Questions from the Unsettled Mind

The notion that there might be a sin or sins that are absolutely unforgivable, even by a bishop, is pretty terrifying. Given what the Church teaches about the sacrament of confession and reconciliation, it's hard to see how a priest or the bishop wouldn't be in a position to provide some way back to God. What's more, isn't baptism, the originating sacrament of faith, supposed to be able to cleanse all sins? A clean slate? A totally new beginning?

Many Catholics are puzzled by the embrace of incoherent ideas and straightforwardly bizarre practices advanced by the cultural elites in contemporary American society. How can young men claiming to be women seriously expect to compete in women's athletics? But they do. And they are competing. How can women in their final weeks of pregnancy discredit the fact that they are carrying a human child and then murder it? But they do. And some of them celebrate with abortion parties. How can state governments having convicted men of felonies incarcerate them in women's prisons when those men start taking hormones? But they do. And the predictable results of sexual assault are now becoming apparent. It seems to many that we aren't living in the same world anymore. And that sentiment isn't far from the truth of the matter, so let's look at how we got here, because radical rejection of human nature doesn't just happen.

Let's begin our exploration of the way in which human nature is essentially expressed through gender by taking a look at the current lay of the land on sex, sexual preference, and gender. What, in other words, do our universities, entertainers, and cultural elites showcase as the truth of the matter on these issues?

Imagine entering a quiet church, looking about to ensure no one else is there, then walking up the center aisle toward the altar, bowing, and sitting in one of the first couple of pews on the right. You drop the kneeler and take on the position of a supplicant to God, beginning your prayers. But unlike the many times you have done this in the past, you suddenly feel a wave of heat to your left. Opening your eyes, you behold what has to be an angel, a dazzling bright young man, wings outstretched behind him, and his feet not exactly standing on the cold stones of the sanctuary. How would you react?

Other than the Pope, no person rankles Protestants more than Mary, the mother of Jesus. Protestants see what looks like hysterical Marian worship in many videos of third world Catholic masses, hear Mary described as co-Redemptrix and the Queen of Heaven, and observe her being called theotokos, the very “Mother of God.” If Mary is divine, then who needs Jesus? How many Gods do these Catholics have? Just how far have they sunk into the abyss of paganism? So, what's with Mary anyway? Why does Mary matter?

I'm writing this question at the outset of Advent, which might seem an odd time with the season's emphasis on the birth of Jesus to instead write about marital infertility. However, the Christmas story does not begin with the annunciation, but instead with an infertile couple, Mary's relative Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah. So, Advent is exactly the right time to approach this traumatic challenge to married couples. And a quick note to those who have been fortunate enough to conceive, carry children to term, and birth them into the world, do not pass on this question. Why? Because all around you are other couples approaching Christmas yet again with an agonizing longing that they cannot satisfy. Imagine how difficult your Christmas would be without your children. So, with the golden rule in mind, listen on.

As Congress continues to be briefed by numerous whistleblowers concerning a significant program to recover and reverse engineer extraterrestrial UFO technology, we appear to be ever-closer to what UFO-researchers call “Disclosure.” Disclosure is the moment when government officially acknowledges or reveals the existence of alien life, particularly, sophisticated and advanced extraterrestrial persons. Such an event would likely be the most important event in human history other than the Incarnation. While it has not yet happened, it is worth our considering how we might react if it did, especially if we consider our reactions not just as stunned human beings but as Catholics. So, what if we really are not alone?

Because the choice of the priesthood or the consecration of a nun (just two examples of the non-marital vocation) is unnatural insofar as it requires non-marriage as part of its discipline, it's quite rare. People accordingly figure that there must be some means by which God selects who will join this separate vocation. And as such, they say that God “calls” people to it. Biblical examples are then trotted out to support this view: Jesus literally called out his disciples, “Drop your fishing nets and come, follow me.” St. Paul was knocked off his donkey and surrounded by a great light when Jesus personally came to him and redirected his life to become an apostle. So, one might think that it's the same today, that there must be some special sort of event whereby God “calls” people into these vocations. As a result of this assumption, it's hard to find a seminarian who doesn't have some bizarre story about the moment God “called” him. Or, if he doesn't have one yet, he is earnestly concerned about the legitimacy of his vocation.

