One activity done in the Atrium

Following up on my post from earlier this week, what specific things can you do to help your children embrace their faith and not fall away?

Father-child Relationship

Take your daughter out on dates. For her birthday, for Valentine’s day. Show her how a virtuous man acts and what she’s worth. Develop a relationship of trust, where she believes she can share things with you. This is just the tip of the iceberg but gives some ideas from good fathers I know.

Likewise, be involved in your son’s life: sports, camping, hunting, house/car projects. Demonstrate how manly men act: with selflessness, courage, and faith.

Pray with your children and for them. Let them see you pray, verbally and silently. Go to daily Mass with them; take them to adoration as their age allows.

Relationship with Christ

Catholic families don’t always do this well. Protestants, especially Evangelicals, do it great. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that you can take your child to CCD and get her the sacraments and Mass on Sundays or even also during the week, and all will be well. All that is excellent, but all this should serve to help her form a relationship with Christ.

When we are grounded in Christ, we are less easily swayed by bad external (or even internal factors). We know that Jesus will never fail us and that we can always trust Him. Of course, the Church also will never fail us, being guided by Christ, but the people in the Church certainly will fail us, in big and small ways.

In addition to devotions and memorized prayers (Rosary etc.), try spontaneous prayer, Bible reading, good youth groups, etc. Share with them your own experiences with Christ and your relationship with Him. This may feel awkward at first but need not be elaborate; just the simple way you have come to know Him.

Finally, especially in the formative early years (3 – 6), look for the Catechesis of the Good Shepherd in your area. Also called “the Atrium,” this program is based on Sophia Cavaletti’s work and is proven to be a great way to introduce children to Christ in a manner they can understand and take to heart. For example, when they are little, they respond best to Christ as the Good Shepherd, who protects them, who gives them His light at baptism.

Good parish, good priest

Maybe you can stomach the bad liturgy and worse homilies at a particular parish. You are mature in Christ and firmly rooted in Him. But your children are not yet mature. They need beauty, a beautiful liturgy especially, and a priest in whom the love of Christ radiates. A priest whose homilies are pastoral, truthful, joyful, and clear.

There is certainly something to “sticking it out” and working to improve your parish, but not if it as at the expense of your child’s faith. You must prudently discern this balance, as every situation is different.

Music

The music in Mass is important, but here I’m talking more about secular music. Some is better than others. Good classical music is excellent of course, but much of the pop music should be avoided. Do you really want your daughter listening to Lady Gaga? Or your son listening to Tupac Shakur or whoever the latest rap sensation is? No. This music, in addition to being offensive in many ways, can create an alternate language among young people, an alternate culture, one in which the parents aren’t invited and cannot enter.

School Discernment

Let’s say your child is homeschooled but you plan to put them into public or parochial school at some point. Are they ready for it? Do they have the maturity, the personality, the understanding to be prepared for what they will face? One size doesn’t fit all: some of your children may be ready by 4th grade for it. Others will need til 8th grade. One or two might need to be homeschooled or with some kind of cottage/homeschool co-op all the way through high school.

The school culture is often a different world: kids socializing other kids, and this is usually not a good thing. Bullying, cliques, keeping up with clothes/appearances/secular immodesty, poor education (yes even at supposedly “good” schools). I say this as someone who went to public schools his whole life. There are good aspects to public and parochial schools, but also many dangerous ones.

Conclusion

This is short survey of things to watch for. None of us are perfect, nor do we have perfect foresight or insight into our children’s lives. But these are fundamental things to help do your part to form your child in the Faith, trusting that our Lord will always do His part!

I’d love to hear your tips, experience, comments, or critiques on this important subject.

But the culture can draw someone away in spite of these good things. It’s powerful. Like Magneto.

It’s easier to accept materialism than to believe in God, whom you cannot see.

It’s easier to reject the notion of virtue than to strive to live virtuously.

Our culture is attractive: gadgets, sexual “freedom,” rational-sounding arguments for rejecting Jesus Christ. Living the Christian Faith is really hard, and more often than not you are laughed at for it.

What can be done as Catholics?

