The Brian Holdsworth Podcast

The idea for this video came from my own experience in protestant churches before I became Catholic as well as from interactions I've had since becoming Catholic, especially on my YouTube channel in which I encounter a lot of the same remarks and arguments from protestants about Catholics over and over, and instead of responding to them each time, I thought it would be more useful to be able to direct them to a video that catalogues them and responds to them. So that gave me the idea to make a video called “Stupid things that Protestants say to Catholics”, but I thought, to be fair, I should try to put the shoe on the other foot first and consider what kinds of things we Catholics say to Protestants that could be described in the same way.

Some spontaneous thoughts as the popular struggle over the narrative starts to take shape in the aftermath of the death of Pope BXVI.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com It's often claimed that the Church is full of fake and hypocritical Christians. A common refrain from non-Christians is that they like Jesus, but not his followers. There's even a popular quote that I believe is misattributed to Gandhi which goes something like, “I like your Christ, but not your Christians. They are so unlike your Christ.” And even if Ghandi never said that, the popularity of this quote suggests that it resonates with a lot of people. And as a somebody that is part of the Church, believes in the Christian creed, and adopts the identity of a follower of Jesus, I can concede that there is a lot of truth to that sentiment – the Church does have that problem. But so does every walk of life. Nobody lives up to the moral standard that they profess, or at least internalize, and the reason we know this is because everyone has experienced guilt and shame. And I'm not talking about the kind of shame that comes from somebody else expressing disapproval of your moral conduct. That more often just produces the effect of anger and resentment, as opposed to shame. I'm talking about the kind of shame that appears as a result of the conviction of our own conscience – because we've done something that falls beneath the expectations and moral standards we set for ourselves – and we've all experienced this. We all have memories, that when they rehearse themselves in our minds, we sort of recoil from them in shame and embarrassment because it is our OWN conscience that disapproves of our behaviour. We all have things we wish we could take back.

I recently read this tongue-in-cheek essay by C.S. Lewis and thought it would be a great reflection for your Christmas viewing. With his unrivaled wit and charity, Lewis assaults the strange habit of modern X-mas traditions in which we buy cards and gifts for people we don't like or want to buy for, exhaust our appetites through gluttony, and weary our stamina with "the rush", which he concludes, nobody would be willing to do to celebrate a religious feast in honor of a God they don't believe in - for that would be lunacy. Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

When I was a newly minted Christian and a young adult, what seemed most obvious to me about my prayer life was the preference for an organic, improvised style of personal prayer at the expense of something formal and scripted. This meant a conversational style rather than reciting prayers from memory. I took this sentiment so seriously that I would adapt prayers that I knew I should be praying, like the Our Father, into a language that was more idiosyncratic to the way I speak. What was ironic about this is that in doing so, I was conceding a recognition that there are prayers that I ought to be saying because we are taught to, from Jesus himself, as well as Church tradition, but then I somehow missed the part where either scripture or Tradition tell us that unscripted and unrehearsed prayer should be prioritized at the expense of scripted and rehearsed prayers. Because it doesn't teach that – which makes me wonder why I was so heavily influenced by this sentiment – and I'm willing to bet that many of you watching this video are as well. I also found that the longer I did this, the more I was running out of creative ways to make my prayers spontaneous and authentic. I inevitably found myself saying the same things every day to the point where I had created my own scripted and rehearsed regimen of prayer and if anything, the pressure to be creative and spontaneous became a discouragement to pray at all.

Why is it that corporations today are so enthusiastic about punctuating the work they do with moral instruction when it really has nothing to do with who they are or what the purpose of their corporate enterprise is? For example, a major telecommunications company in Canada has assigned themselves to be the champion of mental health by encouraging conversation and destigmatization in their advertising content. But honestly, if I want to grow in my understanding of mental health and the afflictions of real people, I'm not going to turn to my cell phone carrier for advice – because, why would I? Coca-Cola, who needs no introduction, elaborates on the work they do in their mission and vision – where it's all about love, sustainability, and our shared future. This from a company that has been accused of being the worst plastics polluter in the world by Ethical Consumer. If they were honest about their mission, it would be about selling as much poisonous and nutritionally vacuous soft drinks as they can with little regard of the health implications or the environment. So given the disparity, between what corporations actually do vs how they describe themselves and their incessant habit of lecturing everyone about their moral “values” which they seem to think we should adopt – doesn't it make you wonder why they do this, why they spend obscene amounts of advertising dollars to perch themselves on a high horse and pontificate to the rest of us? Up until very recent times, we had our best people contemplating the big moral questions for the sake of educating the rest of us on how to live well. They would study these questions, read what others have contributed, and offer their own thoughts. And while they didn't always agree or get things right, their motives were simple. They wanted to understand our ethical needs and gain insights to share with the rest of us. They weren't simultaneously blending it with the objective of selling cars or something like that.