Let's begin our exploration of this question by remembering that all of the created world is a divine gift. Thus, we should be thankful for everything regardless of whether God did a second miracle (after the miracle of creation) to convey one of his products to us in an hour of need. So, we can always give thanks, because God has already provided everything. We call this creative act of God his general providence.

This question haunted me for a very long time during my slow philosophical education into the Faith. I could clearly see why God had to be all-knowing and all-powerful if he were infinite, but why good? It wasn't until I read into St. Thomas Aquinas' Summa Contra Gentiles that I finally understood the essential nature of divine goodness, something, it turns out, that some 1,500 years earlier, Socrates had already realized! Socrates assured his followers that he feared nothing from death, because, he said, the affairs of a just man are not a matter of indifference to the gods. It follows that the gods love justice, a principle that becomes crucial to the conclusion of Plato's Republic, where Socrates showcases the surpassing value of justice not only in this life but also in the next. Socrates knew that the gods ultimately had to be just, because justice lies at the bottom of all things. Because he also understood that the Greek pantheon mixed good and evil in its gods, Socrates often talked about “the God,” the God he could not name but knew had to be perfectly just. After the Athenians began to regret killing Socrates, they constructed an altar to this unnamed or unknown God, an altar that some 400 years later, St. Paul pointed to as honoring the true God whose Son, Jesus Christ, had become incarnate into the world. St. Paul realized that Socrates had it right, that to truly understand the nature of the divine, we must identify God with goodness. But why?

After Jesus rose from the dead, the Church started thinking about everything Jesus had said, what he had done, what God had said about him, and what the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) had prophesied about him as Messiah. They recalled how Jesus had called himself both the “son of man” and the “son of God,” and they were accordingly struck both by how human he was and also how divine he was. They quickly realized that you cannot be part-god the way Hercules was, because God is infinite. You're either God or you aren't. Being the “Son” of God didn't diminish that, of course. On the contrary, it established that he was nothing other than the perfect image of the Father, hence “true God from true God.” But likewise, the Church realized that you cannot really be part human either. So, the Church mulled this over and eventually came to the conclusion that Jesus can only be fully God and fully man! The technical formulation is that while the Trinity is three persons in one substance/nature, so Jesus is one person in two natures. How that can be and what that ultimately signifies is the point of this question on the significance of Jesus in the Incarnation.

The answer to this question is “no, never” or “yes, and a lot more often than you might think,” depending on exactly what we mean by a “lie.” The problem is complicated by the multiple ways people use that term. For example, you'll often hear someone confess to you, “I lied,” when what the person really means is nothing more than, “I made an error.” But being mistaken is not the same thing as lying, since lying requires a deliberate intention to tell a falsehood, a condition that is absent when we make mistakes. Thus, mistakes are not lies, and we would do well not to confuse them. Why? Because we use certain terms to convey automatic moral condemnation, and lying is one of these terms.

Knowing God is understandably a major problem for creatures like ourselves.  We are the bottom rung of rational creatures, heavily linked to our physicality that narrows the extension of our minds.  Nearly all of our knowledge is derived through our sensory systems, yet God is not subject to sensory inspection.  What color is God?  Does God smell of citrus or hickory wood smoke?  How does God's skin feel, furry or scaly or feathery?  None of these questions make any sense to us, because we know that God is a spirit, a wholly immaterial being.  Yet our primary mode of knowledge is sensory, rooted in physicality.  So, how can creatures like ourselves possibly know God?

The term “judge” seems to connote different things in different contexts. Legally, we think of the judge as the person who oversees the judicial process, ensuring that the law is followed. We tend to feel pretty good about him. Morally, we often think of judgment as something suspicious, that we'd best tend to our own affairs rather than sticking our noses into everyone else's business, judging them. Prudentially, we think of judgment as a character quality, a person of sound judgment being capable of making the wise choices in tough situations. Philosophically and scientifically, we think of judgment as the capacity to distinguish truth from error, something pretty important if we intend our planes to stay in the air! So, is judgment good or bad? Should we judge or not? Why does Jesus condemn it, in one of the most oft-quoted verses of the Bible in contemporary America? And what does he mean when he does condemn it?