Strengthen your Catholic community, rear your children in the Faith and be alert to what kind of music they want to listen to, what the Catholic schools are like in the area (if you send them to Catholic school). Many Catholic schools may as well be public ones, or they’re even worse because the kids there are supposed to be virtuous but instead they’re as catty and cliquish and mean as anyone. How painful when a child goes to a Catholic school only to be ostracized by ostensibly Catholic classmates.

Strengthen your parish community, through living close to other faithful Catholic families, as close as you can. 1 minute is better than 5 minutes. 5 is better than 10. And if you are 20 minutes away, you may as well live an hour away. Ultimately we want to buy land and live close by other Catholic families, working together with them as the Amish do…awesome! But that’s a long ways away. Start with baby steps.

Growing Religions

But Mormonism and Islam are growing in the U.S. Why?

Because they offer a strong community. The Catholics in the U.S. do not have strong community. But Mormons’ lives revolve around their faith community: religiously and socially. And that makes it almost unthinkable for most Mormons to even contemplate leaving or questioning Mormonism. They would lose everything! And they love their family and friends, who are almost always all Mormon.

And what if they left Mormonism and became Catholic–I know a few souls who have done so–what kind of community will they be embraced by? Unless they go to a great parish or make a huge effort to meet people, they’ll likely be ignored more than embraced. No wonder people become Mormon and Protestant and Orthodox!

Islam is similar, and offers a strong dogmatic alternative to the relativism that our country has embraced.

It’s heartbreaking to see children leave the Faith and do things that are hurtful to themselves, even though they doesn’t realize it. But there is always hope: they received the sacraments and believed during a formative time growing up. God can bring anyone back, though the road may be long and painful. Parents can only do their best; ultimately children get to make their own decisions, and sometimes they make wrong ones, even in huge ways. Free will is a radical gift, blessed be God.

Update: I am going to make a post on Friday that goes deeper into what parents can do and should watch out for.

Um, why no Tori Amos on Patheos? Tear down that wall!

1. Mark Shea
2. Marc Barnes
3. Pop-under ads
4. Sweaty Cash
5. Irrational hatred of Tori Amos

Slam!

Brent Stubbs would sell out for a few guineas faster than the Mayor of Casterbridge, but not me. No, I have integrity. So does Larry.

The deal is, this site Patheos has a bunch of religion and non-religion bloggers. And they pay people to write blog posts. So people want to join the site because they will get money, dinero, loot. Makes sense to me. As Morgan Freeman declared, “We just want the Money!”

So you get everyone from the (sort-of) Friendly Atheist (atheists only get so friendly) to a Zen D00d to a bunch of awesome Catholic bloggers. And they’re all raking in the dough hand-over-fist.

Let’s dish it up.

#1 is Mark Shea, a man I admire and whose books I’ve recommended more times than I can count. Seriously, By What Authority is awesome. I love it. I wished I had written it but I could never have written it because I was an atheist when he wrote it. If anyone needs money, it’s Mark. And I say that not knowing him personally but because he has begged for money for basic things like antibiotics for his family and money to repair their broken-down car. So I could never write for Patheos knowing I might be drawing ad monies away from a decent Catholic man in such a situation.

#2 is Marc Barnes, “Bad Catholic” (oooh, he’s so baaad), aka the Wunderkind. No not that Wunderkind, the teen vampire novel-knock-off author…but our very own Catholic Wunderkind. The young dude sweeping the Catholic blogosphere by storm, our very own young Gandalf Greyhame, traversing the digital Middle-Earth hither and yon with the fleet-footedness that only Shadowfax could muster. It’s practically axiomatic that young people always need money, so who can blame him, especially since Spencer-for-hire Brent Stubbs ain’t paying squat for this Undoing Babel book gig that he roped Marc and I into. (Keep it classy, Stubbs.) I will not take money from Marc’s college fund; he deserves better than Ramen noodles.

#3 pop-under ads. Seriously? It’s 2012 and you’re pulling the pop-under ads on me? Patheos loves these. Here’s a keyboard commando tip from yours truly. When you see the flash on the screen telling you they’ve just shot off one of these ads in a new window: hit Alt-tab and then Alt-F4 and boom! the ad is gone.

#4 I’m so flush with cash that I don’t need Patheos’ grimy money. They can keep it! Matter of fact, give more of it to Mark Shea so he can get some antibiotics.

