For those who don’t know, it’s the PBS World War I-era period piece miniseries, now in it’s second season.

And I’m not alone: lots of people like it. And here’s why:

It Presents a Living Culture

A living culture is founded upon religion. The Christian religion provides the best basis for culture, but other religions also serve the purpose in varying degrees of quality.

In Downton, though religion is not front-and-center; it’s there in the background almost like an assumption: in the manner of people’s address, in their moral fiber, in the structure of the society and its mores.

Even when the local Anglican vicar gets strong-armed into performing a marriage, the connection is clear that his “living” (read: his parish and income) is dependent upon the great Downton house’s largesse and continued sponsorship.

Morals Matter

Today when someone cohabitates, people shrug. Cohabitation is not different anymore; it’s the (tragic) norm. A sibling’s poor choices in such matters only (externally) seem to affect themselves, not the entire family.

But the opposite is true in the culture of England in Downton’s time (and seen even more explicitly a century prior in the culture during Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice). In both those stories, one child’s indiscretion threatens to sink the entire family’s reputation and the fortunes of her sisters. Why? Because the external society more closely reflected the spiritual reality that sin affects the community, the body, the Church, as well as the individual.

So an illicit affair in these cultures had dramatic consequences. What we do matters, and its clear that it does. In our society, the spiritual effect happens due to such sins, but the public consequences no longer reflect it, showing the disconnect between our society and reality.

We’re fascinated by a living culture, one where the invisible connections between us all are outwardly manifested, where our actions matter, where there are sacred things as well as secular. Where there are truly good characters (and truly bad ones, and ones in between), as opposed to the modern skepticism that refuses to admit anyone is truly good (see for example the mangled characterizations of all the men in the Lord of the Rings movies).

What do you think? Have you watched the series? Hate it, love it?

Thank you for everyone who entered. There were fifteen total, so your chances were decent to win this go round. And no worries, as I’ll run another contest next week and give two more away, so if you enter again you’ll probably have another good chance to win. (I never win anything, so this is the kind of contest I like–one where people actually have a good chance.)

Lightning apologetics round on celibacy for the Kingdom, then a short segment on what to expect from a parish and it’s RCIA program.

Le Book

I’ve bought some copies of my book to give away, and you can win one!

Here’s the deal: Follow me on twitter and then send out a tweet that includes the book’s name and mentions me, and you are entered to win. Something like:

“I’m entering to win If Protestantism is True by @DevinSRose”

Feel free to just copy and paste that and tweet it out. It’s important to mention me with the @ sign so I get notified of your tweet and can add you to the contest.

I plan to give two books away per week until they’re gone, and may vary the way you enter to win, but to begin with I’d like to try this twitter idea. I’ll give everyone through Wednesday to send out their tweets, for those that check the blog a bit less regularly.

I’ll make a post each week to remind you of what to do to enter. Thanks!

Elevation's Pastor keeping it edgy and real

International man of mystery, Doug Beaumont, clued me into this video from Elevation Church‘s “Code Orange Revival”.

The woman giving the sermon, Christine Caine, laudably works to fight human trafficking (something the Catholic Church has worked effectively at for a long time, in spite of the Administration’s removal of funds from the Church’s program). Caine is a leader of Hillsong Church in Australia.

One of her main premises is that churches and people have to be vigilant for how God is moving today (which may be quite different from how He moved yesterday or last year). If a church doesn’t keep up and stay attentive to the Spirit’s current work, they will die.

There is a kernel of truth in what she is saying. But there’s also confusion and error. Just after dismissing churches that still sing songs that were popular five or fifteen years ago–God has moved on from those songs she tells us–Caine says:

We keep going back to our Creeds and our Bureaucracies and our Institutionalized Ways of doing things, but the manna has ceased!

She’s referring to the manna in the desert ending after (about) forty years and how the Israelites had trouble adapting to the new thing God was doing.

Notice how the Nicene and Apostles’ Creeds are equated with “bureaucracy” and “institutionalized ways of doing things.” The takeaway of course is that these are all bad (or at least old) things that God no longer works through.

But of course the Creeds are ageless truths that didn’t stop becoming relevant because Hillsong wrote a few gold-selling songs that topped the CCM charts. This is the “religion vs. relationship” false dichotomy in all its oblivious splendor.

In her zeal to keep up with what (she thinks) God is doing today, she throws out the baby (the Creeds) with the bathwater (rigid man-made bureaucratic institutionalizations).

The only way to keep from going the way of the dodo, we understand, is to “keep up,” “stay relevant,” “anticipate the next move of God and be there.” How long can any church keep that up? Not long. Soon Hillsong and Elevation will get older and less hip and less able to constantly change with what’s popular to the ecclesial consumer (which is easily mistaken for being the same as what God is doing). And they’ll disappear, displaced by newer and more edgy churches.

As John Senior said in The Restoration of Christian Culture:

Through the courts, in think-tanks and research institutes, in activist ideological organizations such as Planned Parenthood, the Humanist Society and the Civil Liberties Union, we have become victims in our public life of a mass agnosticism unknown anywhere in history, and worst of all, this spirit of relativism has paralyzed the Christian churches themselves, whose bewildered and diminishing flocks huddle in the fenceless folds while wolves in shepherd’s clothing explain from the pulpit that the essence of tradition is change.