Since not all of you are Roman Catholic Christians, the doctrine of the Immaculate Conception of Mary, the mother of Jesus, may be less well known to you. It is different from the Virgin Birth of Jesus and different yet again from the Incarnation of the Son of God. Let me start, then, with those two doctrines in order to set up the contrast clearly.

One of the more surprising stories in the Old Testament book of Exodus receives little attention, perhaps because the story is so short. But Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Law, and God tells him that He intends to come down into the camp and meet the people in three days. Moses accordingly reports God's intention to the people down below who tremble with fear (they can see the fiery shaking mountain, after all) and suggest, alternatively, that they will stay in their tents, and perhaps Moses can just climb back up the mountain and meet God there.

My wife and I recently found ourselves at a dinner/musical performance where a young female singer began her set with a question to the audience: “How many of you have ever met a goddess?”  We were mildly alarmed when some forty percent of the audience raised their hands.  Was it possible that paganism was making major inroads into the American heartland?  Were Athena, Aphrodite, and Hera back at it?  Well, her next question clarified things a bit: “How many of you have a goddess within you?”  Our alarm turned to shock when nearly every member of the audience—save us, of course—raised their hands.  Males and females, mind you.  Nearly all claiming to have a goddess within them.  We took this to mean not that they were admitting to possession by feminine demons, but rather that they were claiming divinity for themselves.

A British empiricist philosopher named David Hume is famous for his skeptical arguments attacking the notion of a natural morality. Hume claimed that no moral (“ought”) claims could be derived from descriptive (“is”) claims. From the mere fact that something happens to be a certain way, it doesn't follow that it's supposed to be that way. Hume assumed that things just happened to be the way that they are. But what if he were wrong? What if God created the world, human nature in particular, in such a way that it reveals the way things are supposed to be?

There are many times in our lives where fatigue, suffering, disease, and sorrow weigh down on us unrelentingly. We shake our heads and wonder if going on like this makes any real sense. Why not just throw our responsibilities to the wind and go out on a bender?

Religious people are often obsessed with the question of how to get into the kingdom of heaven, how to guarantee a spot there rather than the fiery alternative. But sometimes what heaven is seems less important to us than getting in, and that failure to consider heaven's nature might well inhibit our entry. In fact, I suspect that asking how to get into heaven isn't all that different from asking how to get into a girl's pants. It's really the wrong question. When the sole focus of our attention is the physicality of sex, we lose not only the reality of sex but its object: unifying love with a human person. Sex without love, physical intimacy without emotional intimacy, biological unity without marital fidelity—all of this sacrifices our personhood on the altar of appetite.

Human beings possess gifted imaginations. One misuse of this remarkable faculty is to reconstruct reality so that it fits our own vices. Sometimes we reconstruct the world so that we are “forced” to obey a set of absolute moral requirements maintained by the authority of an angry deity, an unrelenting Church, or a social order that still occasionally expects conformity. Against that, we sometimes construct an alternative vision of our own autonomy, where even if we are miserable with our choices, heigh-ho, they are ours to make, and, by golly, better to rule in hell than to serve in heaven.

It is common to hear both from the pulpit and in popular culture the merits of unconditional love. From the one, we hear that God loves us unconditionally, that heaven is a free gift, that a last-minute prayer can save us from the flames of hell. From the other, we hear that we are only truly loved when those who love us do so without any direction, without any judgment, without any purpose or aim other than our fulfilling our own desires. In both cases, the greatest love is considered to be that which maximizes our own egos, our own complete control over our destinies. Both God and mortal lovers must stand second to my ambition, my freedom, my desires, and my sense of self-fulfillment.

Much is made today of the dictum, “follow your heart.” Usually, it is a popular appeal to the relativistic sentimentalism that has replaced traditional rational morality. But there's an odd twist on this imperative that can infect Christian ethics, for it is sometimes thought that one's inner life—one's emotions and desires—must be put in order prior to any expectation that one's outer life—one's behavior—can be properly arranged. Of course, Jesus urges us toward the cleansing of the inside of the cup, toward liturgical prayer that is thought about, toward confession of sin and purity within the heart. All very true. But all very much beside the point. For the question is this: how is one to develop such inner purity? Which comes first, the chicken or the egg?

