Donald Trump and his American Christian cult followers continue a long and horrid tradition of elites reshaping Jesus and Christianity to suit their goals. Donald and his enablers may spell the end of the United States and the world as we know it. They, and I do mean they, have brought us to the brink of civil war. The world languishes and watches. China, disgusting in its human rights violations and slave-based economy, claims to be the world’s savior from... Read more
The following are six tips to make us Catholics into better Bible readers. Tips at helping us in our faith walk ahead! Here is a quick post about very practical tips and helps to respectfully read the Scriptures. By avoiding certain popular but mistaken practices, far more can be gained from Bible reading and study. Several items covered below are so common, some may scoff at the recommendations offered. But give it some prayerful thought and you should see the... Read more
Christ truly is risen, and human beings can really experience his transforming Spirit, even Americans. People experienced Christ alive in altered states of consciousness. At the edge of Easter-time, we continue with our focus on the resurrection appearances of Jesus Christ shared in the past few posts. What a wonderful thing it is to say that God raised Christ from the dead! If you know about Jesus, his world, who he was, and his humble beginnings, it magnifies the wonder. Watch... Read more
Is the Pregnant Sky Woman of Revelation 12 really Mary, the Mother of Jesus? Pregnant and about to give birth, a woman is menaced by the Devil. He seeks to devour her child, the Lamb of God. A war rages in the sky above and on earth below between the Woman and the Serpent. What’s going on? Are we talking Marian piety here? Or Scripture? Or both? As we have been discussing in recent May posts, the New Testament gives... Read more
Encountering Jesus risen and alive can be both an experience with someone very real and take place in an altered state of consciousness. Encountering Jesus raised and transformed by God after death is the heart of the Easter kerygma (1 Corinthians 15:3b-5). Last time we discussed failed attempts to explain away New Testament accounts of people encountering the risen Jesus as hallucinations and psychosis. But I should add that affirming the historicity of the resurrection in a naively realist or... Read more
Hallucination and psychosis, used as attempts to explain away Resurrection appearances, fails. Hallucination, aberration in cognition, and psychosis—sometimes skeptics and even hardcore psychiatrists suggest these as possible explanations for what was really going on when New Testament people thought they saw the Risen Jesus. Are such explanations reasonable? We Catholics, like all our Christian brothers and sisters, are Easter people. The resurrection-life we celebrate marks us. The Risen Jesus isn’t just a nice fable to tell us moral truths—we Christians... Read more
The Gospels are extremely different documents, in many ways remote when compared to what American Christians make of them. Gospels—what are they, exactly? For what purpose were they composed? Is it fair to call them biographies of Jesus? Were they written as tools to evangelize people to believe in Jesus? Were they written for all peoples of all times? In what ways are they theological? Scholars Bruce Malina and Richard Rohrbaugh explain that we can think of the Gospels accurately... Read more
The Mother of Jesus becomes a powerful symbol for the Johannine community that wrote the Fourth Gospel. Mother to Jesus, Mary is seen differently throughout various Gospels. Earlier we gave reasons why there is relatively little said about Mary by New Testament documents. We begin with a very negative Markan portrayal of Mary that we explored here. “Matthew” is only a little bit better, as we saw here. But then we saw here how “Luke” massively improves the image of... Read more
Miraculous doings of Jesus, such as his walking on the Sea, can be better understood through cultural insights into altered states of consciousness experiences. Miraculous? Or something wondrous that does not violate “laws of nature” but fits very well into a panhuman experience? Last time, we spoke about two different 21st century Westerners readers and how they misread the story of Jesus walking on the Sea. People from our time and culture tend to read Bible stories like this one... Read more
Ascension of the Risen Jesus into the Realm of God is just one of many biblical Sky Journeys. Ascension is one of those Christian realities of which we are so spuriously familiar. Just what exactly was the Ascension? “…He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father…”—So goes the Creed we Catholics profess on Sundays and Feast Days. But what was it, literally? Watch the brief video here— Ascension and 21st Century Western Questions Was... Read more
Messy Inspirations
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