The alternative is to encounter God in the ever ancient, ever new liturgy that the early Church celebrated, where the Creed is always recited–as true 1,700 years ago as it is today–and just as powerful. God’s Word is read and the Eucharist is confected. The liturgy is not a man-made creation, but the way God has shown that He is to be worshiped in spirit and in truth.

So while God does indeed move in new and unexpected ways in every age, in every year (just look at the growth of Christianity in the Global South, or at the tapestry of saints who uniquely lived their God-given charism in each epoch of history) some things never change, including the truths of the Faith found in the Creed and the liturgy itself.

But…how do they know what parish to go to? As we Catholics know, some parishes have significant influences that are not faithful to the Magisterium. So I put together this how-to video with tips on looking at a parish’s website and bulletin to get an idea of how solid they are.

This is not meant to condemn anyone or any parishes. No parish is perfect. But the last thing that we want is for inquiring Protestants to be taught inaccuracies or errors as Catholic truth. So it is best if they can find a parish that faithfully teaches Catholic doctrine.

Warning Flags:

• Linking to National Catholic Reporter
• Words like social justice, diversity, Catholic Faith Community
• Focus on finding Christ in the community

Good Flags:

• Calling themselves a Catholic Church
• Eucharistic Adoration promoted
• Pro-life groups promoted
• Frequent Confession times (a very good sign)
• Sacred art displayed

Do you have any tips for what to look for in a parish’s website, either good or bad indicators?

My last soccer season before hanging up the boots

Brent Stubbs and I are back at it again in this podcast, discussing the proper role of sports from the perspective of Catholic fathers. (iTunes podcast here.)

Both Brent and I were big-time jocks growing up, but did we play too many sports? Now that we’re fathers and Catholic, we reflect on our upbringing in this area and how we might bring better balance with our own children.

Includes:

• Lightning Apologetics Minute on the canon featuring syllogism from Tim Troutman of CalledToCommunion.com
• Inevitable Tim Tebow discussion and “Jesus Water”
• Dr. Taylor Marshall mention
• Legacy by Steve Woods recommended

For Chad and other non-iTunes users, here’s the RSS feed for the podcast.

But I’m here to show a more excellent way than his solution for how to avoid being replaced in your job.

Briefly, his premise is that, in the globally competitive marketplace, in what he thinks is a recession that will never truly end, you must become indispensable in your company. Someone who connects people, forges ahead where there is no path yet trodden, and serves as an irreplaceable worker.

If you are an average worker, you will be replaced by someone else who can do the same job for cheaper, whether in your own country or in Asia or elsewhere where labor is inexpensive. So you must not be average, just getting your job done (even if doing it well); you must be exceptional.

And I think he’s right.

I’m a software developer and see already that developers in India and China and Eastern Europe are gaining in technical skill and in numbers. They work for much less than American developers do. Eventually the few advantages U.S. programmers still have will be nullified, and “average” developers will see their jobs get outsourced.

So in theory I should buy his book and learn how to become exceptional so that I keep my job.

But here’s the problem: by definition, everyone can’t become exceptional. Otherwise everyone is the exception which means no one is. By definition, most people are average, the big part of the bell curve. So his solution isn’t really one at all. Sure, it might help the people who are already exceptional become more so, or the few hanging out near the standard deviation’s edge to move a few fractions to the indispensable right of the curve. But for everyone else: pack up your desk; you are the weakest link; good-bye!

Godin is advising on how to avoid getting replaced–a problem we’ve created for ourselves by our modern industrial business model, where everyone’s a cog in the machine. “Be an indispensable cog,” is his message. “Then when natural selection comes and culls the unexceptional, you’re left untouched, flying above the clouds in bliss.”

But I say, why not opt out of the machine altogether?

One way is to become independently wealthy (like Godin is), by getting hundreds of thousands of people to buy your products and come to your talks and label you as a guru. Great. Most people can’t do that, anymore than they can become exceptional.

Instead, we need an economic system where even average people–who are the majority–can provide for their families. A Distributive economy, where the majority (and not just the few) own land and have capital to generate their own subsistence and wealth.

Imagine a country where the majority were, at least in part, yeoman farmers–agriculturalists with some small number of acres to provide a large part of their food–and where people could actually learn trades and (even with their moderate intellects and average abilities) make a living from them. Spinning wool, sewing clothes, butchering meat, milling grain, building houses, sawing lumber, wiring electrical connections, metal-working, etc. etc.

The average guy and gal can’t get outsourced from such an economy.

They don’t need to fear being replaced because they aren’t a cog in the global economic wheel, a mere object that can be discarded when a cheaper one comes along. They are instead an integral part of their local community, one that is economically stable and independent of a butterfly flapping its wings in Japan.

A truly human economic system must have room for the average human to make a decent living. One that requires everyone to be indispensable is inhuman.