Why did Adam fall? It's an intriguing question, because we are told by the old texts that Eve fell through the seduction of a deceiver, the serpent, who tricked her into misunderstanding the aim of the divine prohibition.

American Catholics are becoming increasingly alarmed as once-overflowing parishes find their pews emptying, their pulpits shared with other churches, and their college-aged kids abandoning the faith in unprecedented numbers.  Why is this happening?  And what can we do about it?

The caterpillar lives a fairly simple existence, slinking along, dodging the ravenous appetites of birds, all the while devouring as much food as possible.  At some point he finds a choice spot and forms a cocoon around himself and begins one of the most astonishing transformations within nature: he turns into a butterfly.  During this metamorphosis he sheds all his caterpillar “fur” (his setae), his caterpillar legs, and even his caterpillar antennae.  His slender body, too, gives way to the chrysalitic soup, as his own digestive juices consume him.  Not even his head survives intact, but dissolves until all that he was liquifies into the ingredients necessary to form his butterfly “self.”  I put “self” in quotes because it's not clear whether anything of the caterpillar actually survives the transformation.  There is evidence of at least some memory being carried through the change, though how this occurs remains a mystery.  Nonetheless, nearly all that is caterpillar is gone.  What emerges is an entirely new and beautifully winged creature.

Idealizations of human love run deeply within the human imagination.  While contemporary romantics search longingly for their soulmates, the ancient Greeks spoke of seeking their other half.  If human beings were made for intimate love, then it seems that human lovers must be two halves of one whole.  Neither is fulfilled in themselves, but each needs the other for completeness.  If we represent this model as an image, we might think of a circle (the whole) bisected right down the center creating the two lovers (the halves) united in love.  But this image would suggest that any man and any woman are equally compatible marital choices to any other, because any two half circles of the same diameter could create a whole.  Our experience with love, however, tells us otherwise.

Science fiction tends both to illuminate and obscure many issues related to human nature and its relationship to the animals below it and the spiritual natures above it.  Our science fiction literature and film are filled with creatures with supernatural qualities as well as hybrid human qualities, not all that different from the ancient myths' depiction of a universe bursting with gods, demi-gods, and human-animal hybrid monsters.  Early in the creation of modern science fiction, the vampire was created (or perhaps borrowed from medieval mythology), an immortal monster who preys on human blood and is possessed with the magnetism and predatorial instincts necessary to succeed both in the hunt and in disguising its reality.  Since those early 19th century depictions of vampires, a steady evolution of what vampires “are” has occurred, to the point where some of the more recent vampire story arcs such as The Twilight Saga render the vampire heroic and attractive, leading to our question for today: why are we drawn to vampires?

The dramatic story of the Israelite escape from slavery in ancient Egypt makes riveting reading from the book of Exodus, but when we look into Egyptian history for some record of the event, we find next to nothing.  So, is there any reason to really think that those events occurred, or does it all just amount to Israelite myth?

A very famous philosopher named Immanuel Kant flipped traditional ethics on its head when he suggested that the commitment to moral goodness is only truly noble and “pure” when it is fully detached from any reward, from any happiness, from any other purpose whatsoever.  Kant was worried about the problem of ulterior motives that, he thought, could water down the noble purpose of the truly good choice.  His separation of goodness from human happiness has led to what is now the most widespread ethical theory in the West, namely the opposition of egoism vs. altruism.  Egoism is thought to be acting for the ego, the self, the “I,” while altruism is thought to be acting for the other.  Kant's philosophy pits these two motivations for action against one another fundamentally, so that on Kant's account, one could not act both for the other and for the self.  Hence, any action done for one's own sake immediately becomes morally problematic, becomes selfish, because it seems to deprive the other of your duty.

While most people consider the question of the meaning of life to be the biggest mystery of all, in fact it's one of the easiest questions we've confronted together in Questions from the Unsettled Mind.  Why?  Because we already know the answer!  What is less clear, perhaps, is why it is the answer, but even more importantly for human destiny, why we ignore it.

