Anne Rice has made waves in her declaration about leaving Christianity while retaining Christ:

For those who care, and I understand if you don’t: Today I quit being a Christian … It’s simply impossible for me to ‘belong’ to this quarrelsome, hostile, disputatious, and deservedly infamous group. For ten years, I’ve tried. I’ve failed.

My faith in Christ is central to my life. My conversion from a pessimistic atheist lost in a world I didn’t understand, to an optimistic believer in a universe created and sustained by a loving God is crucial to me,” Rice wrote. “But following Christ does not mean following His followers. Christ is infinitely more important than Christianity and always will be, no matter what Christianity is, has been or might become.

Two things struck me:

1. Isn’t it natural to not want to be associated with “those people” who call themselves Christians, those “deservedly infamous” and petty little nincompoops? I think lots of Christians feel that way. But becoming a Christian involves realizing that, rather than being apart from and better than “those people,” you are one of “those people.”

2. The popular mantra from a few decades ago was “Jesus? Yes! The Church? No!” Anne Rice has evolved that by saying yes to Jesus and no to all of Christianity.

This idea also seems appealing: leave the historical baggage tied to “Christianity” behind and set out on your own with just Jesus. Leave the churches and the mom’s groups and the Evangelical Republicans and the hypocritcal gossipers and the charismatics and the Catholics and even the liberals and just do your own thing with Jesus.

The problem is that you, too, are a sinner in need of God’s grace, and that grace often comes through other fellow sinners. Sinners wrote the Bible and handed on divine revelation to other sinners who handed it on to other sinners who loved God and His Church so much that they gave their lives for Christ and handed it on to their children who ultimately handed it on to Anne Rice. It’s like disowning your family–you can’t get away from them because they are part of you.

Augustine and Jerome

I just finished reading The Fathers, by Pope Benedict, a collection of his first series of Wednesday audiences covering the Church Fathers up through St. Augustine.

Augustine’s dedication to finding the truth through reason actually led him to reject the Catholic Faith as a young man! From Pope Benedict’s Wednesday audience on January 30, 2008:

Today’s Catechesis, however, is dedicated to the subject of faith and reason, a crucial, or better, the crucial theme for St Augustine’s biography. As a child he learned the Catholic faith from Monica, his mother. But he abandoned this faith as an adolescent because he could no longer discern its reasonableness and rejected a religion that was not, to his mind, also an expression of reason, that is, of the truth.

His thirst for truth was radical and therefore led him to drift away from the Catholic faith. Yet his radicalism was such that he could not be satisfied with philosophies that did not go to the truth itself, that did not go to God and to a God who was not only the ultimate cosmological hypothesis but the true God, the God who gives life and enters into our lives.

He ended up following the Manichean heresy for many years (a dualistic theology of balanced good and evil powers) before returning to the Catholic Church and becoming the greatest Latin Father and Doctor of the Church.

Here is an interesting application of Augustine’s pilgrimage of faith to my own: I have been asked before if my goal is “to convert everyone to the Catholic Church.”

St. Augustine answers this question for me: my goal is for everyone to find the fullness of the truth. It so happens that I believe with all my heart that the fullness of truth is found in Jesus Christ and that the Catholic Church is the one He founded and has protected from error in her teachings. So yes, I do want all people to enter full communion with the Church.

However, if the Church is not what she claims to be, then I do not want people to become Catholic, and I remain open to the possibility that she is not the true Church. If someone can show me through reason that there is a more plausible alternative, I am open to considering those arguments. So far that has not happened.

More brilliance from Benedict on Augustine:

Thus, Augustine’s entire intellectual and spiritual development is also a valid model today in the relationship between faith and reason, a subject not only for believers but for every person who seeks the truth, a central theme for the balance and destiny of every human being. These two dimensions, faith and reason, should not be separated or placed in opposition; rather, they must always go hand in hand.