My parents' and grandparents' generations did something unprecedented in the history of the Church. When their ancestors attempted to transmit the traditional culture of the faith to them, and which had been handed down with great care and diligence from their ancestors, my parents generations said, no thanks, we're going to do it our way. We're going to invent our own Catholic culture based on the contemporary fashions of the popular culture which we are so enamored with. And if that's a legitimate process of cultural succession - to reject your ancestors' culture in favour of perpetually reinventing the culture to whatever might fit your personal preferences in a given moment of time, then the thing that the Catholics from my parents' generation need to realize is that their cultural and liturgical sensibilities are just as susceptible to that process as was their parents' generation. In other words, what goes around comes around. But what I found in those early days of my faith when we were pushing the envelope was that we weren't going to be given that same liberty as they themselves had seized upon. If you want young people to participate in the life of the Church today, and apparently this is a lamentation that has appeared in much of the listening sessions of the synod on synodality – that there are no young people attending mass – then baby boomers need to suppress their own cultural preferences in deference to those of successive generations like millennials in the same way that they expected their ancestors to embrace their cultural revolution. If there's an unwillingness to do that, then maybe we need to admit that that isn't a legitimate way for culture to progress from one generation to the next. Maybe it's a bad idea to treat your parents' and grandparents' culture with contempt in the hopes that you can seize the reigns and make it all about your own generation. This cultural incoherence is the reason there is a lack of young people in the Church today. They are being told they can't have a Catholic culture that reflects their own pop culture sensibilities, like their parents' generation were allowed to do, but also, they aren't allowed to embrace a tradition that is truly traditional. Instead, they have to inherit the anti-traditional tradition of the 1960s and treat it with the reverence and enthusiasm that the people of that time were unwilling to treat previous traditions with.

In times of crisis, it's easy to sympathize with those who are willing to consider extreme solutions to account for the extreme situation that they find themselves in. And if you're a Catholic today and you're paying attention, you can probably admit that the situation is extreme. Which is why I don't sympathize with Catholics and especially prelates who are carrying on as if it's just business as usual. The sheep of the flock are suffering and confused, they are disenchanted, and they need a voice of reassurance. And in the absence of such authoritative voices, there are those with easy answers that are more than happy to lead people astray. If I had started my channel 10 years ago, I think it would have been rare to see comments that say things like, “The Vatican 2 Church is false and you are a false prophet for supporting it.” Or simply, “Sedevacantism is true.” I mean, those voices would have existed, but you'd have to search for them, whereas now, those voices have conspicuously multiplied so that on almost every video I publish, I will see a comment like that pop up. And so, to reiterate, I sympathize with people who are struggling to make sense of things. Things are not as neat and tidy as they once were for Catholics and especially those who try to defend the Catholic position through apologetics. Now we have any number of scandals to contend with from which there has been a lot of lip service from the highest authorities, but their actions are at best complacent and at worst, and there's a lot of at worst, perpetuating, nurturing, and even encouraging the same corruption that created the scandals. And among those same sectors of the Church, we find scandalous and incoherent teachings if not explicitly heretical. Which makes those of us who are trying to reconcile our beliefs with the historic tradition and the infallibility of the Church – anxiety inducing. More recently, there was a debate published online that discussed sedevacantism that has amplified that anxiety for many people. And because there have been responses from competent apologists and thinkers like Trent Horn and Michael Lofton, I'm not going to repeat what they said, but I would encourage you to check out their efforts with the same open-mindedness that you brought to that initial debate. And if you can't do that, then ask yourself if you're just looking for satisfaction and justification for your anger and indignation. It might be that you just want to give yourself excuses not to be meek and humble of heart as the reading from Ephesians at last Sunday's Latin Mass implores us to do for the sake of unity in the Church. But the thing about indignation is that it is dependant upon anger and for anger to be sustained, it will compete with reason. Righteous anger and indignation are good when needed as a response to something like war or a grave injustice, but if they are sustained for too long, you will forfeit reason. Beware of that. So come, let us reason together.

