from the position of a practicing, but doubt-filled, Catholic. “Faith, for me, has always been a place to register a sense of doubt, of powerlessness, of inadequacy and uncertainty about my place in the world and how I am supposed to live,” Klay writes. Facing Human Frailty “You kneel before a crucifix. Before a broken, tortured and humilia...

Google Image Last year, I wrote an opinion piece entitled, “Why Christians Should Hate Christmas.” It was published in the online edition of the National Catholic Reporter and elicited a bit of attention, even resulting in a telephone interview for the publication’s podcast. But on some level, I regret having written it. The point of the article was that Christmas has become so commercialized, so estranged from its meaning, so inimical to Christian values, that it’s unredeemable. I mentioned that if I had the power, I would change the Christian celebration of Christmas from Dec. 25 to some other date, abandoning Dec. 25 to the buyers and sellers. That last part may still not be a bad idea, but whenever it is held, Christmas itself is a beautiful celebration. The allegorical stories of Jesus’ birth capture essential lessons for anybody searching for God. The Value of Humility Among the most powerful of its lessons is the value of humility. God – who ...

Google Image A few months ago, a church in Des Moines displayed a big banner on its building that proclaimed, “Black Lives Matter.” It should be no surprise that in today’s politically charged climate where every statement is viewed from a tribal perspective, the banner elicited backlash. And from all places, it came from the police department, whose spokesman said the banner should have read, “All Lives Matter.” Of course all lives matter. That’s implicit in “black lives matter.” The intent of the later is to focus on the lives of a group of citizens that historically and currently are less likely to be recognized as mattering. The Congregational church’s pastor said the banner was intended to bring attention to the systematic racism in society that has resulted in, among other things, higher poverty and arrest rates. Persist in Denying It I believe it’s hard for a reasonable person of good will to deny the pastor’s claim. Many people, however, persist in denying the existe...

Google Image I’m about to finish reading “The Indifferent Stars Above” by Daniel James Brown – the tragic story of the famous Donner Party, after whom Donner Pass and Donner Lake in northeastern California are named. It’s about a group of emigrants who left rural Illinois on foot and in horse-drawn wagons in the spring of 1846 to find a better life in California where the climate and pending theft of the territory from Mexico promised prosperity. Led by brothers Jacob and George Donner, the group of nearly 90 people tried a new and supposedly shorter route to California. They soon encountered rough terrain and numerous delays and eventually became trapped by heavy snowfall high in the Sierra Nevada Mountains. Starving and weakened by the cold and harsh conditions, they were reported to have resorted to cannibalism. Only about half of the group reached California the following year. As their story became widely known, “Donner Party” became associated with one of society’s...

Google Image Writing notes for this blog, I stare out the window of the retreat house at New Melleray, a Trappist monastery in northeast Iowa, at what I believe is a large oak tree that has recently shed its leaves. It stands black and naked against an overcast November sky. It seems dismal, even sad. But, of course, it has no such feelings; it’s simply doing what deciduous trees do. It has no self-consciousness. We observe it and think about it or contemplate it but it has no ability to reciprocate. Partly because of this, we say that we humans are a higher form of life. It reminds me how much greater the difference there must be between the human form of life and that of God. So much so that we can think of God only by analogy. He/she is father/mother, creator, a “person”   in which “we live and move and have our being,” says Paul in a speech recorded in the Acts of the Apostles. But that, and all language regarding God, is only analogous to what we know from hu...

Google Image (This blog was originally published in 2014. I did some updating for 2018, but it's mostly the same. That includes the wish that readers will have a thankful Thanksgiving.) I was a columnist at one point in my newspaper career, and for several Thanksgivings, my whole column comprised a list of names of people to whom I was particularly thankful. I had thought about doing that with this blog, which will be posted on Thanksgiving Day, my favorite of all the holidays. But in the interest of privacy, which is becoming a rarer commodity, I decided against it. You know who you are. You’re family and friends and the readers of this blog, including the people to whom I send weekly e-mails about the posts, my Facebook friends and the unknown number who see it on Google+ and Tumblr. I am particularly grateful to Jim Stessman, my friend and former newspaper colleague, for looking these blogs over each week and providing valuable feedback.  Not Always in the Mood ...