#5 Um, Tori Amos is awesome. And yet, she’s not on Patheos. Why the blacklisting? Haven’t they heard Silent All These Years for crying out loud? Maybe they don’t realize how grittily real and religious her lyrics are:

I’ve got the Anti-Christ in the kitchen yelling at me again…

Dang that’s serious.

I’ve almost had to eat all these words because would you believe that none other than Pat Vandapool the Czar himself joined Patheos? The proof is in the animation, as they say, and if I had Pat’s humor no doubt I’d get invited by Patheos too, but I’m just a dude who blogs about apologetics and agrarian stuff so who cares about that, right?

I mean most people in our country don’t even read one book per year much less one on apologetics. And those who do read apparently buy stuff like the Da Vinci Code, Hunger Games (aka the Running Man rip-off), and some Harry Potter cotton candy, not hard-hitting literature.

So that’s what I got concerning Patheos. I’m sure the people running the site are all good chaps as far as I can throw them but until these five reasons are overcome I won’t be blogging for them.

Update: My wife gently informed me that the frequent mention of money in this post, even in jest, comes off badly. Apologies for that. The post is supposed to humorous and more poke fun at the entire pro/con-Patheos debate rather than weigh in on either side. I don’t blame anyone for blogging for them, nor anyone for not blogging for them, for whatever reason they have.

Personally, I would have no compelling reason to move my blog over there because I’ve spent 7 years blogging here, with people subscribing to this feed, on a site that I wholly own and control. Moving to Patheos means gaining more readers potentially, but also losing many who currently read and also giving up the most important “plank” in my digital platform.

Money-wise, my blog has never made money to even cover the hosting costs. It has, however, given me an outlet for writing–one of my charisms–which is gratifying, and has indirectly led to me writing my book, which has been successful beyond my imagination, and not particularly monetarily but just in terms of how many people have bought it (as you know, it’s priced dirt cheap at $2.99 for e-book and $9.99 for paperback. Amazon won’t let me charge much lower than that otherwise no one would make any money from it).

Most importantly, the blog has helped me connect with lots of great people, both those who agree or disagree with me, who are Catholic or not. It has actually led to real-life friendships as well, something I value above all.

In any case, if this post struck a sour note, I apologize. My wife’s radar is usually tuned in pretty accurately. Thanks for reading and for sticking around and for your participation.

Long live Christ the King!

Crusaders All

The only question is: which side are you fighting on?

Take my friend Rachel Evans and her recent post on the North Carolina traditional marriage amendment:

Reading through the comments, the same thought kept returning to my mind as occurred to me when I first saw that Billy Graham ad: You’re losing us.

I’ve said it a million times, and I’ll say it again…(though I’m starting to think that no one is listening): 

My generation is tired of the culture wars. 

We are tired of fighting, tired of vain efforts to advance the Kingdom through politics and power, tired of drawing lines in the sand, tired of being known for what we are against, not what we are for.

Rachel’s a former conservative Evangelical-turned-liberal Protestant and is representative of a growing movement within Christianity. Her belief is that, when traditional Christians stand up for traditional Christian morality, they are “engaging in culture wars” but when she blasts them for doing so and promotes beliefs contrary to traditional Christian morality she is not being a culture warrior.

But of course she is a culture warrior, just one that is fighting on the other side.

Same with the recent kerfluffle where the Susan Komen Foundation was going to stop supporting Planned Parenthood. All the PP supporters screamed (literally) at pro-lifers for “bringing politics” into the abortion debate and swaying Komen, completely blind to the fact that they are also being political in supporting abortion. You can’t avoid politics, no matter how hard you try.

The fact is, most Americans have lost the understanding of what grounding our laws are based on: the natural law. Say “natural law” to most people and they think you mean the law of the jungle, natural selection, or how animals behave. Without this grounding, you can forget about having a reasoned discussion with someone who is, for example, pro-same-sex marriage. There’s no common ground from which to begin!

And absent any understanding of natural law, they simply claim that “we shouldn’t discriminate when two people love each other”–consent being the sole critierion for the good.

Our country is being steered in their direction. Make no mistake: they are winning the culture war, and they are culture warriors. Such deep confusion exists; we don’t know up from down or why we believe what we do. And there’s no big change in sight that will change this.

So I’m taking Pres. Obama’s advice and gathering up my guns and sticking to my religion (which builds on the natural law), buying some land and fighting the culture war from a solid footing.