I've been Catholic long enough now to have seen people come and go and whenever I've gotten some indication that someone I know is struggling or drifting away, I've often invited them to talk about it and to challenge them on what's going on. And whenever I've done so with men, especially with those who have one foot out the door, they always describe their complaints as being intellectual in nature. They'll start to deconstruct the existence of God, or the credibility of the Bible, or Church history, or whatever. And whenever I've heard these objections, I've never found them to be particularly compelling or novel and for my part, I'm usually able to find a solution that I find satisfying. And what I often find happens in these conversations is that they will end with a response that goes something like, “Ya, I guess.” or “I think we'll just have to agree to disagree.” And the thing that I would like to say in conclusion to these kinds of exchanges is, “What would convince you? Because you've framed this as an intellectual and a rational problem that needs a rational solution and it isn't addressed and resolved on those grounds, then there's no longer an obligation to remain in the Church.” Because here's the thing. There are compelling rational arguments and responses that are far superior to the objections that any of us mere mortals might raise. There will always be someone smarter out there who can respond to those objections and who have responded to those objections.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Some highlights from the video: "More and more, such pragmatic thinkers are discovering that religion and certain religious practices… just work – even if we don't understand how. Study after study concludes that religious people are generally more happy and at peace than their non-practicing pears. Which is why psychologists like Dr. Jordan Peterson are eager to embrace the idea that even if you don't know if God exists, it's a good idea to act like he does – because – it works. It works for all the kinds of afflictions someone like him is responsible for helping relieve. " "Unresolved conflict and forgiveness are related to important relationships in your life. I'm not talking about the guy who cut you off in traffic or the person who was rude to you at the coffee shop, because those things are easy to forget about and move on. I'm talking about important relationships because when people who you share some intimate aspect of your life with hurt you, it can be extremely hard not to resent them and almost impossible to forget them. And this presents you with a choice. Every time you think of that person, you can indulge your anger and resentment and even thoughts of revenge – or you can choose to forgive them. If you choose the former – think about what that entails and to help illustrate this, I'm going to amplify the principle with an example that probably a lot of people can relate to. Imagine a parent who has done something that has seriously hurt you – like, I don't know, splitting up your family by getting divorced – not uncommon right, but also extremely hurtful for everyone involved. Now imagine one parent is more to blame, like they had an affair or something. Well, you're going to be confronted with your own emotional anger over what they did, and that's to be expected. We should be angered by that kind of wrong behaviour. But if you nurture that anger, as a habit, so that it doesn't recede, if you regularly feed it so that it grows in intensity and becomes something like hatred for that person, then think about what that does to you. Because that person, is going to feature significantly in your life up until that point. You will have memories of all the most important events in your life that include that person. Think about holidays, family events, formative moments in your life, graduations, weddings, the birth of your children. In order to hate that person, you will simultaneously be training yourself to hate important aspects of your own life – IOW you will be training yourself to hate, yourself by hating important parts of yourself."

There is a lot of fanfare when someone converts into the Catholic Church, at least among Catholics, and that's true whether you're a pop culture celebrity, like Shia LaBeouf or not. I was in my early 20s when I became Catholic and because it was such an unusual thing for someone with my demographic qualities to do, there was never a shortage of people who wanted to talk to me or hear my story – that is as long as I didn't say things that indicated I wasn't the exact same kind of Catholic they were. And, honestly, that's a good thing. We should want to hear converts' stories and learn from their experiences, but there are also risks that come with all of that fanfare, both for the fans and for those who are treated like celebrities for their conversion, again, whether they actually are celebrities or not. This is why, from within that excitement and celebration, we need to embrace the goods that come from conversion and converts as well as be mindful of the ways that all of that celebration and fanfare can cause harm especially when we put them in positions of leadership or influence because of that celebrity factor.

I once had someone initiate a conversation with me by saying, “you know what's wrong with your religion? It doesn't incorporate any physical exercises into it like yoga.” And I suspect that this criticism is something that many people, including Christians, would find persuasive and why they might be attracted to something like Yoga or why they might want to embrace a kind of syncretism between yoga and Christianity. Jesus told us to seek first the Kingdom of God and live righteously and all the other things that you might want will be added to that priority. CS Lewis put it this way. He said “Aim at Heaven and you will get earth ‘thrown in': aim at earth and you will get neither.” If you seek after God and the virtues he can instill in you by fidelity to his commandments and the infusion of His grace, then all the other goods will be more accessible to you. But if you chase after those things apart from God, they will slip through your fingers and you won't even know why. So why isn't physical exercise a requirement in the practice of Christianity or something that is emphasized within the teachings of Jesus or scripture?

