December 15, 2008
Why Studying St. Thomas Is Still as Important as Ever
While I'm at it, here's a recent lecture given by another Dominican luminary, Fr. Romanus Cessario, O.P., on “the perennial relevance of St. Thomas Aquinas to aspiring theologians in the service of the Church.”
Dominican Wisdom on How to Teach Young People the Faith
We are parishioners at St. Patrick's, a wonderful Dominican-run parish in Columbus, Ohio. St. Patrick's has a wide and well-deserved reputation for orthodoxy. Confessions are heard by two priests for a few hours each day. The confession lines are long, Masses are typically packed, and large families are practically the norm there. I can think of at least five families we know personally who are parishioners at St. Patrick's, who have 10 or more children. Families with 5, 6, 7, and 8 children are inumerable.
Anyway, that's all background for saying that St. Patrick's and the Dominican friars who staff it are part of the Dominican Province of St. Joseph, which has its headquarters in Washington, DC (just across from the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception). This province is known for producing orthodox and erudite men for the priesthood. Many of them have passed through the hallowed walls of St. Patrick's Parish, over the years.
One of the intellectual powerhouses of the St. Joseph Province is Father Augustine De Noia, O.P., undersecretary for the Vatican's Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith. He has written a very insightful piece on “Clearing Away the Barriers: Preaching to Young People Today.” I've put in bold a particularly important passage. Enjoy!
An effective preacher needs to understand how this background shapes young people’s understanding of the Catholic faith. The influence of the beliefs and attitudes of non-Catholic friends on young Catholics also have to be taken into account. Research conducted by an evangelical think tank (the Barna Group) suggests that a significant percentage of Christian young people share the negative perceptions of Christianity held by their non-Christian fellows.
We have to respect and be willing to engage the intellectual challenges and questions young people pose in their struggle to understand their Catholic faith. “Young adults enjoy challenging the rules. They are extremely-you might say innately-skeptical. Today’s young people are the target of more advertising, media, and marketing than any generation before. And their mindset is both incredibly savvy and unusually jaded” (Kinnaman 2007, 21-22). They are “the ultimate conversation generations. They want to discuss, debate and question everything” (Kinnaman 2007, 33).
In our conversations with young people, we have to avoid the temptation to fudge-to adapt the Catholic faith so as to make it palatable to modern tastes and expectations. This so-called “accommodationist” approach generally fails, and it fails doubly with young people. There is a risk in this approach that the Christian message becomes indistinguishable from everything else on offer in the market stalls of secularised religious faith: “In the powerful yet soft secularising totalitarianism of distinctively modern culture, our greatest enemy is…the Church’s ‘own internal secularisation’ which, when it occurs, does so through the ‘…largely unconscious’ adoption of the ‘ideas and practices’ of seemingly ‘benign adversaries’” (Nichols 2008, 141).
Clearing away the barriers-whatever the audience we have in view-demands a robust sort of apologetics. No one in his or her right mind will be interested in a faith about which its exponents seem too embarrassed to communicate forthrightly. We have to be convinced that the fullness of the truth and beauty of the message about Jesus Christ is powerfully attractive when it is communicated without apologies or compromise.
Our reasoning has to be based on solid theological principles and to operate within a vision of the Catholic faith in its integrity and interconnectedness. “Apologetics is a theological art that must rest on the firm foundation of theological science. If our defense does not flow from deep preparation, deep Christian formation, it will be unconvincing at best, but merely offensive at worst” (Hahn 2007, 12). Sometimes the response “it’s a mystery” is just a cover for theological ignorance on the part of people who should know better. Especially with young people who have questions, it is a mistake to cry “mystery” when an explanation is available and needed. (continue reading)
December 12, 2008
December 11, 2008
When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get on Their Knees and Pray
Which is exactly what my friend, Father Bud, is doing in the wake of a recent discussion he had with a parishioner who gently challenged him about finding ways to provide for special-needs children in the soon-to-be-built parish school. You can read about it in his blog post today, “God's Throwdown.”
Excellent food for thought which, as those who know him know, is typical of Father Bud.
Tune in to my radio shows today, if you can
A heavy radio day for me today. I'm not complaining, though. I enjoy it.
First, I'll be doing my regular “Open Line” live radio broadcast today from 3:00 to 4:00 p.m. ET, and then I'll immediately tape another show from 4:00 to 5:00 p.m. ET, which will be aired on Christmas Day.
You can tune in on any of the 130 or so Catholic AM & FM stations around the country that air this program, or you can catch it on Sirius Satellite Radio, or you can listen online at the EWTN radio site.
If you'd like to ask a question or make a comment on the air — for either hour — just call 800-585-9396 or 205-271-2985. Call in! I can especially use your calls the second hour, because we won't be live while taping that show. Please help me out and call the show to question or comment especially between 4:00 and 5:00 p.m. ET this afternoon.
Next, I'll be handling both hours of Q&A today on the Catholic Answers Live radio show, from 6:00 p.m. to 8:00 p.m. ET.
If you'd like to call in, that number is 888-318-7884, and if you don't live in an area with Catholic radio, you can listen online at the Catholic Answers website (click the “Listen Live” thingamabob to launch the stream).
When you say your prayers today, please include an intention for me, that my mind and voice will hold up for the four hours of gabbing I have to do this afternoon and evening. Thanks.
December 9, 2008
Love Plus One — Bass Lesson
Even if you don't play the bass, this is still nice. This song is, as my dad would say, is fabulous! Enjoy this lesson from a guy who really nails it, note for note (although I'm not sure I agree with all his harmonic embeleshments).