Let the battle continue.

Hi John,

It takes faith to believe in Jesus Christ. It takes faith to believe that God inspired men to write letters and books, such that they are inerrant. It takes faith to believe that the deposit of faith was not corrupted sometime in the past 2,000 years of history since Christ. It takes faith to believe that Christ established the Church and that the gates of hell won’t prevail against it. I would not expect any of this to be controversial. Do you take exception with it? Do you reject the claim that believing in these things takes faith? If so, then you would be claiming they are demonstrable through reason alone, which is false. Reasons and motives of credibility support all these beliefs, but cannot prove them.

You wrote, quoting Dr. Kruger (and let me see if block quotes work):

to say the canon is self-authenticating is to say that these books objectively bear qualities that show them to be divinely-produced books. It is analogous to our belief that natural revelation (the created world) exhibits qualities that show it is divinely-produced. Do we not believe that ‘The heavens declare the glory of God’ (Ps 16:1; cf. Rom 1:20)? In the same manner, why would we not believe that God’s special revelation also bears evidence of his handiwork?

Let’s assume I agree that this is true. The idea then is that the books God inspired would sort of “jump out at” the attentive reader (and we might add, one who has the Holy Spirit within him). God inspired these psalms, proverbs, histories, apocalyptic writings, letters, gospels, and epistles. Jesus’ sheep will “hear His voice” and recognize each of these writings through prayerful reading (if not outright divine illumination/private revelation).

Yet, you have faithful men in the early Church who erroneously included non-inspired books, or excluded inspired ones, as any glance at the various canonical lists proposed during the first 400 years shows. Either they didn’t have the Holy Spirit and so missed those objective qualities of the divine, or their Spirit-gauges were not completely accurate. (But we are to believe, I suppose, that John Calvin’s is? Or John Bugay’s?)

Dr. Kruger would say, it seems, that it was through the gradual consensus of all these broken-gauged men across centuries that the Holy Spirit worked, something that is not too far off from Catholicism’s claims. But Catholics believe that God guided the Church in her discernment, not just on the canon, but on all doctrines of faith and morals. This is consistent. Protestants, like you and Kruger, do not believe this, and so your belief that God guided these men to the true canon over time, but didn’t guide the Church on the other doctrines she discerned, is ad hoc. You say that Protestants have answered the canon question, but I have not heard an answer that avoids being ad hoc in just the way I described.

Regarding interpretation and the accusation that the Catholic Church interjects itself as a lens between Scripture and the believer, even Keith Mathison admits that Protestants also required an interpreter: “All appeals to Scripture are appeals to interpretations of Scripture. The only real question is: whose interpretation? People with differing interpretations of Scripture cannot set a Bible on a table and ask it to resolve their differences. In order for the Scripture to function as an authority, it must be read and interpreted by someone.”

So is that someone John Bugay? Or Dr. Kruger? Or Mathison? Or the PCA, PCUSA, OPC…? How do we know? (And if you choose the “church” based on the one whose interpretation of the Scriptures matches your own, you just created that circular reasoning you’ve been trying to avoid.) So you cannot avoid an interpreter, the only question is, which interpreter do you choose? Protestantism’s sola Scriptura, the Called to Communion guys demonstrated, reduces to solo Scriptura with respect to ultimate interpretive authority. Mathison failed to rebut their argument.

God bless,
Devin

There was no one day when I realized I had overcome habitual lust and sexual addiction. It doesn’t work that way. Instead, I kept fighting the battle, availing myself of everything I could to help me live chastely: I put pictures of Our Lady around my computer, went to daily Mass and adoration whenever I could, studied the Theology of the Body, did accountability groups with close friends of mine, wore the Cord of St. Joseph, prayed novenas to St. Maria Goretti and St. Therese, and went to Confession after I fell to temptation.

We often hear about struggling with this vice but less often about the joy of overcoming it, of the way in which it was overcome, of the vigilance required ever afterward against lustful temptations, so I wrote with that in mind. Please check it out, share it with any people you know fighting this battle, and thanks to Fr. Christian for his vocation and his willingness to use social media for the Kingdom!

We got this collection to start out

My wife has wanted us to explore trying essential oils for a while. I was skeptical of them and when we bought some from Whole Foods, I treated them like dangerous chemicals because I had read about how potent they can be.