Sometimes religious people have this idea that religion allows you to shortcut the normal human processes of agony, misery, decay, and death.  I mean, if God is with you, why shouldn't he enable you to be happy?  But that's not how it works.  In fact, with respect to grief, St. Paul himself warned that we Christians do grieve, just not as others grieve—without hope.  So, in every other way, Christians are as crushed by grief as anyone else.  We differ only in the confidence that we will one day see our loved ones again, a confidence that does little to overcome the loss, loneliness, and crushing emptiness that we experience now.  “Filling your life with God” won't help you here, because God himself became a man, and he too was “acquainted with grief” as “a man of sorrows.”  When God makes the saint, he does not unmake the man.  There is no way to shortcut normal human processes through some secret powers built into religion.  That's not what religion is for.

There has been a trend in modern historical methodology to pretty systematically ignore tradition. The irony with this approach is that it is fully anachronistic, imposing contemporary categories onto the past, since all ancient cultures embedded their history in tradition, in practices that could be handed down to future generations. Many cultures lacked written languages, while those that developed the written word saw minimal literacy rates. As such, memory rather than the tablet, was the primary form of preservation and transmission. To aid in memory, ancient cultures used a handful of mimetic tricks that are well-known to us: rhyme, song, and ritual. Many of us remember learning to say “i-am-bic-pen-tam-eter” when we were first introduced to Homer. Meter and rhyme contributed handsomely to the ancient Mycenean's preservation of their historical defeat of the Trojans, a war that helped to define what we now think of as classical Greek culture. Thus, tradition—ritualized and poetic practices—rather than anything like modern historical textbooks provided the Greeks with their identity. Why? Because tradition is lived practice, formalized or ritualized in some way to enhance memory, mark significance, and transmit ideas to future generations. The rituals, festivals, songs, poems, and sayings of the ancient peoples preserved and handed down to future generations what fragile scrolls rarely survived to save. Tradition requires the survival of a people, yes, but a people can rarely endure without it, because their identity and meaning are defined by it.

Esoteric knowledge is one of those things that sounds very cool—that word, “esoteric”—but for most of us lacks a clear definition. It conjures up the mists of the East, ancient riddles, dark secrets, and the promise of ultimate power—all things that entice many contemporary human beings, because, whatever esoteric knowledge is, it seems that an exciting offer is on the table. As with most offers, however, what is really on the table is a transaction. So, to assess esoteric knowledge, we need to know not only what we are allegedly getting, but what we are trading away!

While various Protestant sects have their go-to complaints with what Catholics believe about salvation apart from grace (Catholics don't believe that), worshiping saints (Catholics don't do that), or even that the pope is the anti-Christ (he isn't), there's probably no one issue that galvanizes them more than the Marian doctrines, that Mary is elevated to the level of a deity. When Protestants hear her called “the mother of God,” they feel that their case is made, that Catholics are indeed pagan idolaters in “Christian clothing.” The real Mary, they think, would be horrified that she has been elevated to the status of a goddess by the Roman Church, since she was probably just a worship team leader in her local congregation. Okay, maybe they wouldn't go that far, but still, Mary as the mother of God? It certainly sounds suspicious!

Of course, it is! Re-incarnation strictly means that the human soul-spirit is reconnected to the body after being separated from it. We have enormous evidence of this happening in near death experiences (NDEs).  During an NDE, a person experiences separation from the body and its associated processes (especially pain, but also all sensory links to the body), and usually initially finds himself floating above his body. At the conclusion of the NDE, the person is drawn back to his body and finds himself reconnected as usual. Thus, separation from and reinsertion back into one's own body occurs.

When faced with an enemy assault, it is critical to identify the strategic objectives of your enemy, for once these are known, you can create effective counters to his aggressive moves. However, as we know from metaphysics, evil is not a positive objective but instead is classified as a privation by philosophers, meaning that it merely negates what God is positively trying to achieve. Thus, in order to confront our spiritual enemy effectively, we must begin with the divine plan that he opposes: what is God up to?

