Skeptical Faith

Google Image Listening to a radio broadcast recently, I heard an interview of a woman who was advocating for more freedom for women. Basically, she said that women should be free from traditional constraints to be able to do what they want. “What about men?” I thought. Lots of women would answer by saying we men already do what we want. There’s truth in that, but people searching for God - at least in the Christian tradition - need to go deeper. Jesus was “a man for others,” and all of his teaching urged his listeners to be the same, man or woman. I thought about the newscast, and the advocate for women’s liberation, as I read a recent article in America magazine arguing against the concept of the “chosen family.” The idea of a chosen family, as I understand it, is the adoption of people other than one's biological family as one's “real family.” According to the article, the chosen family is becoming more common, especially among young adults. Those We Choose to Keep Cl...

Google Image One of my favorite all-time Saturday Night Live  characters was Debbie Downer, a fictional person created and portrayed by the show’s regular, Rachel Dratch. Debbie could always be counted on to pour cold water on ideas, trends, and life in general. The term, Debbie Downer,  according to Wikipedia, “eventually became an established slang  phrase referring to a pessimistic  person who frequently adds bad news and negative feelings to a gathering, thus bringing down the mood of everyone around them.” In life, and in this blog, I try not to be a Debbie Downer, but it strikes me that trying to address the issues important to people who have given up on God and religion is harder today than at any time in my lifetime, and part of the reason is the cultural climate. Fewer People Read? For one thing, fewer people read – the newspaper, books, instructions, the Bible, and blogs like mine (except that a substantial increase in reading occurred during th...

Google Image When I read gospel passages like the following from the Gospel of John - the whole of which was read in Catholic and other churches a few weeks ago - I empathize with people who see the Bible as gibberish. It’s no wonder Jesus’ listeners “grumbled about him.” “So, the Jews grumbled about him, because he said, ‘I am the bread that came down from heaven.’ They said, ‘Is not this Jesus, the son of Joseph, whose father and mother we know? How does he now say, ‘I have come down from heaven’?” “Jesus answered them, ‘Do not grumble among yourselves. No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws him. And I will raise him up on the last day. …This is the bread that comes down from heaven, so that one may eat of it and not die.    I am the living bread that came down from heaven. If anyone eats of this bread, he will live forever. And the bread that I will give for the life of the world is...

Google Image My wife, Amparo, and I were blessed over the Labor Day weekend by a visit from our son, Sean, his wife and two sons, aged 8 and 10. They live in a Chicago suburb and make the plane trip to Colorado, where my wife and I live, a couple of times a year. I had been thinking about something fun to do with them and discovered among the YouTube videos on Colorado hiking trails one that ascends to the top of a jagged mountain we can see a few blocks from our house. It’s aptly called “Devils Head.” Happily, Sean and his sons, and my daughter, Maureen, were all up for such a hike and it was a blast – although a bit of a challenge at my age. It’s only 2.8 miles up and back but it ascends 866 feet, making the elevation above sea level just under 10,000 feet. I lived for 31/2 years at over 12,500 feet, but I was in my early 30s then, and on this hike, I had to take several rest stops. Spectacular! The views, especially from the summit - which has a small, window-enclosed U.S. For...

Google Image I don’t recall how, but I recently came across the above painting of St. Jerome by a 15 th century Italian artist named Benvenuto Tisi da Garafalo. Being nearly illiterate in art, I had never heard of him or his painting of St. Jerome. But I’ve always been interested in St. Jerome, who lived almost 200 years before Garafalo painted his picture. I’ll get to why St. Jerome interests me, but first, a bit about the painting. Garafalo evidently was a tireless painter of religious subjects, especially of Mary, the mother of Jesus. This painting of St. Jerome strikes me as a bit bizarre for modern observers, picturing Jerome with his shirt undone and several strange objects around him while he holds a book in his hand. His face is evidently meant to show him thinking about what he’s reading – thus, the painting’s title, “Meditation of St. Jerome?” Among the First Christian Scholars That title makes sense because Jerome is counted as among the first Christian scholars. Born...

Google Image I’ve told this story to many people because I think it’s a fascinating illustration of how fear often gets the better of us. I heard the story from my wife’s, sister who was a lifelong teacher in the beautiful city of Medellin, Colombia. She told it about a fellow teacher and friend who boarded an after-school city bus carrying in her wallet her monthly wages - in cash. She placed the wallet in her purse, and since a lot of thefts had been reported during this period, the woman was careful to hold on to the purse carefully. She was standing on the bus in the midst of a crowd of passengers, one of whom was a man who seemed too interested in the purse. A Suspicious Man Someone rose from a nearby seat and the woman quickly took it, mostly to get away from the suspicious man. But almost immediately, the person in the seat next to her got up to leave and the man immediately took that seat. After a few minutes, the woman nervously checked her purse for the wallet and found...

Google Image  I keep coming back i n these blogs  to the perceived conflict between faith and science, mostly because so many people cite it as a reason for having lost their faith. A common view is that all scientists, at least the most respected ones, are non-believers and that faith and science are incompatible. (And from what I’ve read, I believe some scientists who are not believers disparage scientists who are.) But some of the most famous scientists in history were believers. They include Galileo, Isaac Newton, Copernicus, Gregor Mendel, and Georges Lemaître, physicist and astronomer who first proposed the “Big Bang. (The latter two were priests.) Science Had Few Answers All of them lived in the past, and some skeptics might say that, of course, people who lived in past eras were believers because science had few answers to questions about the universe. But many modern scientists are believers as well. They include Francis Collins, a geneticist who led the Human...