Also, there didn’t seem to be any manual for how to use them. What if they burned our skin? Could they be taken internally? Could they be used somehow in the humidifier? Etc.

We compromised and I agreed to put some into our beeswax balm (made from our own bees’ wax!), since that dilutes it quite a bit. That worked pretty well, and if nothing else was a nice fragrance with the bee balm. Also it saved us shelling out $10 for Burt’s Bees Farmer’s Friend hand salve.

But then we started reading some more and it turns out that these oils aren’t really regulated, so a company can call their oil “pure” even if it is not really pure–it may be cut with a synthetic chemical or come from, say, hybrid lavender plants that are higher in camphor than true lavender.

That’s when we heard about Young Living essential oils and decided to give them a shot. They made a big deal about really being pure, when the research I did on the other company’s oils downplayed the whole thing. The Young Living lavender smelled a lot better than the other brand’s, which was telling. The only downside is that the Young Living oils are more expensive.

I was still skeptical, but our son seems to have inherited my wife’s asthma and would get congestion from a little bug, which would quickly turn into a kroupy cough, and then before we knew it he had an infection and needed antibiotics. This was in spite of us using all the standard scientific remedies for him, including a nebulizer with albuterol.

We researched which essential oils could help with this kind of respiratory bugs, and the next time he started going down the path with illness, we tried using them topically according to the proper amounts and dilutions. Result: he got better.

I still wasn’t convinced; maybe it was a fluke or that was a weak bug or anything. A month later it happened again where he caught a bug. We did the same thing with the essential oils…and he got better again. Now I was more convinced, at least about these particular oils helping his body kick a respiratory bug.

We’ve since had another success with a different oil for another child health issue, and so I’ve started recommending these oils to my friends specifically for the remedies that have worked for us.

The essential oils are pricey, but you can get a fairly large discount by signing up for wholesale prices. Young Living calls it being an “independent distributor” but you don’t have to distribute or sell any oils to anyone. If you buy oils from them you should become one because otherwise you are paying a lot more.

Just like any wholesale buying club, there is a fee to join (think Costco, Sam’s Club etc.). The difference here is that you don’t just pay a fee and start shopping – instead you basically buy a starter kit of oils and that’s your “fee.” And, unlike Costco or Sam’s, there is NO yearly fee; as long as you spend at least $50.00 during the year in essential oils, you’ll maintain your wholesale status. The oils are expensive enough that spending $50 per year is easy to do.

Here’s the simplest way to sign up as a wholesale customer:.

1. Click HERE
2. Select the “Independent Distributor” membership type.
3. Enter my member number: 1313245
4. Choose the “Start Living” kit of your choice (I recommend the Everyday Oil Kit).
5. Click “I Agree” on the distributor application.
6. Once you’ve completed this process you will be given your own member number, which will allow you to start shopping with wholesale prices immediately. 

Two things that bother me about Young Living: one is that some of the marketing for the oils is very yoga/zen/new age/chi. So this or that oil is supposed to “balance your energies”–blah. I don’t believe that at all. But I just take the good and leave the bad. The other is that they really go for the whole network marketing idea. I don’t like trying to sell stuff to my friends, not unless I really can stand behind it. So far I have seen some good results from a few of the oils for specific purposes, so I’m willing to recommend others try them. But I’m not going to throw a tupperware/essential oil party to pressure people to join. If they want to, great. If not, good.

I’m scientific and care about empirical results. I have two friends who suffer from frequent migraines, and one oil blend (called M-graine) is targeted to help with migraines. So one friend is going to try it out and see if it helps any; I hope my other friend will as well. Migraines are serious stuff–I used to get them all the time and they were terrible–so if an oil can actually help with them, I’ll be impressed.

Why do these oils work? The best explanation I have heard is that these oils’ purpose in plants is to help them fight disease and pests. Many of our medicines are synthetic versions of these chemical oils found in plants.

Do let me know if you have any experience, good or bad, with essential oils. I think they can become a part of the “natural” medicine chest on our future homestead.

We walked into Mass right as it began, and the church was full of Mexicans.

Which wasn’t a surprise since this was a Spanish Mass and Clovis is a big cattle city. Who works in all those cattle plants now? Mexicans. They do jobs that you and I generally don’t want to do.