We often pray to God as our Father for things that we think would very much improve our lives, yet we usually find ourselves empty-handed afterward. We are told to pray harder, so we try that, but the results are the same. Church leaders might suggest that we give more, and though we rightly smell a rat, we very marginally increase our giving just to test this hypothesis, but again find that nothing changes. So, how can God be our Father if he doesn't give us what we want?

The problem of evil—that great suffering is permitted by God in this world—haunts many people. It seems that if God really loved us, then he would do something to assist us. So, if he does nothing, it appears that he doesn't really love us, in which case he isn't all that good. But if he isn't good, then he isn't God. As such, it seems that God cannot exist, because great suffering does occur in the world.

In a previous podcast, we examined Plato's famous “Myth of the Ring of Gyges” story. In that story where, as usual, Socrates is Plato's primary dialogical character, we faced the ultimate moral challenge: what would we do if we were put into a situation (the invisibility ring) in which all of the rewards for justice were replaced by all of its penalties in this life and in the next, in which the reputation for justice were replaced by its opposite in the view of both gods and men? Is justice—is a just soul—still worth it? And wouldn't it be more profitable to choose injustice if we attached to it all of the rewards usually associated with justice, all of the praise of gods and men, in this life and in the next? And if so, then perhaps the real reason we choose justice is that it happens to work. In reality, however, we value power over goodness, might over right, for justice is merely a means to an end, but, because we happen to be too weak to secure our own futures through power, we pretend to love justice. 

This is one of those questions that terrifies a great many people around the world, since they have been told that at some point in the future Jesus will secretly arrive in the clouds, yank all of the believers into the air, and then zip back to heaven, “leaving behind” all the wicked unbelievers. Portrayed in the books and films of the “Left Behind” series, this “Rapture Event,” the sudden removal of hundreds of millions of people from the earth, has the sorts of shocking effects one would expect: planes dive into the earth, cars pile up on highways, and a general chaos ensues as people confront the disappearances. So, what happens if you miss the rapture?

Since posting the blog and podcast on the point of fasting, I've run across some very screwed up applications of fasting that is undermining some people. So, I'm going to address these misunderstandings in this follow-up blog on when not to fast. The fast recognizes that we are spiritual/physical hybrid creatures, so that what happens in the body impacts the mind, just as what happens in the mind impacts the body. Fasting is a deliberate tinkering with that relationship by depriving the body of the usual amount and typical kinds of protein and sugar rich foods. As a result, fasting destabilizes our normal mental equilibrium, compelling us to use greater mental and spiritual self-control to hold to our virtuous lives. Too little fasting won't challenge us enough, while too much fasting can lead to catastrophic moral results. And that is why we must always remember that fasting is for us, not for God. God is not impressed if we fast excessively and so undermine our rational self-control that we destabilize our capacity for charity! We should instead fast thoughtfully and prudently by considering how it will impact our overall constitutions in such a way as to stretch us without breaking us. Except for the three theological virtues which are directed to God without limit, the virtue of moderation applies to everything including fasting.

Are you a good person? Or perhaps that is too strong. Would you like to think of yourself as a good person? Almost everyone answers this question with a resounding “Yes!” There is something about goodness that we human beings find attractive. We want good steaks, good sex, good kids, good government, and we want a good God. But why? What is it about goodness that is so wonderful?

Christians and Jews of the ancient world practiced periods of fasting pretty seriously. Jesus did too, including those forty days in the wilderness prior to his temptation. But many Christian communities around the world don't fast at all. Some Protestants suspect the activity, thinking it confuses genuine spirituality with mere ritual. They believe that the essence of prayer is spiritual, so that, once one has understood and begun to practice prayer, fasting becomes an unnecessary, really, a spiritually immature relic of Jewish practice. This line is taken in other cases too, for they sometimes insist that it's the faith, not the water of baptism which saves. Similarly, they will tell you that it's what's in the heart, not what's in the grape juice and crackers, that makes their “Lord's Supper” effectual. The notion that God places any premium on the physical, such that the physical might function as the conduit of divine grace, is viewed merely as all that sacramental nonsense from the Catholics.