My thoughts on Pope Francis' visit to my hometown and the effects of his actions here. 

If you follow my channel, you might know that my family attends the traditional Latin mass on Sundays – which isn't something I point out to try to position myself as some elite Catholic, but simply to share some of what that experience has been like for me and how it has formed me these past few years since I started attending it. But every now and then, our family, either by necessity, or even to try to balance out our perspective, we will attend the novus ordo or the common liturgy of the Roman rite of the Church. And that's what we did a few weeks ago. Now that liturgy is one I attended for years and years and when you become acclimatized to something, it can be very difficult to notice things. Everything just seems normal, familiar, and comfortable. But comfort can breed complacency where we should be on the alert. On this occasion, something startled me that wouldn't have years ago when that environment was my comfort zone. It was during the presentation of the gifts when lay people from the congregation bring up the “gifts” of bread and wine which will then be consecrated in the mass and it's almost always a family carrying things up together.

For whatever difficulties arise for the Christian in accounting of the Problem of Evil, I think there is an even larger difficulty for a materialist atheist. Because materialism is the belief that the physical properties of the universe are all that exist. There is no invisible, transcendent dimension of reality – only what can be observed physically. But if you hold this view, and you want to arrive at some rational explanation for the kinds of evil I discuss in the video, you have to account for those events by appealing to exclusively material causes. But as soon as you do make an explanation like that, if one is available, notice what you've forfeited. What you cannot say after having observed such phenomena is, “That was evil or that was wrong.” Because as soon as you admit that, what you're saying is, “Something that happened, and is therefore real and part of reality, should not have happened.” In effect, you're saying, “I disapprove of those events which are part of the fabric of reality and, therefore, I disapprove of reality.” To say that is to insist that reality and the events that constitute it should have been another way. Something else should have happened; specifically, that guy shouldn't have brutally murdered an innocent life. And he shouldn't have gloated about it afterwards as if he did something enviable with complete indifference to goodwill or the lives that he has now traumatized. But if all there is is material reality, how can you lay claim to knowledge of an alternate reality, which doesn't exist, and which you believe should exist – some invisible better world that you would have approved of?

I often see comments from people who have just found my channel that is some approximation of, "How can you defend the Catholic Church?" And the implied, or sometimes explicit, accusation that accompanies this question often betrays a misunderstanding of what "The Catholic Church" is. So, in this video, I offer some insights into how to make distinctions between the institution, its members, and the Church as it truly is by pointing out that we tend to make these distinctions in other areas of life and community (such as the education system). Next, I spend some time discussing the many prejudices that I brought to my understanding of the Catholic Church which have slowly unraveled as I have devoted time to learning about the Church's history. Events like the Inquisition, the Crusades, and the supposed persecutions of scientists, aren't nearly what I was taught they were, if not outright fabrications relying on outdated historical narratives composed by Protestants or other rivals of the Catholic Church.

We are living in a time in the Church when social justice seems to be at the forefront of everyone's mind, and I think this is largely the result of the emphasis of Pope Francis who has made talking about the needs of the poor a priority. But one thing that is true of a crisis is that it will test the sincerity of certain beliefs and how committed people are to them, especially if it starts to cost them something and I would say recent events did just that. And it makes me wonder that for the people who talk about social justice the most, do they actually understand what the Church even teaches about social justice and even if they do, are they sincere when they rehearse those concepts in conversations that will portray them as those most committed to the needs of the poor? Whenever you explore Catholic social teaching, you will inevitably collide with the concepts of solidarity and subsidiarity and many respectable commentators and instructors on the subject will point out that if you ever want to evaluate and compare some system or fabric of society for its compatibility with Catholic social teaching, you should look to see if they get these two things right.

We are told that the Synodal Way is going to be a time for listening in the Church. If that's sincere, then this is my attempt to penetrate into that conversation with what I think needs to be a the top of our hierarchy of priorities, as a Church. If we intend to renew the Church, if we intend to see it flourish, and if we intend to enable the mission of the Church, evangelization, then we have to offer what only the Church can - a mystical, transcendent encounter with God. Instead, we keep getting distracted by a desire to offer a natural, down to earth, worldly-minded message and culture. It's self-defeating and, when I was a convert, it was a bit turn-off. And as much as we may not want to hear it, the Tridentine Latin Mass is the kind of thing that does offer that encounter. So what can we do now, to reform ourselves to be more capable of embracing the mysteries of our faith then trying to brush them under the rug for fear that they will repel naturalist sensibilities?

