Name that tune

Catholicism: Classical
Protestantism: Pop
Evangelicalism: Jazz

Discuss...

Religion Podcasts

I wrote about my own growing interest in podcasting not long ago, and followed that with a post about a great podcast of Chris Lydon's Open Source called "God 2.0". The other day, Dev Thakur posted a list of the podcasts he subscribes to, and it coincidentally makes a nice roundup of some Catholic themed podcasts.

Anybody have other suggestions for good religion podcasts? Gotta load up the iPod for the gym...

Alpha Male

I answered the call of a friend last night and attended the first meeting of an Alpha group at his home.

The Alpha program, for those who don't know, is a 10-week introductory course to Christianity, designed for seekers and unbelievers, started by an Anglican minister named Nicky Gumbel. Meetings consist of a meal, a movie and a discussion. The movie is of a lecture/sermon by Gumbel, standing at a podium in that sweetly awkward British manner, with the requisite reaction shots of a group of improbably beautiful young British "seekers." The messages are very simple and designed to get the conversational ball rolling on "first-order" questions. The group that I attended had only one "seeker." He would probably not have used that term, he was pretty content thinking that "good people won't be sent to hell," and he was mostly there because his wife (a Christian, but subject to doubts) had enticed him. The others in attendance were the host and hostess, a couple from my church and me.

The truth is, the discussion period felt a little uncomfortable to me, with the cards so stacked, so I tried to identify with the poor guy who was still digesting his dinner. I found it unsettling to realize that I could still argue on both sides of the coin when it comes to "mere Christianity." Talking with unbelievers I can get pretty excited about defending the faith, but in a room of believers I find myself playing the devil's advocate.

For a former type-A agnostic like myself, arguing with the accepted beliefs of Christianity is sort of like smoking. You can give it up, recognize it's bad, but still recall the experience fondly. I may be a born-again Christian, but I'm still a dyed-in-the-wool contrarian.

Question 1:

Does this make me a bad evangelical?

Question 2:

Would this make me a bad Catholic?

Drinking, Moderation, Good Stewardship

Michael Spencer, The Internet Monk, has an interesting post reflecting on his Southern Baptist upbringing, specifically the prohibition of alcohol. He concludes, “I was snuckered. The Bible didn't say what I was told it said. There are millions of Christians who drink. Jesus made real wine. It's what you are supposed to drink at communion. I was misled and there isn't any other word for it. It is just one, big lie. And now, we're hearing it all again. I've heard lots of articulate people try to build a new case for teetotalism, and while I respect what they are saying, the Bible is too clear. They can make a very good practical argument, but they can't get past Colossians 2:16-23. You can't bind the conscience in these matters. It's a fools errand, and life is too short to listen to it.”

It’s a fascinating story, and worth the read. Likely it caught my eye and imagination because I happen to like a martini, a bit of single malt Scotch, a glass of wine (I'm not necessarily implying a single unit of any of these), and I’m glad the Catholic Church doesn’t hold prohibitions against drinking (though all sorts of sinful problems can stem from immoderate drinking, and these are, of course, dealt with in prohibitions against the individual sins). But maybe it also caught my eye because for me it relates to a larger question – how are we, as Christians, even as humans, to draw the line on where the sincere appreciation of the good things God gives us becomes simply self-indulgence? I’m not talking about how good pleasures in moderation become destructive in immoderate quantities (this is self-evident and easy to see the sin in), but how good pleasures in moderation can become a misuse of the gifts we’ve been given, bad stewardship. This, it seems, is more complex and requires a good deal more discernment.

It also occurred to me Rick (and others!) may have interesting insights on this from a Southern evangelical perspective.

And in full disclosure ... after Mass today and before I posted this, I stopped at the liquor store for a bottle of good single malt Scotch to share while slow roasting pork on the grill on this cool, Green Mountain fall afternoon.

A Little Quiz Regarding Kids and Church

Kristen's mom has been out visiting for the past four days, which meant Kris and I got to go to Mass sans kids this morning. It was lovely to be able to reflect on (heck, just listen to!) the readings, the homily, to immerse ourselves in the magnificent prayer of the liturgy … But as other people's children squawked, giggled, thumped and cried out, during the service, I couldn't help thinking about our kids, missing them, and even wishing they were there with us!