As with most of the songs on Haircut 100's debut album, “Pelican West,” this classic tune evokes in me some extremely vivid, happy memories from the early 80s. Les Nemes, whose style I sought to emulate somewhat with my own bass playing back then, absolutely kills on this track from the band's first of only two albums — major bummer that.
As with most of the songs on Haircut 100's debut album, “Pelican West,” this classic tune evokes in me some extremely vivid, happy memories from the early 80s. Les Nemes, whose style I sought to emulate somewhat with my own bass playing back then, absolutely kills on this track from the band's first of only two albums — major bummer that.
I'm not sure who this musician is, who's providing this tasty video tutorial, but he knows what he's doing.
I'll Be on the “Catholic Answers Live” Radio Show, Tonight at 7:00 ET
I'll be doing the second hour of Q&A today. If you'd like to call in, the number is 888-318-7884, and if you don't live in an area with Catholic radio, you can listen online at the Catholic Answers website (click the “Listen Live” thingamabob to launch the stream).
Don't forget! Tonight at 7:00 p.m. ET. “See” you then.
I will ALSO be guesting on the Catholic Answers Live show, at 7:00 p.m. ET, on Thursday, December 11th, and on Tuesday, December 16th at 7:00 p.m. ET. All the above info applies to those shows, too.
My Little Sister Lisa on the Radio Now
Check it out, if you can. She's being interviewed by Al Kresta on Ave Maria Radio:
Mark Steyn: Jews get killed, but Muslims feel “vulnerable”
Read this incisive article about the gross double-standard in the American mainstream press in how they covered the recent terror attacks in Bombay. Here's a snippet:
Shortly after the London Tube bombings in 2005, a reader of Tim Blair, The Sydney Daily Telegraph's columnist wag, sent him a note-perfect parody of a typical newspaper headline:
"British Muslims Fear Repercussions Over Tomorrow's Train Bombing."
Indeed. And so it goes. This time round – Mumbai – it was the Associated Press that filed a story about how Muslims "found themselves on the defensive once again about bloodshed linked to their religion".
Oh, I don't know about that. In fact, you'd be hard pressed from most news reports to figure out the bloodshed was "linked" to any religion, least of all one beginning with "I-" and ending in "-slam." In the three years since those British bombings, the media have more or less entirely abandoned the offending formulations – "Islamic terrorists," "Muslim extremists" – and by the time of the assault on Mumbai found it easier just to call the alleged perpetrators "militants" or "gunmen" or "teenage gunmen," as in the opening line of this report in The Australian: "An Adelaide woman in India for her wedding is lucky to be alive after teenage gunmen ran amok."
Kids today, eh? Always running amok in an aimless fashion.
The veteran British TV anchor Jon Snow, on the other hand, opted for the more cryptic locution "practitioners." "Practitioners" of what, exactly?
Hard to say. And getting harder. For the Wall Street Journal, Tom Gross produced a jaw-dropping round-up of Mumbai media coverage: The discovery that, for the first time in an Indian terrorist atrocity, Jews had been attacked, tortured and killed produced from the New York Times a serene befuddlement: "It is not known if the Jewish center was strategically chosen, or if it was an accidental hostage scene."
Hmm. Greater Mumbai forms one of the world's five biggest cities. It has a population of nearly 20 million. But only one Jewish center, located in a building that gives no external clue as to the bounty waiting therein. An "accidental hostage scene" that one of the "practitioners" just happened to stumble upon? "I must be the luckiest jihadist in town. What are the odds?"
Meanwhile, the New Age guru Deepak Chopra laid all the blame on American foreign policy for "going after the wrong people" and inflaming moderates, and "that inflammation then gets organized and appears as this disaster" in Mumbai.
Really? The inflammation just "appears"? Like a bad pimple? The "fairer" we get to the, ah, inflamed militant practitioners, the unfairer we get to everyone else. At the Chabad House, the murdered Jews were described in almost all the Western media as "ultra-Orthodox," "ultra-" in this instance being less a term of theological precision than a generalized code for "strange, weird people, nothing against them personally, but they probably shouldn't have been over there in the first place. . . . ” (continue reading)
Veil Wars
I just read an interesting discussion at a blog called “St. Louis Catholic” about whether or not theCatholic Church still requires women to cover their heads with a veil or hat at Mass.
The unnamed canon lawyer whose opinion that, yes, women are still obliged to wear them (even if virtually none do anymore), critiques the contrary opinion, advanced by Father John Zuhlsdorf, canonist Ed Peters, and Jimmy Akin. Even though I have long been of the opinion that the Church no longer requires this custom, at least not at Novus Ordo Masses, I must admit that this article has gone a long way toward convincing me that I have been wrong about this. The fact that “nobody does this anymore” is not a good reason not to observe this venerable Catholic custom.
I do, however, have a respectful complaint for the proprietor of the St. Louis Catholic blog (who goes by “Tinman” rather than his real name), and that is: It is a mistake for you not to name the canon lawyer whom you quote and whom you refer to only as “an out-of-state canonist.” There's no reason that I can see why he should not be named, especially since he publically critiques others by name. That seems unjust to me. The unnamed canonist's argument has great merit, but its effects are blunted by his remaining anonymous.
December 8, 2008
What All the Cool Catholic Kids Will Be Wearing on Christmas Morning
Seriously. Check these out. They're called “Sacrifice Beads.”
I happen to have come into possession of six of these beauties, and my wife and I are giving them as Christmas stocking giftlets for our six youngest kids. But adults of all ages can (and should) use them to stay recollected in a spirit of mortification.
Check them out here, along with all the other great Catholic stuff for your kids (or grandkids), available from the good people over at www. HolyHeroes.com.
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