Skeptical Faith

Google Image Before moving to Colorado, my wife, Amparo, and I used to drive from Des Moines to Denver to see our daughter, Maureen, who lives in the city’s southern suburbs. Because of the homilies and the wonderful diversity of the parish, we used to make the long drive to Denver’s City Park neighborhood to attend Mass at St. Ignatius Loyola Church. The pastor, Dirk Dunfee, S.J., authored and delivered most of the homilies. He has moved on but now writes a blog that has been forwarded to me. Like his homilies, his blogs are cogent, to the point, easy to read, and sometimes funny. In the blog-writing department, I know when I’ve met my match. This recent blog is based on a gospel reading of the day about a notion that is not easy for contemporary people to grasp, the Kingdom of Heaven or the Kingdom of God. Jesus uses the terms hundreds of times, but Americans, at least, have little direct experience with kingdoms so the idea may be lost on many of us. Fr. Dirk has his usual ins...

Google Image I often sit and read on the small stoop outside our house in the evenings, sometimes with “an adult beverage.” It’s usually cool and always calming. The calming effect is partially due to the two beautiful trees in our tiny front yard. One is a 25-foot Ponderosa Pine. With its gnarly limbs and long, slim needles, it appears to be much older than it is. The other tree is, according to the plant ID app on my phone, a type of fruitless crabapple. It’s not a particularly elegant tree, but at about ¾ the height of the Ponderosa and with its deciduous leaves, it provides more than its share of shade. And both trees attract a variety of birds, many who sing their hearts out. I usually sit there late in the afternoon when there’s almost always a cool breeze, reminding me of one of my favorite passages from the book of Genesis, which provides an image of God that is so human, it makes it a bit easier to relate to the divine: “The man and his wife heard the sound of the Lord God...

Google Image As it says on its website, this blog is written mainly for “those who have given up on God  and/or religion ,” and in a broader sense, for all of us who are searching for God (including me; writing it allows me to carefully consider the quality of my own faith). Giving up on religion, of course, is not the same as giving up on God. I’m sure everyone who identifies as "spiritual but not religious“  would agree, as well as those of us who consider themselves spiritual as well as religious. But sometimes I wonder whether people who have given up on God or religion are, as the old idiom goes, "cutting off their nose to despite their face."  They may have old doubts that could possibly be resolved; old quarrels with clergy that don’t warrant cutting God off; have the idea that religion, or belief in God, is outdated and irrelevant; the notion that all religious people are hypocritical. Or just see God and religion as boring. Warrant Slamming the Door on Go...

Google Image For 10 years at a regional newspaper, I wrote about medicine and health, despite having a rather weak background in science. The newspaper’s editor-in-chief believed I would well represent the majority of readers on that score and better be able to explain scientific topics to the average reader. I don’t know if I accomplished that, but I tried. I wrote my articles with my dad in mind, an avid reader of the newspaper. He was a smart guy but had only a 10 th grade education. The job was a tremendous educational experience, so much so that I often thought – but never mentioned it to my bosses, of course – that I should be paying the newspaper instead of the other way around. Everyday Exposure During that time, I took some college courses on scientific subjects, but it was the everyday exposure to science and scientists that was most valuable. I wrote about medical breakthroughs; watched innovative surgeries; covered statewide, and sometimes nationwide, controversies abo...

A bonfire with an effigy of migrants in a boat before it was set on fire this month in Northern Ireland. Google Image A story in last week’s news was about a beautiful town in Northern Ireland called Ballymena. I happen to have visited there years ago with my long-time, dear friend, Fr. Gerald Waris, whose maternal grandfather was from the town. Ballymena evidently has long been a hot bed of religious strife. I vividly recall that one of Gerald’s relatives, who was Catholic, told us that a committee of men had to spend nights in the parish church to keep anti-Catholics from defacing it. Now comes another type of strife – one to which Americans can better relate: anti-immigrant bigotry. Rioters and masked thugs have burned buildings, including immigrant homes, in and around Ballymena. A huge effigy of a boatload of immigrants was also set afire. Millions of Irish Emigrants The irony here is that Ireland, including Northern Ireland whence Gerald, and my ancestors hailed, was amon...