This is my conversation with Dr. Anthony Esolen in which we discuss what it means to get a liberal arts education and how it produces liberty (freedom) in its pupils. We cover topics including utilitarianism, leisure, culture, university, humanities, freedom/liberty, and more.

The word Rigid or rigidity has become something of a buzzword and specifically a hammer to use, indiscriminately against orthodox or traditional Catholics who want to hold fast to the teachings of the Church, without compromise. I've heard pastors and bishops using it a lot these days and what I find interesting is that this term doesn't appear among lists of sins in scripture or in tradition. When St. Paul enumerates who will not inherit the kingdom of Heaven in 1 Corinthians, the rigid don't appear there. When we think of the 7 deadly sins, it doesn't appear there either, so it raises the question, is this something new or. The first thing to notice about it is that the word rigid, is a metaphorical word. It doesn't describe a literal trait that someone could have, unless you're talking about diseases like Parkinson's… but I doubt that's what clerics mean when they are accusing people of being rigid. Now, the thing about metaphorical language is that it is drawn from objects which are not human and is therefore, imprecise when it is applied to us… which means, it needs a lot of clarification when it is used. It needs to be related back to traits that are, literally, human traits. This is the thing about metaphorical language. It can help expand our understanding of something literal, by providing references and associations to other things that we might already be familiar with. Because, as Catholics, grounded in the knowledge of scripture and revelation, as well as the great wisdom of the tradition of reason which gave us virtue ethics, we have a fairly comprehensive list of qualities that we can be confident are precise and accurate in defining good qualities, what we might call virtues, and bad qualities, what we might call vices. If we want to use metaphorical words like Rigid to expand or enhance our understanding of a literal vice or virtue, then it can be a welcome rhetorical device as long as it's accurately applied in a way that brings clarity rather than ambiguity and confusion. Unfortunately, when I've heard this term used by Catholic leaders, it often appears divorced from the kind of clarity that I think is necessary. It's tossed out in vague allusions which can be seized on by anyone who wants to use it to condemn people they don't like. So, I think we need to be more precise with this term by clarifying what literal vices or sins we are associating it with or stop using it altogether because of how easily it can be associated with qualities that are not only not sins, but virtues, in fact. As a side note, notice that the definition of virtue is, a stable disposition to good. The catechism substitutes stable for firm but whichever word you use, it means unfaltering.

In this episode I discuss the recent dust up over a bishop in Florida sending a letter that forbade "ad orientum" posture at mass while another of his priests got caught committing some serious liturgical abuses that went unnaddressed by him. I spend some extra time talking about the practical and rational reasons ad orientem makes more sense. 

A conversation between Jonathan Pageau and Brian Holdsworth in which we discuss faith and reason, classical vs. modern thought, how and why we shifted away from metaphysics, scientism, empiricism, symbols, patterns, culture, customs, liturgy, and more.

Support the channel by joining the Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com As many of you know, if you've followed this channel long enough, I'm a big admirer of CS Lewis and even employ some of his argumentation in my videos. This in spite of the fact that even though his Catholic friend J.R.R. Tolkien was instrumental in his conversion to theism and then Christianity, he never converted all the way to the Catholic Church. He instead, embraced a kind of high Church Anglicanism. Lewis was famous for trying to build bridges along the fault lines of Christian denominations by promoting what he called Mere Christianity, or what was essential and mostly agreed upon by the main denominations – you could call this credal Christianity because it promotes the fundamentals of the ancient creeds which we almost all agree on. This is probably why Lewis wasn't in the habit of criticizing any Christian church or tradition, but he is supposed to have compared the Catholic Church to an overwhelming jungle where people can get lost and distracted before they ever get to the fundamentals of mere Christianity. And, I, in the course of my own conversion to Catholicism have found it hard not to sympathize with that criticism. Catholic thought and beliefs are so substantial that it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. For example, I've met Catholics who could tell you all about the apparitions of Medjugorje but don't know what the phrase “consubstantial with the Father” in the Nicene Creed means. I've met Catholics who know all about the life of St. Juan Diego, but can't name the 12 apostles. So maybe Lewis has a point. But instead of describing it as a jungle, I might amend the comparison to be a library – a massive library. Because, if we're talking about the Church's intellectual tradition, her teachings, and even her dogmas, you actually do have something like a library of content. But the challenge with a library, is that it's easy to get distracted with the stuff you want to read as opposed to the stuff you should read.