“The ancient Epistle to the Hebrews contains a hitherto unnoticed enigma. It refers to a man without beginning or end – one who lives forever. So, who is he, and where is he?” These words of enticement draw the reader into my novel on Melchizedek, entitled, The Search for Melchizedek. The text of Hebrews really does describe him as a man who never died, meaning that for all we know, he is still out there somewhere today. For a novelist, that's a terrific plot opportunity that I couldn't pass up. You are welcome to explore that story and its sequel, Osiris Rising: (available in print and Kindle editions on Amazon)

We tend to distinguish who we are from what we do. So, I am Jeff, and I am always Jeff. I might be skiing or not skiing. I might be fishing or not fishing. What I do can change, but what I am remains the same. In modern times our names don't tend to tell us very much about who the person is that bears it, but this wasn't always the case. Take the famous Viking, Ivar the Boneless. Ivar suffered from some kind of deboning ailment in his legs, identified at his birth and contributing to his name. Ivar the Boneless was always the Boneless, whether he was fishing or skiing. (And yes, I imagine that if he skied, he probably did so on a sled, being boneless!) He could stop fishing or start skiing, but either way he always remained boneless. Thus, Ivar's name tells us something significant about who he was, not just what he did. His name offers us an essential quality of Ivar, one that never changed, one that always identified who he was.

The search for the Holy Grail, like the longing to find the Ark of the Covenant, figures prominently within the myths and legends associated with the Christian tradition. That Jesus took a cup at the inauguration of the Eucharist and used it for the first transubstantiation is indisputable. What happened to that cup thereafter is the mystery. The traditional story has Joseph of Arimathea collecting the cup and eventually migrating with it all the way north to Roman Britannia. The Grail accordingly plays an important role in the legends surrounding King Arthur. Like anyone, you probably would like to know where the Grail is. I have no idea, but I am likewise curious about its whereabouts. It would function as an important touchstone to the reality and significance of the Incarnation, just as the other relics figuring in the passion do: the nails, the true cross fragments, and the crown of thorns. While I do not quite agree with Indiana Jones that “they belong in a museum,” I do think that they belong in a sacred museum or church. The reason I wouldn't go further than this is because I find the rest of the mysticism surrounding the grail a serious confusion of the differences between magic, miracle, and sacrament.

Many people are overwhelmed by the sheer volume of religious options in the world today. Sometimes that plethora of choices is even offered as a challenge to God's existence, because, it is said, a God who doesn't make it easy can't expect much of us. Though I don't find an appeal to our desire to be lazy particularly compelling, and I do grant that there are an awful lot of religious options out there, I think nevertheless that by means of a few carefully thought through questions, we can narrow things down quite a bit.

Many people who are drawn to religious experience find the task of choosing between so many religious options daunting. Why should I choose to become a Hindu rather than a Muslim? Why isn't Scientology just as good as becoming a Presbyterian?  Why is Catholicism the “true” way as opposed to just worshipping nature?  What if we make a mistake and choose the wrong religion? Will God toss us into hell for that? The answer very simply is no. How do I know that? Because of who God is, what God is up to, and what he has explicitly told us about how he judges people.

In the weeks leading up to Christmas you will often find magazine articles and television specials referencing the alleged pagan origins of Christmas. The Christmas tree is part of the Roman Saturnalia festival, we are told, or the Christmas feast is actually the Norse Yule feast devoted to Odin. The suggestion being made is that since Christianity is really just repackaged paganism, it offers nothing novel to the world, or that because Christianity just copied pagan rituals, its claim to unique divine origins is suspect, or that the Roman Catholic Church's claim to apostolic authority is merely the last gasp of imperial Rome dressed up in religious garb, or, finally, that since it is obvious that Christianity is pagan, it cannot be the Jewish messianic fulfillment and that Jesus, accordingly, cannot be God incarnate. One way or another these whispers as to origins arise every December, maligning the Faith and challenging its credibility.

It's hard to find a topic more controversial to Protestants than this notion that between heaven and hell there lies this third thing called Purgatory. I mean, seriously, if one's sins are forgiven by the blood of Christ, why create a hellish experience for believers? To what end? And if we look at the medieval literary and artistic record, the portrayal of purgatory is something right out of the worst of the medieval torture dungeons. So, how does this make any sense?