As Augustine himself wrote after his conversion, faith and reason are “the two forces that lead us to knowledge” (Contra Academicos, III, 20, 43). In this regard, through the two rightly famous Augustinian formulas (cf. Sermones, 43, 9) that express this coherent synthesis of faith and reason: crede ut intelligas (“I believe in order to understand”) – believing paves the way to crossing the threshold of the truth – but also, and inseparably, intellige ut credas (“I understand, the better to believe”), the believer scrutinizes the truth to be able to find God and to believe.

I believe in order to understand.
I understand, the better to believe.

I’m honored that Catholic authors and fellow converts Francis Beckwith and Eric Sammons linked to my conversion article on Called to Communion. Both of their blogs are well worth your time.

I am honored to announce a guest blog post that I wrote about my conversion that has just been published on Called To Communion.

Since the CtC guys began their project a year or so ago, I have been continually impressed by their depth of scholarship, clarity of exposition, and fairness toward all Christians who have engaged them in dialogue. It is a laudable effort and a great resource for both Catholics and Protestants alike.

Catherine Doherty of happy memory, my namesake, is the author of a sweet work titled, Apostolic Farming.  I meandered through it this afternoon and was particularly struck by the words of her father that she relates from her childhood memories:

“The earth was our mother, in a manner of speaking, and farming was a holy way of life.  It was a way of life that God meant for the majority of people.  In the growing of things, first to feed one’s family, and then to serve one’s neighbor, man fulfilled himself as a workman.  He went on to say that work was not a curse.  Adam had worked; God himself had worked.  Work was holy, especially work on with the earth.  One had to be reverent when one was a farmer.  God spoke very clearly to those who farmed and taught them many lessons in this place of formation.”

It seems to me that millenials, of which I am one, are being drawn back to the land that our grandparents vacated.  Something deep inside of us recognizing just what Baron Doherty, Catherine’s father, identified, namely that farming is a way of life God intends for most people and that it is very holy work.  Many of our friends either desire to live on a few acres or, at the very least, to have relationships with the farmers who grow their food and to love God’s earth through eating with wisdom and self-restraint.

I absolutely love this little book.  Devin reminds me every time I read it that I always say the same thing.  “Devin, there has been so much wisdom lost from farmers who have died.  Who will teach us all that our ancestors once knew?”  I keep saying it and keep wondering how in heaven’s name we are supposed to be farmers; it almost feels as if we really have to reinvent the wheel because the world has forgotten how.  We trust God, however.  And, with a little literary help from Russian farmers, we will do our best.

Today’s first reading from Genesis about Sodom and Gomorrah struck me (as it often does) as interesting from an apologetics standpoint:

While Abraham’s visitors walked on farther toward Sodom,
the LORD remained standing before Abraham.
Then Abraham drew nearer and said:
“Will you sweep away the innocent with the guilty?
Suppose there were fifty innocent people in the city;
would you wipe out the place, rather than spare it
for the sake of the fifty innocent people within it?
Far be it from you to do such a thing,
to make the innocent die with the guilty
so that the innocent and the guilty would be treated alike!

Seems pretty straightforward: there were innocent people in Sodom who didn’t commit the sins of the guilty people in that city. But, my old Evangelical Protestant voice spoke up, remember from Romans 3:23 that “all have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God.” All are guilty; all are under the curse, which is why Christ came: none are innocent.

Abraham and the Angels Rembrandt

So this little bit in the early Old Testament where Abraham parleys back and forth with God on the basis of some minimal number of “innocent” people in the city seems inconsistent. Sure, maybe some in Sodom didn’t commit the particular sins of the evil doers, but we know they must have committed other sins and so were guilty as well.

Calling some of the city’s inhabitants “innocent” must then be interpreted as “less guilty” than the others and not completely guilt-free, but this implies that some sins are worse than others. And the Evangelical Protestantism that I knew rejected the notion of different degrees of sin. No, if you committed one sin, it was just as if you had committed them all. Only the Catholics and other false teachers taught that some sins were worse than others.

Now that I am Catholic, I look back and consider these Evangelical interpretations of the Bible to be unworkable. I think that the “all” in Romans 3:23 refers to Jews and Gentiles without distinction rather than “without any exceptions whatsoever.” The innocent people in Sodom may have committed sins in their life but could still be considered innocent by God, like Christians who are in a state of sanctifying grace but still commit venial sins. And some sins are worse than others. That doesn’t take away the fact that we still all need Christ to save us; it just points out what is obvious to common sense.

