In which I finish up my little series for The Catholic Weekly on the necessity of the Creed to a faith rooted in remembering actual events. One of the ways in which I moved from partial to fully biblical (that is, Catholic) faith was by discovering that my little dorm group was wrong about baptism. In the early Church, to believe and profess your faith and to be baptised were the same thing. If you believed, you sought baptism and... Read more
C.S. Lewis writes in “The World’s Last Night”: I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations who, as one terrible moment now reveals to him, were never going to exist. Then he will see the massacres, the faked trials, the deportations,... Read more
Hi uncle Mark, I need a favour/favor from you. I have just started a website for Catholic prayers called POWERFUL CATHOLIC PRAYERS. I will be happy if you can give a shout out of that site at your blog for me. Thanks a million. Check thou it out! Some of the most heartening signs of health in the global Church come from Africa. Speaking of which, human dynamo, apostle and future canonized saint Fausta Nalubega, who is busy conquering Uganda... Read more
The next chapter in our discussion of the Creed is here: It was only when something had happened, not Once Upon a Time, but to a specific group of people living in a real place during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat that creeds became necessary, because real memories, not dreams and legends, were involved. For this people was constantly being pressured by its neighbours and by its own sinful tendencies to forget what had happened–to remove Jesus to Cloud Cuckoo Land where... Read more
Pete Vere pointed this out to me. It’s the interesting structure of the Noah narrative: The reason it interests me is that the sacred author uses a similar technique in Exodus. It has the effect of placing what the author want you to see (in this case, the core lesson that God did not forget Noah and the rest of his creation) within a sort of nesting set of parentheses which parallel each other before and after the central point.... Read more
In 2009, Pew did a study of support for torture among Americans and found that the two most zealous supporters of this mortal sin are white conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. They *love* this thing the Church calls “gravely and intrinsically immoral”. Love it! And they fought tooth and nail to defend it and to make war on the Church’s teaching against it for ten years. The proof of this is easy to find. Just look at the massive compendium of... Read more
He writes: Hi Mr. Shea! I read your book By What Authority? awhile back and enjoyed it. Along with some other religious works I’ve read, Anyways, I’m wondering if you might give me your “take” or thoughts, however brief they might be (I know you’re busy), on a passage from the preface of John Calvin’s “Antidote” against the Council of Trent, which I’ve quoted below. These are some words of his that precede his critique of the council, in which he... Read more
Sometime back, I gave a talk based on my little book This is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Real Presence here in Seattle. One of the things I noted is that there are only two moments in the gospels where Jesus says something that baffles his disciples and he does not take them aside and explain that this was just a parable or figure of speech. Mark, in fact, tells us that when he spoke in parables he always... Read more
I had a couple of fun conversations with some kindly and curious non-believers recently and I thought it might be useful to others to see them. The first was with a teacher writing to a Lutheran friend (Elaine) and me and trying to decode our quotation (referring to Christianist apologists for Trump’s outrages) “God’s Name is blasphemed among the Gentiles because of you.” She wrote: Hey Elaine. You and Mark always use this phrase, “blasphemed among the Gentiles.” Can you... Read more
by Allying with Evangelical Republicans: The affair of Fr. Patrick Conroy’s tendered and withdrawn resignation as chaplain of the House of Representatives is one of those regrettable incidents in our public life that nevertheless has the virtue of bringing to light certain things that most politicians would prefer to be kept in the dark. Among these is the tenuous strength of the Republican alliance between Catholics and evangelical Protestants born of supposedly shared values. In fact, few shared values exist.... Read more
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