We live in the age of information, but as any reasonable person can appreciate, most of the information that is available to us, is pollution and noise. Most of it does not educate or illuminate our minds. Plenty of it is misleading. This is a consequence of unflinching admiration for technological advance. It blinds us to important ethical questions like, "Should we do this?" And since we've refused to ask those questions, we now find ourselves in the age of fake news and having to try to fight back against it. But instead of revisiting those important ethical questions that we've neglected, we've decided to technologize a new solution to fix the old: enter fact checking! But the phenomenon of fact-checking has introduced more problems of its own. The authority that it brings is too tempting and intoxicating to not breach its own requirements and now we find ourselves getting censored for conclusions that cannot be easily called into question because... you cannot fact check an argument. That requires counter-arguments, but that isn't fact-checking, yet the self-appointed fact-checkers aren't willing to admit that what they're doing is argumentation because they're too used to the unquestioned authority that fact-checking has brought them.

If you've ever seen videos of street corners in the late 19th or early 20th century, if you have a soul, you may notice how beauty is exemplified in so much of what is captured there; from the architecture, to the carriages, to the dress of the people. And, if you have a brain, it may have left you wondering, what changed? What happened to our culture that caused us to go from sensibilities that would inspire men to aim at a vision of masculinity like this to something more like this? The first reason for the shift in our cultural sensibilities that I'd want to highlight is that as the influence of the Church and Christianity has waned over the years, we've been more easily persuaded to believe that external appearances do not convey anything necessary about internal realities. We say things like, don't judge a book by its cover. By that, we mean, there is some internal value that you can't see when judging an object or a person by their external appearance. Whereas Christianity has, predominantly, insisted that human beings are body-soul composites and that the material world expresses the spiritual reality of God's creation. All of which is to say, the external does tell us something about the internal or incorporeal. Just as a person's words tell us something about the content of their thoughts, so too, does our appearance, tell others something about our mind and our soul. For example, St. Francis de Sales said, “External cleanliness is a sort of indication of inward good order.” But as we've slowly embraced this dualistic idea that external and internal are distinct and irrelevant to each other, we've, in theory, become more accepting of unconventional appearances.

It's that time of year again, when Christians of various stripes complain about the war on Christmas and if it isn't Christmas it's some other effort to marginalize or erase Christianity from the public sphere. By a war on Christmas, they mean the watering down of the festival of Christmas in order to turn it into some secularized silhouette of its former self. For example, the vernacular authoritarians will complain that it's offensive to non-Christians to use the word Christmas, so we have to substitute it with some vacuous alternative like “happy holidays” which is amusingly ironic because holiday means holy day which should give you some indication of the origin of the concept of a holiday… it comes from the Catholic Church scattering days of celebration throughout the Gregorian calendar, which the Church invented. All of which is to say, if you want to fully vandalize the Christian cultural heritage to make it appear like it never existed, there's more work to be done. And when some Christians complain about such cultural appropriation, they are met with ridicule from non-Christians as well as some Christians who claim that this is not worth getting upset about and that if you truly think you're being persecuted, go learn about REAL persecutions and martyrdoms and if your current marginalization doesn't compare, then stop being such a mollycoddle. This kind of response is a bit absurd, though, if you compare it to other possible scenarios where this might apply. Imagine if someone broke into your house and stole something of value to you and when you called the police for help, they said something like, “you know there are people who have been murdered recently. Unless what has happened to you is that bad, you shouldn't be complaining to us.” It's a reprehensible assessment of a victim's experience that insists that unless they have suffered the worst out of anyone, then their suffering, to whatever degree it is measured, doesn't matter. Which is insane. But I'd add, that Christians have good reason to have an elevated sensitivity to this kind of thing because it doesn't take much for a subtle current of animosity towards Christians to turn into something far more insidious and terrifying.

This is my conversation with Mark Mallett (https://www.markmallett.com) in which we discuss the Catholic tradition concerning the apocalypse, eschatology, mysticism, prophecy, and if he thinks we're living the end times today.