What do you think of the interpretation of these verses?

I posted recently about the way in which our family is transitioning out of survival mode and into a growing season of forming strong loving bonds.  As the weeks are passing, we are beginning to gain some momentum toward that end.

Please, God, make us a family in love.

This week, after interviewing a couple of attachment therapists, we found the perfect match and are eager to begin taking Adele twice weekly for attachment play therapy.  In addition, we are hurrying to read all that we can about attachment and play therapy.  Amazon.com is the happy recipient of our money these days.  Our most recent purchase is I Love You Rituals, and we are excitedly awaiting its arrival.

We are also starting two new family habits, nursing and massage.  Adele began asking to nurse in February, and at that time, we allowed her to role play, “nursing” at my chest or Devin’s while we held her in our arms and pretended that she was a baby.  However, at the urging of our new play therapist, we began last Thursday to nurse Adele with milk in a bottle and are already seeing amazing results; Leo and Tobias are loathe to miss any of the fun, so they get to nurse, also, though they seem much more secure in our family love than Adele, which is no surprise, in view of their presence in our family since they were eight months old.  Devin and I are, also, educating ourselves in infant/toddler massage, which can have marked healing results on brain chemistry and delayed neural development, as well as fostering loving trust between parent and child.

We soberly admit to each other the risk that we are taking, the risk that we might pour out our love for our children and they might reject our invitation.  We might fail in our dance to win their hearts.  Yet, we are comforted when we gaze at the Cross.  Because, we are sharing in the very heart of Christ when we love this way, Christ who pours Himself out since the foundation of the world, only to be rejected by so many.  Our children belong to God, and, while we have undertaken the charge to give them every possible love and care, we know that their salvation is in the hands of the Lord of the Harvest.  We can plant and water the seeds, but He who accomplishes all good things will see to their happiness.

This podcast explains the difference between the Catholic and Protestant understandings of the four marks of the Church from the Nicene Creed: that she is one, holy, catholic, and apostolic. It’s the fourth argument in my book, 50 Roads to Rome.

Most Protestants happily affirm the Nicene Creed, yet they can only do so by redefining what the four marks mean to fit their particular Protestant ecclesiology (how they understand what the Church is).

You can also subscribe to all the podcasts via iTunes or subscribe with Google reader or another feed service.

You can listen to the podcast here as well:

Direct link to this mp3

I’m a slow learner and a late adopter: I didn’t think podcasts were anything big or were very worthwhile for a long time. I was wrong (duh). Podcasts are accessible to lots of people and provide knowledge and answers in a way that it often easier to digest than sifting through hundreds of webpages or books.

So now I am planning on starting a video podcast. If you are like me, when you first hear about this concept, you think “what the heck is a video podcast? Isn’t a podcast audio?”

Here’s the deal: If you make videos and provide an RSS feed for them, you have created a video podcast. That’s all it is. So, in addition to our blog’s RSS feed and my audio podcast RSS feed, I am going to create a video podcast feed and start making short videos.

Why? What’s the point? I have one purpose with these videos: target specific Catholic keywords and phrases searched for in Google where the top search results have been captured by (well meaning) anti-Catholic Protestant sites which focus their efforts in trying to get Catholics to leave the Church for Protestantism.

My friend George over the past months would complain to me that he searched for some Catholic doctrine and the first sites he found were Protestant ones. He read them and wanted to know how I would rebut their arguments. Other Catholics may read them and not have a friendly neighborhood apologist around like yours truly and begin to doubt their faith.

So the idea is that video podcasts are highly ranked by Google and can show up on the first page (“video results for xyz search phrase”). People like watching video, so they will watch it and at least learn the actual Catholic teaching before reading a (well-intentioned but false) argument against the teaching.

The video camera is en route! Imagine the excitement of watching me on a video, tobacco pipe in hand, talking about apologetics–I know, I know, try to contain your anticipation.

Our friend Jen is now writing for Envoy magazine–way to go Jen!