Skeptical Faith

Google Image Thank God, we’re almost through one of the worst “lying seasons” ever. That’s what I call the time before elections when candidates air campaign ads full of wild exaggerations, half-truths and downright lies. It’s appalling. It makes you wonder how the authors of these ads justify their creations. Does winning require searching for any possible damaging information about an opponent? And is winning all that matters? I imagine many producers of these ads, and the candidates that approve them, would say that if you can’t win, you can’t make the changes that the candidate promotes, as if life itself depends on a particular candidate winning. The explosion of these misleading ads makes me wonder about their effect on the public’s notion of truthfulness. I believe it erodes many people’s determination to be truthful. After all, if prominent people are willing to “bend the truth” to get elected, why shouldn’t I lie to get a job, procure a life mate, prepare my taxes? ...

Google Image I recently finished reading a novel called, “Have You Seen Luis Velez” by one of my favorite authors, Catherine Ryan Hyde. It’s an unusual title, I know, but no more so than the plot, which is about a 17-year-old boy named Raymond who befriends a 92-year-old woman who lives in his apartment building in New York City. The woman, Mildred Gutermann, a blind, German Jew whose family narrowly escaped the Holocaust, has been alone since Luis Velez, a modern-day Good Samaritan who visited her and helped her regularly, suddenly stopped coming. She spots Raymond in the hallway one day and asks, “Have you seen Luis Velez?” The subsequent conversation between the two blossoms into a deep friendship in which Raymond, who is black, substitutes for Velez, spending time with Mildred, doing errands and the task he takes on with dogged determination – finding Luis Velez. Knocks on Doors Finding 21 Luis Velezes in the New York phone directory, Raymond sets out to knock on doors. His...

I’ve often wondered what motivated my grandmother, Julia McNulty Carney, to communicate with a cousin in Ireland she had never met. And this was in the age of “slow mail.” There was no email, messaging or WhatsApp. But her doing so opened a channel for me and my family that has proven invaluable. At about 10 years old at Julia’s urging, I started to write the same cousin – an already elderly woman in the town of Dromore in Northern Ireland – that led to knowing and loving an extended family I hadn’t known existed. As a result, our American family have kept in touch – including mutual visits – with our Irish cousins. On both sides of the Atlantic, belief seems to have faded, but the relationship has helped us on the American side at least understand where we come from, literally and figuratively. And in my view, faith is our most important Irish inheritance. Whether the Faith Fits You Obviously, you can’t “inherit” faith like you can a set of silverware. At some point you have to ...

Google Image  An opinion piece in a recent edition of Rolling Stone magazine by Tim Dickinson was about Lance Wallnau , whom he describes as “a self-styled ‘prophet’ and one of America’s most strident Christian Nationalists. “Wallnau,” says the article, “is a leading figure in the New Apostolic Reformation, or NAR, whose followers believe that we are living in an age of new apostles and prophets, who receive direct revelations from God. NAR believers hold that the second coming of Jesus is fast approaching, and that it is the destiny of Christians to accelerate the End Times by exerting ‘dominion’ over the world.” I’m not a regular reader of Rolling Stone and have never heard of Wallnau, but I do know that the idea that Christians should impose their beliefs on the rest of society, and even promote a “Christian” state, has been a continual thorn in the side of Christianity, and indeed, of religion in general, for centuries. Papal States Historically, my own Catholic Chur...