I grew up in south-central Texas. Katie grew up on the New Mexico border. We both know a decent bit of Spanish (pace Gerardo) and have been to more Spanish and bilingual Masses than we can count. So we didn’t feel uncomfortable, even though it was clear that we were the one gringo family in the church.

We not only felt comfortable; we felt even closer to these Mexican Catholics than we do to many other secular Americans.

Because we share the Catholic Faith with them. We worshiped together at Holy Mass in the universal Church. Most of them were first-generation Americans. They were born in Mexico. But they found their way over here, maybe legally, maybe illegally, to make a good life for themselves. And they found the jobs that they could, even in stinky cities like Clovis that smell like feedlots and concentrated manure.

And I see in them perhaps the one hope for the United States. They aren’t (yet?) contracepting away most of their children. They haven’t (yet?) abandoned their faith for secularism and relativism. It is possible, perhaps just so, to catechize, evangelize, and form them to become the most powerful force for the New Evangelization that the world has yet seen.

I don’t know how to do this. I don’t even know if it is what I’m called to do. But I know lots of people who are, people at my old parish who are pouring their lives into the formation of Mexican-American Catholics.

This is another hallmark of the Catholic Church: it’s universality. Anywhere in the world, in whatever language, we are united in full communion with the successor of St. Peter, Pope Benedict XVI. So I say, bring in the Mexicans. Reform the immigration system. And may they revitalize our country with their faith.

Gene Logsdon

I just finished Gene Logsdon’s intriguing book, A Sanctuary of Trees. Logsdon is an 80-some-odd year-old agrarian writer who considers himself a “contrary” farmer.

He’s also grew up Catholic back in the pre-Vatican II days, went to a minor seminary for several years (in spite of his lack of interest in the priesthood and Christianity in general), left, got married, and eventually realized that he yearned to return to his childhood home, where he could live close to the land.

This book is part how-to, part reflection, part memoir, part editorial, centered around Logsdon’s experiences with groves of trees, forests, and especially his own woodlots. Those looking for practical tips on how to plant, transplant, nurture, and harvest trees will find helpful, but not comprehensive, information. Likewise, those looking for a pure memoir of a boy who lived his whole life in the woods will only be partially satisfied. Logsdon combines a well balanced mixture of all these genres.

Regarding the Catholic Faith, the curious thing is that Logsdon got it into his head that Catholicism was somehow against the natural world. He was being “lured away from priestly life by the temptress of wild nature that religious authorities doggedly kept right on providing me [by having a forest on the seminary property].” This is a common theme: those in “authority” are usually or always wrong, incompetent, and cowardly. While Logsdon, the nomad and lone wolf, goes his own way and finds the truth that those in authority are ignorant of.

Part of this confusion about Catholicism is no doubt due to the state of the Church in the United States in the 40s and 50s. Reform was definitely needed. Who knows how many young men like Logsdon were shuffled into the seminaries without strong faith or a good understanding of Christ and His Church, and probably without even a priestly vocation at all? At least Logsdon left the Church entirely and didn’t become a (bad) priest who would have caused scandal one way or another years or decades later.

Why did his parents send him off to seminary at age 14 when he showed no signs of being fit for the priesthood, or even of having a strong faith? Who knows? Why didn’t the Franciscans, whom he learned under, teach him how St. Francis, too, loved nature and spent most of his time out-of-doors, exploring? The dots never got connected.

I know a priest, manly and strong, who spends his free time working beautiful objects with his lathe. Who used to run a machine shop and fix motors. Who, as a priest, saved up his meager stipend to buy a small bit of land in the Texas Hill Country and built his own cabin to go on retreat whenever he got a chance. This priest makes the large Easter candle himself each year and then–regardless of how cold or windy or wet the weather is–kindles the Easter fire by hand with flint until it is lit. There was never a place that a wild man of the woods could be more at home than the Catholic Church, which sees a reflection of God’s glory in His creation.

But back to the book. Logsdon marries, takes a journalist-type job for an agribusiness publication, and learns to love the woods and nature again, even on his small suburban homesteads. He manages to buy some land he and his family grew up on and returns home to make his living there, writing.