And within the locally focused, distributive economy, there’s plenty of room for imagination, hard work, creativity, and so forth, not for the end goal of becoming rich (as is so often what modern workers are shooting for), but to simply make a living doing something that’s good for family, for the community, and good for God’s creation. We work insane hours for decades as cogs in the machine in order that we may finally “retire” one day and, if we still have any health left, buy an RV to cruise about the country, perpetually “getting away from it all.”

What if instead we were rooted to our home place and found the recreation and beauty on our own ten acres, watching the animal life around our pond, the wildflowers in spring, the grains turning golden and the sheep grazing in the pasture? What if we never wanted to retire from our work, because our work was stewarding the land and plying the trades we loved to do? What if it were so fulfilling that our children wanted to stay and continue such a life, instead of heading to the cities to join the rat race and futilely attempting to become that indispensable cog in the works?

Pie in the sky? Maybe. Certainly not everyone would even want to do it. So let them make the smart phones and RVs and computers for the cheapest price possible while we go back to the Land and live a whole life.

Apple says “think different.”
I say “live different.”

I’m not a guru. I’m trying to figure this stuff out. So weigh in and respond with your challenges, rebuttals, arguments, and thoughts.

First off, if I were younger, single, and a woman, I would be considering a vocation with these Dominicans. (I actually took some vocation literature just because I wanted to know more about what they are about and how they live their lives as religious.)

I gave two talks at the bisonCatholic week FOCUS was putting on, and in large part due to the sisters’ prayers for me, they went well and I believe God was glorified. When one confused young woman challenged us about nuns being married to the Church (female-female typology (no workey)), Sister Joseph Andrew calmly stood up and informed her that nuns were married to Jesus while priests are married to the Church (the correct male-female typology). Bam!

Lucas Martin from FOCUS recorded the talks so it’s possible I will be able to put them up in a podcast in a little while. The main one was my conversion story and little did I realize that FOCUS had booked the large ballroom at NDSU’s student union building for it and invited thousands of people to come! There must have been three to four hundred students and other interested people who came: Protestants, Catholics, Hindus, and who knows what else.

The Protestants were coming out firing but received good answers from the two priests (a canon lawyer and Mariologist and young Monsignor who is a biblical scholar). I was there too and chimed in with interesting tidbits occasionally.

I’ve never been so cold in my entire life: -20 degrees Fahrenheit with a -40 wind chill. I thought my face was going to freeze when walking to a car five minutes from our building. Wow! These North Dakotans are tough. But they’re also incredibly warm and generous. Like an idiot I didn’t bring warm enough clothes (I don’t think I even own warm enough clothes to handle those temps), but they lent me their gear to wear so there was no problem.

I hope to return one day, if they’ll have me, but maybe in the late spring or summer next time.

(A picture of a) Real Live Chicken

I remember the day I was out front of our house in Austin. The gate was open in the side yard, and my neighbor, a young lady in her late 30s, came out to do something or other, and happened to glance into our backyard, where we had our chicken coop.

“Oh my gosh! Oh. My. Gosh. Is that real? Is that a real chicken? I’ve never seen a real one before!”

I am not making this up. I assured her it was a real chicken. And truth be told I couldn’t be too hard on her, because before we got chickens I couldn’t have told you the last time I had seen one. Years ago as a kid maybe on a field trip or “farm day.”

I was reminded of this while reading The Restoration of Christian Culture (which is incredibly expensive (out of print?) as a paperback but reasonable on the Kindle):

I remember how forcefully it came to me some twenty years ago that the real difficulty students were having with Chanticleer in Chaucer’s Nun’s Priest’s Tale was not that, ignorant of Scholastic theology, they missed the satire in a rooster talking like St. Thomas–I could teach them the Scholastic theology at least to some extent–but that never having seen chickens, they missed the fun in St. Thomas talking like a rooster!

I remember, too, many years ago taking my then young children to the Bronx zoo in New York where we discovered at the end of the longest line not the expected Duckbilled Platypus but a farmer milking a Jersey cow–at which the poor little culturally deprived suburban children with starved, distended souls, stared and stared with wide eyes.

It’s so true. Anyone who doubts our modern disconnect from agriculture and the natural world need only ponder these scenes. There was once a day when every home had chickens–they were easy to keep, economical, laid eggs, reproduced, and at the end of their lives could be butchered for a healthy family meal. Nowadays cities have strict zoning laws restricting people’s abilities to keep them.

Perhaps a manifesto for agrarian life could begin with one small challenge: Keep a few chickens in your backyard. It’s simple, possible for most people, and actionable (as we would say at work).

Don’t know how to build a coop? Neither did I. In truth I never learned how to build anything, but the great thing about wood and screws and nails is that, if you bang stuff together long enough, eventually you figure out how to make stuff. It may use twice as much wood as necessary and not be the Poulet Chateau, but the chickens won’t care. And I can guarantee you that you’ll find watching your chickens being chickens–scratching, clucking, preening–much more entertaining than what’s on TV.

I leave you with this clip from Woody’s Allen Sleeper, watch til the end to see the chicken:

Did you see the size of that chicken?