In the beginning of the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, they break out into a song about Tradition where the main character admits that some of the things they do, they don't understand. They do them for “Tradition”! That's the great chorus they sing out. And in many ways, that story is about the collision of Tradition with new and emerging, “progressive” ideas of the modern world. But from that opening chorus, it's easy to conclude that tradition is something we blindly adhere to without employing our reason or critical thinking. It's the lazy reliance on a way of life without ever challenging yourself to think for yourself or progress to something better than your ancestry would allow. It's a mark of fear and ignorance rather than courage and enlightenment. And there may be some truth to that. There are some traditions that we inherit that you could say we blindly follow simply because they are traditions. But does that make the alternative more prudent or discerning? Well, let's take some time to consider why traditions exist at all. Tradition is what happens when ideas, practices, beliefs, and culture are passed down from one generation to the other. And why exactly do we invest all the effort it takes to transfer these goods from one generation to the next? It's so that our descendants won't have to unnecessarily solve every problem that has already been solved. If we made discoveries and acquired knowledge and customs that have a clear benefit to us, if we truly love our fellow man, which includes our descendants, then any good society would want to save them the trouble of having to go through all the sacrifices, danger, and difficulties that we had to in order to overcome our adversities. If we've already mapped out certain landmarks of the human experience, it would be cruel and evil to withhold the knowledge contained in discoveries from future generations. As I spoke about in a previous video, this is the whole reason we have education, to transmit knowledge and culture which means the work of education is inherently a process of a living tradition. And a lot of people seemed to misunderstand what I was saying in the past about that. This isn't to say that there is no room for innovation or authentic progress – there is, but the only way you get progress is by starting where your ancestors left off. You first have to inherit what they have to offer, become intimately familiar with it, and then build on from that point.

I just had the pleasure of listening to Matt Fradd's podcast on why you shoud get rid of your smart phone and was so excited by what he had to say, that I had to join in and add some of my own thoughts to his. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca  Matt's original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTJu-...

This is my interview with Barrie Schwortz rom the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association which runs www.shroud.com. We talk about how Barrie became a member of the first team of scientific researchers to examine the shroud, what their research discovered, and how it changed his life.

When Bram Stoker's Dracula was first published, it featured themes of death, seduction, temptation, and eternal life, and something about the arrangement of those themes, produced a story that was horrifying to its Victorian audience. But vampire stories, mostly in movie form today, don't have the same effect. When people today think of the scariest movies they can, very rarely will a vampire movie feature among them. Vampires of contemporary story telling are just as often portrayed as our friends as they are our adversaries and the worst thing they can do to you is kill you which is no worse than any other human adversary. They're no worse than serial killers, which is bad enough, but it doesn't produce the kind of uncanny terror that other concepts can in us. So why is it that vampire stories, especially the original vampire story, have lost their ability to terrify us the way they once did? What about us has changed so dramatically that this story no longer produces the terror and dread it once did?

My family and I recently went on a few hikes in the Rocky Mountains and there was one particular hike that was such a spectacle, in every direction you turned, that I was reminded of an anecdote that CS Lewis introduces in his book, the Abolition of Man, which, by the way, I believe is one of the most important modern books I've ever read. He treats a scenario in which two people are observing the same waterfall and in which two people could have different responses to that encounter. You could say something like, “It is majestic, it is beautiful, it is sublime.” Or, you could say, I am experiencing sublime feelings, I am in awe. And the difference between these two reactions, can reveal to us the very heart of human evil. Take any obvious example of evil that we can point to and you will find the same common denominator among them all – the same erroneous pattern of thinking and the behaviour that proceeds from it, is at the root of all evil.

If you're like me, you may have felt like the whole world, including the Church, has gone insane and you're exhausted from standing your ground in opposition to it all. In this video I describe a recent experience of contemplating a way that I could surrender the fight, especially the fight for traditional Catholicism and where that time of prayer led me. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

Joseph Pearce's enthusiasm for the Catholic faith, and some of the great writers who incarnate it for us, is contagious. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak early on in my faith journey and I have no doubt that he helped plant those seeds much deeper so that they would persevere. It was a joy to speak with him about great authors such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton. We discussed literature, culture, art, and the liturgy.

A conversation between Timothy Gordon and Brian Holdsworth. We discuss the risks of "celebrity and popularity" as Catholic pundits and whether that can motivate our behaviour and the type of content that we produce. We also spend some time exploring faith and reason and how and why reason is so important in order to make the necessary distinctions that so many people in the age of social media, don't seem to be able to make - for the good of the Catholic Church and society.

