Skeptical Faith

Google Image I’m a weekly volunteer at a social services agency, where my duties include interpreting from Spanish to English, and vice versa, for recent immigrants. If they qualify financially and otherwise, we provide temporary rent assistance, help with payment of utilities, vouchers for gasoline, food and emergency housing. This past winter we needed to provide most of the above for a family of four from Mexico who were sleeping in their old car. Besides a mom and dad, the family included two small children. The car’s windows didn’t shut properly, so they used rolled-up towels in the windows to protect their children from the intense cold. They had no jobs and nowhere to go for help. We helped them with food, fuel and emergency housing. As a matter of policy, we don’t ask about clients’ legal status, their religion - if they have one - or any other such questions. We just try to help them in their need. "Illegal Aliens" The agency is part of the mission of a Catholi

Google Image One of the most solemn and ancient rituals of the Catholic Church is the Easter Vigil. As the name implies, it is held on the Saturday evening before Easter and following a long tradition of anticipating a feast day on the day before, it includes the first Easter Mass. My wife, Amparo, and I hadn’t gone to an Easter vigil for several years, mostly because it is the longest Catholic service of the year and at our age, the frequent standing, sitting and kneeling is not easy. But since we’re in a new parish in a new state, we decided to try it again this year. It was beautiful and inspiring, outweighing, for me at least, its length. The ritual includes lighting of the “new fire” and Easter candle, symbolizing Jesus’ new life as light of the world, lots of readings from new and old testaments, baptisms and reception of newcomers into the church and Mass of the Resurrection.   Renewed Interest? During the Easter vigil this year in thoroughly secular France, according to a

Google Image I recently watched “Freud’s Last Session” on Netflix, a movie set in England at the start of WW2. It stars Anthony Hopkins as Sigmund Freud, the famous pioneer in psychoanalysis and psychology, and Matthew Goode as C.S. Lewis, the renowned English professor, author and lay theologian. I recommend it. The movie portrays a fictitious meeting between the two, Freud, the dyed-in-the-wool atheist, and Lewis, the author of 30 books selling millions of copies,  whose wartime radio broadcasts promoting faith captivated the minds and hearts of thousands of people during that critical era in British history. Although the two men undoubtedly knew of each other and each other’s work, historians doubt they ever met. Can Doubt Strengthen Faith? And doubt, in a way, is the principal subject of the movie: each other’s doubt about their atheism and faith while outwardly trying to show how firm they were in their belief and unbelief. In my view, the movie shows that faith and doubt g