Now the quiz. Was this:

a. Indomitable parental love
b. Short term memory loss
c. Stockholm Syndrome

Network Theory ... Or Blog Stuff

A hearty thank you to Amy Wellborn for posting a note about our newborn blog on Open Book last week. Looking at it from a scale-free network perspective, Amy's not just a node in the Catholic blogosphere, but a super node! Recent commenters have also provided us new links to blogs I'd not been acquainted with and am glad to have found : Ales Rarus, Against a dictatorship of relativism, Pontifications and The Paragraph Farmer to name the ones that come immediately to mind.

Carnivalesque

Godspy has an interview with Caleb Stegall, editor of The New Pantagruel. The name of the publication (from Rabelais' Gargantua and Pantagruel) came from Stegall's idea that, "some kind of resurrection of the Carnivalesque as a possible mediating force between religion and modernity."

Stegall goes on to say, "A number of commentators have mentioned that tNP has something vaguely 'Catholic' about it. I find that fascinating. I don't think this evocation of the Carnivalesque is necessarily 'Catholic,' but I think I understand the transposition of the two because Protestants have never excelled at evoking the Carnivalesque. In one of the ironic twists of the Reformation, the Protestant desire to arrive at a 'critical' understanding and implementation of tradition ended up closing off the Carnivalesque spaces in society. Catholic culture on the other hand, with its ordering of life around the ritual of the Mass, is better situated to foster such spaces."

A Purgatorial Debate

An earlier debate (Irons in the Fire) has diverged into two distinct topics, so I am breaking this one on purgatory into a separate post. The other, original topic (hierarchical authority structures in the church), continues in the original post.

Rick wrote: "Purgatory is the device by which Catholics deal with the seeming cruelty and harshness of Hell existing within God's perfect will. It sets the stage for a variety of works-related salvation practices, putting the brunt upon the living do good deeds for the souls of the departed and motivating the faithful to good works to shorten their own stays in an unpleasant place. Of course, just beyond purgatory lies Hell, so beware. For evangelicals, the device by which we deal with Hell is grace. We can take comfort in knowing that our departed loved ones, while not perfect or even necessarily good, were able to receive the unmerited favor of God by trusting in God's son. Since we can't know the hearts of people, we can't know that anyone is in heaven or hell, but we can imagine anyone in either place."

I reply: The ideas of purgatory as being a setting for any sort of stage for "works-related salvation practices" and that "just beyond purgatory lies Hell" are where the crux of the error, as I see it, lies. According to Catholic doctrine, a soul in purgatory is only bound for heaven. That soul has been irrevocably saved, so there is no stage set for "works-related salvation practices." Hell is not a possibility. No amount of works by people still on earth, and no amount of suffering by the soul who has chosen hell (or heaven) can revoke that decision, because once outside of time, decisions are eternal.

The formal Catholic teaching on purgatory is this: "All who die in God's grace and fellowship, but still imperfectly purified, are indeed assured of their eternal salvation; but after death they undergo purification so as to achieve the holiness necessary to enter the joy of heaven." (From the Catechism of the Catholic Church)

Rick wrote: "We can take comfort in knowing that our departed loved ones, while not perfect or even necessarily good, were able to receive the unmerited favor of God by trusting in God's son."

I reply: This is what Catholics believe also, and why the concept of purgatory makes such good sense.

Hitchhiker's Guide to Humility

I had a great talk with a friend recently, a member of the American Orthodox Church. Since I'm an evangelical, naturally we started to beat up on the Catholics, in absentia. More on that later, but out of the conversation came a religious concept I'd never really heard before: the Eighth Day. This is an Orthodox view of all of history that reduces it to a single phase of God's work, not unlike the seven days prior. It emphasizes the intimate relationship of such events as Noah's flood and Christ's blood because these events all happened, in effect, on the same day. Christ's birth and my salvation: same day. Christ's horrific death happened virtually simultaneously with my last batch of sins. It is the mystical order of the world that we simply convert to the mundane by the narrow time-shackled view afforded by our senses.

Coincidentally, I'd been thinking a lot about a story by the Argentine writer Jorge Luis Borges titled "The Aleph." The Aleph is a spot where all of time and space converges and all can be experienced by the senses. All Borges' works have a kind of equatorial Zen quality to them, shaking deeply buried associations out of the past, and this Eighth Day concept seemed to ring a similar set of neurons in me.