For the past century or so, there have been two competing views about sex that have raged at each other in the hopes of winning the acquiescence of the people through sermons, editorials, research, and even political legislation. They can basically be summarized like this. One believes that sex, like most things, brings with it an intrinsic moral dimension which means that sex can be partaken in conformity to what is good or in rebellion against that good in the form of evil or perversion. According to this belief, since sexual behaviour requires moral consideration, we as moral agents, must govern our appetite and behaviour accordingly. This means that whatever we do, we have to do what is right, we have to make good and right choices and actions. – let's call this the traditional view. The other view claims that there is no moral dimension to sex or if there is, it's far less pronounced than the traditional view would have us believe. Sex is just like any other leisure activity that we might choose to engage in and it's unreasonable to expect people to moderate their behaviour because that will only exacerbate our sexual appetites and it's unrealistic anyways. This view encourages us to explore and liberate our sexuality and taste all the fruits and experiences that it has to offer. So, to ensure that we can engage in as much sexual activity as we might want, we've developed technology to mitigate the negative consequences. We can call this position, the liberal position. And we see these two positions clash in a very revelatory way whenever there is a health emergency or an outbreak of sexual transmitted infections. The tradition side will say, if people would just commit to having only one sexual partner for life, then these outbreaks would never occur. And that's true. But the liberal contingency will reply that this is far too lofty a solution and it will never work, so the best we can hope for is to continue to encourage promiscuity while promoting a reliance on technology to mitigate these adverse consequences. Well, I think there are ways that we can demonstrate that sex is a profoundly moral act of the will and how we engage in it will ALWAYS have significant moral consequences. Unlike the liberal advocates, I think it's abundantly obvious that sex is very different from a range of leisure activities that we might want to compare it to.

Support the channel by joining the Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca. Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com I would say, the reason to save sex for marriage is similar to the reason that we have locks on our car doors or the front doors of our homes. The reason we have locks on our doors is because we can't trust strangers to respect our dignity and the effects of our hard work. Now, don't jump ahead, I'm not saying that sex is a property or a commodity. I haven't gone that far with the analogy. It's merely that you can't trust strangers to respect and protect your well-being. And that's not because all strangers are untrustworthy, but it is because enough strangers are, that you need to protect yourself and your privacy because they will attempt to use that access and that knowledge that serve their interests, often at the expense of your interests. So, you defend yourself against that kind of risk by locking your doors and governing who has that kind of intimate access to you and your home. Not everyone is welcome to enter your house. Only those who have earned a measure of trust are welcome inside. Think about why we wear and have always worn clothing. We often assume that there is a natural utility as the reason, like to protect ourselves from the elements. But in truth, as far back as we have records for, we have examples of people wearing clothing for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting themselves from the elements. There was always some form of decorum or ornamentation as a feature in human clothing. On the question of decorum, an obvious motivation is: privacy. We aren't just protecting ourselves from the cold, but from exposure to other people. When we wear clothes, we are protecting ourselves from the crude and possibly even vulgar assessments of people who have not demonstrated to us that they can be trusted to protect that intimate knowledge the way we protect it ourselves. In other words, they haven't proven that they love us. Because that's what love is: it's a willingness to do for a person as they would do for themselves. To love someone is, in part, to protect their interests to the same degree that they would protect their own interests. When a person only has a superficial knowledge of us, they do not know us intimately and therefore, they do not care for us as much as intimacy requires. And from that, a principle should announce itself to us which is that we should only give intimate knowledge of ourselves and our privacy, including our physical form, to those who have demonstrated a deep concern for our wellbeing and who will care for that knowledge the way we do ourselves.

I know it's easy to villainize those who have not received their vaccines yet which makes it even easier to disregard the infringement of their rights by vaccine passports and mandates. You might be thinking that they deserve it because they're putting everyone at risk. And I've read quite a few articles in the media about who these people are and why they are hesitant and the explanations demonstrate that whoever is writing these articles has done very little research into the real reasons why people are hesitant. It usually gets chalked up to the conclusion that they are anti-vaxxers across the board or that they have bought into crazy conspiracy theories. The truth is, I know a lot of people who have not been vaccinated and while some may be stretching their logic a bit, most don't fit those characterizations. So what are the real reasons why they hesitate? Will mandatory or coercive campaigns be effective in increasing vaccinations and even if they are effective, do the ends justify the means?