Google Image A priest in Colombia, Juan Jaime Escobar, is an extraordinary speaker, combining profound insights into his subjects, humor, and a keen sense of what people are actually thinking and doing. If you speak Spanish, you can type in his name on YouTube’s web site and watch many of his best presentations. In one of them, Escobar comments on our practice of replacing the God of the New Testament with the god of our imaginations. In other words, instead of us being “God-like” – for which I advocate regularly in these blogs for people searching for God – we insist that God be “human-like.” To get close to God, he advises, “We have to pluck from our minds the illusions about God that we’ve nurtured since our childhood.” The God Who Regularly Punishes Among the most difficult of these fantasies to banish is the God who regularly punishes people in this life for a myriad of infractions. We enthrone God, the judge, over the God of mercy, the tyrannical despot over the...

Google Image In her book, “Redeemed,” Heather King writes about the changes in her life when she went from being a waitress to becoming a lawyer in Los Angeles. Described as “ an essayist, memoirist, blogger and speaker” by Wikipedia, King was estranged from God and addicted to alcohol, and in telling her story and the reasons she gave up the subsequent practice of law, she provides unflattering opinions about the law and lawyers. “…The entire legal profession,” she asserts, “was so driven by the fear of not winning enough money, so intent on covering its a.., so inured to the meaninglessness of the whole enterprise, that if the truth had stood up from the jury box and waved, we would have stared for a moment in shock, then made a motion in limine to rule it inadmissible.” Disillusioned My apologies to any lawyers who may be reading this. King was obviously disillusioned by her experience as a lawyer – something that happens with many professions. But that experience and...

Google Image Mass shootings and terrorist acts against various groups of Americans come and go with such frequency that we may become immune to their horror. The latest, at this writing at least, was the massacre of 11 worshippers at the Tree of Life Synagogue in Pittsburgh on Oct. 27. According to a report on National Public Radio, “the detectives who investigated the killing reported that the gunman, once in custody, told officers that he ‘wanted all Jews to die.’" The report called this “anti-Semitism in its rawest form." Conspiratorial Thinking “Jeffrey Herf, a historian at the University of Maryland who has written widely on the anatomy of anti-Semitism, argues that particular arguments and habits of thinking underlie its power. Most important, he says, is a willingness to buy into conspiratorial thinking. "The core of every conspiracy theory," Herf notes, "is the basic notion that the world is governed by small groups of people who operate ...

Google Image If you visit the small, Central American country of El Salvador, you’ll notice in prominent places huge images of Oscar Romero, sometimes alongside an image of Ernesto “Che” Guevara. “Che” is a hero to many leftists in Latin America. An Argentinian by birth and a medical school graduate, he joined Fidel Castro in the Cuban revolution and later attempted to foment revolution in South America. He was killed by the Bolivian military in 1967. He became a “ ubiquitous countercultural symbol of rebellion ,” according to Wikipedia. And, it is said, the association in the popular mind between the leftist causes of people like Guevara and Oscar Romero, the murdered archbishop of San Salvador, is the reason the Catholic Church took so long to canonize Romero. Gunned Down Many Salvadorans believe the archbishop, who was gunned down while saying Mass in 1980, should have been canonized long before now. But others within the Church argued that Romero’s martyrdom was for...

Google Image Archie Bunker, the character masterfully played by the late Carroll O’Conner in the 1970s TV comedy “All in the Family,” had his own take on the traditional Christian doctrine of the inerrancy of the Bible. “God don’t make no mistakes,” declared Archie. “That’s how he got to be God.” For those too young to remember Archie, who in 2005 was listed as number 1 on Bravo's 100 Greatest TV Characters, Wikipedia says Bunker was characterized by his bigotry towards “… blacks, Hispanics, "Commies," gays, hippies, Jews, Asians, Catholics, "women's libbers," and Polish-Americans….” Bunker was presented as a Christian, however, and “… often misquotes the Bible. He takes pride in being religious, although he rarely attends church services ….” An Anonymous Contributor Sister Mary Matilda, my eighth grade teacher, would accuse me of being uncharitable but I imagine that an anonymous contributor to a recent newspaper column is an “Archie Bunke...

Google Image There’s a story in the Acts of the Apostles – in my view, the most interesting book in the Bible – about the Apostle Paul walking around the Areopagus in Athens, a sort of open-air courtroom/forum/temple. Images of Greek gods were on display there, and Acts describes a speech Paul gave to “the men of Athens” who were presumably there to discuss weighty matters of state or religion. Paul tells them he noticed an altar with the inscription, “To an unknown god” and says that’s the God he is proclaiming – the God of Christians and Jews, who was unknown to the Greeks. Impenetrable Mystery That God is still unknown, theologians tell us, because he/she is unknowable. As much as we may pray and talk about God, we really don’t know who he/she is. We can theologize and philosophize all we want, but God will always be an impenetrable mystery. And the mystery is why we need faith to have a “relationship” with him/her. But Paul goes on to quote Greek poets to say th...