Then I realized another cultural event had reminded me of the Aleph. When the movie remake of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy came out recently, I was moved to review the far superior BBC TV version. It was there I rediscovered Douglas Adams's concept of the perfect galactic punishment: being tossed into the "total perspective vortex," where one's ego is confronted by the actual relationship of an individual, in size and importance, to the whole of creation.

Finally, I had just finished reading a great memoir by David Horowitz titled "Radical Son." Horowitz, now a Neocon, was raised in an intellectual family of Commies. He set forth as his life work to write the perfect defense of Marxism as the solution to the problems of the world. At a certain point, after his faith in the Communist faith had been shaken by numerous events, he walked into a book store and realized that the place of the shelf where his life's work would go was just one small section of one shelf of the Political Science stacks. Competing views of the world by brilliant minds argued silently from every nook and cranny of the store. His epiphany was humbling, as all real epiphanies are.

In my own hubris, I'd planned to try to knit all these concepts together into some kind of seamless whole, but I realized that this would wind up taking an entire book, that would then sit on one small shelf of one bookstore (probably in the remainder bin). I still may try, but I thought I'd toss it out here on Detente for comment. And to tick off Ernesto by alluding to the arguments against Catholicism that were discussed over coffee when he wasn't there to spar.

C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton?

C.S. Lewis or G.K. Chesterton? I've asked the question because it seemed it might illuminate some differences (maybe not between Catholic and evangelical, but between intellectual styles?), but to be honest, I'd hate to be without either. Maybe a better question is, who among today's Christian writers could be considered anywhere near the class of these giants? Or as Rick put it during a phone call recently -- are there any giants left?

Religious and/or Spiritual?

There was a package in Newsweek at the end of August on Spirituality in America. One element is a poll that asks: “Where Do You Stand on Faith? Forget red and blue. On spiritual matters, the United States is still one nation, under God, according to a Newsweek/Beliefnet poll. How do your opinions stack up?” One of the most interesting results in the poll is that the majority of Americans (51% Web and 55% NEWSWEEK / Beliefnet ) consider themselves to be both religious and spiritual. That’s how I answered the question. (Assuming that one might define them as spiritual being the belief in or experience of the metaphysical and religion being the systematic expression of that experience and belief.)

Newsweek's conclusion, however, seems to be that spirituality is in, religion is out.

Mulling this over afterward, this analogy to physical hunger occurred to me: I can sate my hunger eating a sandwich in the car on the way to work or standing on a beach eating a burrito. In both cases, I enjoy and appreciate the food and it sates my hunger. But I wouldn’t want to eat like that all the time. I’d miss silverware, plates, napkins, table manners, conversation and conviviality, music and all the other ritual elements that make up a formal meal. I can satisfy hunger without them, but with them, the bare satisfaction of hunger becomes transformed into something deeper, more carefully realized (and likely better understood and so appreciated), and importantly, bound to community. Some people argue that religion is a superfluous layer that hinders our experience of spirituality. Perhaps sometimes it is. At its best, though, religion is more like a frame around our spirituality, drawing our attention back to it again and again and enhancing our view of it.

The Revealer has a harsh critique of the Newsweek package, "Spiritual, But Not Newsworthy."

Son Salutation?

Saw this debate referred to in Time last week… is Christian yoga a contradiction in terms? Yoga purists, and some Christians (including the Vatican) feel it is, since they believe the physical practices of yoga cannot be separated from the Hindu spiritual elements of yoga. Nevertheless, this practice is apparently taking off – praise yoga is all the rage (Time says) at a number of Christian churches around the country, in some cases with some modifications in language such as changing the name of the Sun Salutation posture to Son Salutation. I agree, on one level, that there is huge power in intent, which this modification of language implies. Yet that cuts both ways. If by intending a certain posture to be an act of Christian worship, does that perhaps make it tolerable from a Christian perspective but strip it of its yogic effectiveness so far as a Hindu might be concerned? Can it be both or must it be one or the other? Seems the core questions here are whether yoga as a spiritual practice can be separated from yoga as a physical practice and whether the belief system that underlies yoga as a spiritual practice is inherently antithetical to or contradictory with Christian spiritual belief.
Okay, discuss.

Stolen Quotation

''For true and false will in no better way be revealed and uncovered than in resistance to a contradiction.'' -- St. Thomas Aquinas

This is the official "corner quote" on Disputations, one of the sites that Ernesto has linked to from Detente. (I've got to find out how to create links here, to balance out the list with some evangelical blogs.) Anyway, I liked the quote, but I'm not sure I understand it. What exactly is resistance to a contradiction? Still it seemed like something that belonged here on Detente, so I stole it.