Google Image This is third and final blog in a series on an interview with Rowan Williams in the New York Times that was so cogent, so relevant to my goal of helping people searching for God that I don’t want to deprive the blog’s readers of any of his wisdom. For those unfamiliar with him, Williams is a theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury - principal leader of the Church of England . The Times s tory, is entitled, “ The New Atheists Attack a God I Don’t Believe In, Either.” Throughout the ages, Christians have had so many ways of describing Jesus, and ways he describes himself in the gospels – the Son of Man, the Son of God, the Savior, the Lord, the Suffering Servant, to name a few. But Jesus was also a great storyteller, and that aspect was an important element in his mission. He knew that we humans are more engaged by stories than by direct preaching. “One of the things that people seem to have remembered about Jesus,” said Williams, “is that he told extremely good...

Google Image This blog is second in a series on an interview with Rowan Williams in the New York Times that was so cogent, so relevant to my goal of helping people searching for God that I don’t want to deprive the blog’s readers of any of his wisdom. So, I’m using the interview in successive blogs. For those of you unfamiliar with him, Williams is a poet, theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury - principal leader of the Church of England . The Times s tory, is entitled, “ The New Atheists Attack a God I Don’t Believe In, Either.” Back when I was in the seminary, studying to be a priest, one of my classmates and I got into a conversation in which he said regarding my faith: “It must be nice to be so certain, to be so sure of it all.” I denied such certainty but without providing details. Fact is, I struggled with faith during my time in the seminary and have done so much of my life. Mostly through centering prayer , I believe I’m getting better at recognizing God in others, ...

Google Image For the next few weeks, this blog, Skeptical Faith, will be a bit different. That’s because I recently read in the New York Times an interview with Rowan Williams that was so cogent, so relevant to my goal of helping people searching for God that I don’t want to deprive the blog’s readers of any of his wisdom. So, I’ll be using the interview in the next few blogs. For those of you unfamiliar with him, Williams is a poet, theologian and former Archbishop of Canterbury - principal leader of the Church of England  and ceremonial head  of the worldwide Anglican Communion . The Times story is entitled “ The New Atheists Attack a God I Don’t Believe In, either” and the interviewer is Peter Wehner,  a contributing opinion writer for the Times. A recent Skeptical Faith blog reported on the benefits of watching “The Chosen,” the wildly successful movie about the life Jesus, the fifth season of which is available on several streaming video sites. Strugg...

Google Image Back in 2006, Author Dannagal Young sprinkled her husband’s bath towel with holy water while he was showering. She got the holy water from a friend, who tried the same thing on her husband, who also had cancer, and he survived. So Young decided to try it as well. A former Catholic, Young describes herself and her husband, Mike, as agnostics, but, she wrote in a recent issue of the New York Times about the holy water, “It couldn’t hurt, right?” She said she “tapped into my childhood Catholicism and faith in a benevolent God as I pictured the magic water covering him with a protective layer.” She did this without his knowledge and acknowledges he “would have been very annoyed” had he known.    Mike had what Young describes as “ a benign tumor that had nonetheless taken over his midbrain,” and he died several months after the failed “holy-water therapy.” She describes her frustration with medical solutions at the time but says she now realizes that “science and m...

Google Image I’ve written about sexual subjects only a few times in the 12 years I’ve been writing this blog. Why? Shouldn’t every aspect of life be included among topics meant to help people searching for God? Yes, but when it comes to religious teachings, I believe sexual values have traditionally been overemphasized. “Morality,” in fact, has often been used solely to refer to sex. But current sexual mores – at least as portrayed on TV, in movies and streaming video – are, in my opinion, hard to sync with Christian or Jewish ideas of right and wrong and with the goals of people searching for God. Dramas, sitcoms, crime shows inevitably view sex as little more than recreation. Whenever romance is portrayed, it almost always includes one or more sex scenes, often on first encounters or dates. Merely Reflecting Reality? Producers of these shows will undoubtedly say they are merely reflecting contemporary reality. That’s partly true in so much as their shows portray a segment of s...

Google Image Years ago, a young work colleague told me she had stopped going to church and no longer considered herself a Catholic. She wasn’t very specific about her objections to her former faith. She simply didn’t see the need and was disenchanted with the church, which was under siege because of the revelations about priests who abused minors and bishops who covered it up. When I asked if she had ever considered the church as family, she looked puzzled. I mentioned that I had begun to think of it that way after the embarrassment and disgust I felt about the priest revelations. Tension, Disagreement, Conflicts I told her I thought about a typical American family and the interactions among its members, the tension, disagreements and conflicts as well as the mechanisms many families have for holding the family together. Those dynamics are different from those we use when dealing with non-family members. In most cases, at least when families are “functional,” we cut much more s...