He’s at his best when he is writing about the trees and their characteristics: hickory nuts and black walnuts, planting from seed vs. transplanting, letting nature do its work instead of interfering too much, how to fell trees without getting yourself killed, how to find food in the woodland, what woodcarvers look for in wood grain, how to heat your home with wood, and many other fascinating topics.

He’s not quite at his best when he plays arm-chair philosopher. He advocates for population control as if over-population is a major world problem. But just a bit later he laments the fact that there are enormous amounts of land that could be used for productive and helpful sylvan culture in cities, suburbs, and countrysides. In other words the fact is that we are incredibly wasteful in how we view and manage trees and they could sustainably support human habitats if we only paid attention.

So ironically, while he thinks that he is a “rampart person,” an independent thinker who bucks the authoritarian propaganda, in fact with regard to contraception, over-population, and even a disdain for Catholicism, he’s aligned himself perfectly with the popular secularist creeds. He’s faithfully towing this particular party line while believing himself to be a renegade.

Criticism aside, I pray that Logsdon, even in his late years, will turn to Jesus Christ and ask again for the gift of faith. Faith in the brilliant God who created everything he loves. Faith in the wise Father who made the woods for men to steward. Faith in the Savior who loved us beyond all telling.

Trees are important, but not as ends in themselves. Rather they are given to us to use prudently and intelligently. They are beautiful, and their beauty is a tiny manifestation of God’s uncreated, majestic beauty. My hope is that Logsdon is given the grace to see that before he meets our Lord.

Protestants are not unreasonable. In fact they’re quite reasonable, up until a certain point, and then they have to resort to Faith of the gaps. Here’s how: Take the canon of Scripture. Protestants make historical arguments in support of their canon. Catholics point out how these cannot actually give them their certainty needed to believe their canon is correct, but when faced with these rebuttals, instead of realizing that they have a fundamental problem, one that strikes at the root of their beliefs, they claim that that hole in their reason is where “faith” comes in. You see, “faith” fills in the gaps left by Protestantism’s ad hoc judgments.

For the canon, one ad hoc judgment is the fact that there is no principled reason for believing that God guided the early Church’s discernment of the doctrine of the canon while rejecting the belief that God guided the early Church on other doctrines.

This Faith of the gaps actually sounds reasonable enough. Just listen to what a Protestant would say to himself: “Well, I’ve researched the canon and found many arguments and pieces of evidence for the Protestant one over the Catholic one. They seem reasonable, so I have reason to believe that the Protestant canon is the true one. Also [get ready for Faith of the gaps assurance here] since I have gleaned so much wisdom from the Bible and encountered Christ in it, I know that it is true.”

What’s the problem here? It’s simply that faith builds upon reason, but that reason must be sound reason. Solid philosophical arguments. Principled reasons. Motives of credibility that are accurate. So the edifice of reason supporting Catholicism is sound, but its purpose is limited to being the point where the person makes the assent of faith. Sound reasoning allows one to make the assent of faith seamlessly, as a hang glider gets a running take off from a tall ledge. Faulty reasoning is akin to that hang glider stumbling over rough stones, not getting the momentum needed for a proper take off, and then relying on Faith of the gaps to somehow correct that problem and get him into flight. He may get into some sort of flight in a partial or wobbly way (analogous to, say, a canon missing 7 books that God inspired), but it won’t send him soaring to the highest heights he was created for.

The ultimate cause of this Protestant problem though is not one of reason. Ironically, it is one of faith. Because Protestants reject the Catholic belief that Christ founded a visible Church and has protected His Church from error in her teachings, they are forced to fill in the holes, inconsistencies, and discontinuities in their beliefs with “faith,” yet doing so is really (unintentionally) being fideistic and not the true use of faith.

Hopefully this helps you understand (if you’re Catholic), why Protestants don’t all just become Catholic immediately after they are presented with the problems in the edifice of reason supporting their faith. The Faith of the gaps is an almost irresistible device to turn to.

But God has provided many ways for us to come to know Him in the fullness of the truth in the Catholic Church. One of those is by people carefully learning how to reason and then applying that knowledge to their beliefs. When they see the basis for their beliefs (like the books of the Bible) rests on an ad hoc decision, that can lead them, by God’s grace, to stop and say “that doesn’t quite make sense, hmm…” and lead them deeper into the truth of Christ.