Irons in the Fire

I like your “About” line which says that we’re seeking “truth beyond semantics” -- although I’m sure that a scholar of semantics could parse any such sentence into a puddle of alphabet soup. Here’s another way of saying basically the same thing with some specifics tossed in to make it chewy.

What we are engaged in sounds a bit like classical ecumenism, which in my church tradition is viewed with suspicion. That road leads to the World Council of Churches and the Jesus Seminar, where flaccid conjecture replaces lively debate; where the gospels are screened by a committee until only the most popular and inoffensive sayings of Jesus are left.

Usually, in my church tradition, the purpose of dialogue is to convert, to assist the Holy Spirit in opening the eyes of another, to correct errors. I know, it does sound a bit arrogant.

I happen to think that we can disagree with one another, not change one another’s minds in any great degree, and still be better Christians for the practice.

Proverbs 27:17 says “As iron sharpens iron, so one man sharpens another.” I think that’s the goal of this exercise, to be better Christians of whatever type we happen to be.

If along the way we change one another’s minds in some way, or convert some passing soul, then praise be to God, and then back to the debate.

Prayer in the blogosphere...

Amazing some of the Web's dichotomies -- a system that has tremendous potential to alienate and dehumanize also provides opportunity for deep human connection and also for spiritual edification and even practice.

I recall reading and hearing several discussions lately about the pursuit of spirituality online and the working of sacred time into a seemingly secular venue like the Web. (There might have been some discussion of this in the Open Source "God 2.0" podcast I linked to a while back. In any case, following on that theme, Steve Bogners has linked to an online retreat offered by Creighton University's Collaborative Ministry office.

Steve writes:

Instead of doing this retreat on my own, I want to open it up and invite everyone else to join me. I'll provide the online space for everyone to write & share experiences, via this blog or another one. You don't have to be a Catholic Christian to sign-up for this online retreat; there's nothing really exclusively Catholic about it. So please don't let that be a barrier. Actually, there's no sign-up at all; no cost; no penalties to join late or leave early.

No proselytizing in fiction?

Here's a great interview with fantasy writer Tim Powers (via The View From The Foothills and Mixolydian Mode). Powers is a Catholic writer, and though he writes from that worldview, he doesn't write proselytizing books...

At one point in the interview he says:

I was on a panel once in which a woman said, "Dracula is actually about the plight of 19th-century women," to which I replied, "No, it’s about a guy who lives forever by drinking other people’s blood – don’t take my word for it, check it out." As a reader, if I can sense a "message" unfolding in a story I’m reading – if I get the idea that the writer is trying to make some point beyond the characters and events of the story – my "suspension of disbelief" is just gone. This is especially risky in science fiction and fantasy, because all our disorienting effects, our ghosts and our starships and our time-travel – which are the main point of our stories – become just "let’s pretend" devices, not meant to be mistaken for "what the story’s really about.

Reminds me a debate we once had about whether proselytizing belongs in fiction -- you said yes, I said no, and though your argument was better than mine, I'm still not convinced that my position wasn't better than yours. (I'll try and dig up the copy and post it here later.)

In any case, thought this might be of interest. I read Powers' Drawing of the Dark, by the way, and loved it.

Is it a Catholic thing?

Is it the Catholic part of me, the part that loves ritual and liturgy and a formalization of processes ... that prompts my first response to your first post to be a question of protocol? Normally, I'd respond to your post below with a comment. But since this is a joint blog, should I respond with a post of my own? I'm leaning toward "comment" since it keeps threads neater... But I've already broken that rule ... (Right, then. I am not at all trying to imply here that a complex system of rules that are almost immediately broken by anyone trying to follow them is inherent to the majestic complexity of the disciplines and practices of the Catholic faith... this obsessive muddle is entirely mine!)

In any case, based on our discussions in the past, I'd say an essential, fundamental challenge might be sola scriptura, teaching authority, or a combination of both.

Square One

Being a soft-core fundamentalist, I think the best place to begin this blog is with some fundamentals. I can probably list the points of disagreement between Catholicism and evangelicalism, but our discussions in the past have bridged a number of those points. I wonder, what is the essential dispute between us in matters of faith?