Prayer vs false values posing as ideas

Tucker Carlson at a gala gathering on the Friday before his ousting from Fox News

How quickly formerly exhilarating ideas stumble and fade! One example most recently has been New Atheism, with its momentum all but stalled. 

Upon us still is the attempted overthrow of moral safeguards for the individual and society as the spirit of the Enlightenment's rationalism ebbs, evidenced by the capitulation of the health and science community to the newly entrenched Critical Theory activists, and by the loss of the mutual tolerance and freedom that Liberalism championed, all based on Christian principles. To the degree those principles are ignored, rational, respectful discourse is made impossible (see more below). 

Note that the Marxist “Critical Theory” in the narrow sense designates several generations of German philosophers and social theorists in the Western European Marxist tradition. "Since the 1970s, critical theory has been immensely influential in the study of history, law, literature, and the social sciences" (Source; see also here). Key to understanding the Critical Race Theory and the Transgender Ideology that is dominant among the Western elite is the materialism and subjectivism of this age, in which everyone can espouse a "truth" of their own making, but in doing so increase the domination of others and the decrease of freedom. 

 But Truth will win out:

Truth contains within itself the ability to resist and to blossom in the light of day, even if [truth’s opponents] try very diligently and carefully to hide it. Those who proclaim the truth do not need to be numerous. Falsehood is what requires a lot of people, because it always needs to be renewed and fed. Our duty as Christians is to abide in the truth, even if it costs us dearly. ‒ Jerzy Popiełuszko, a priest killed by Poland's former Communist regime.

 And this view has drawn this comment:

What especially strikes me is the true observation that falsehood cannot stand on its own. It requires bands of flunkies. This gives it a ridiculous aspect it is important to remember. We mustn’t trifle with falsehood; but it is good to recognise its absurdity. What we can laugh at heartily has no power over us.

The comment is by Erik Varden, aged 48, a Norwegian Trappist monk, bishop of Trondheim, and writer on spiritual and cultural matters. For 10 years he studied theology and philosophy at Cambridge University, where he gained a doctorate.

A typical post on Varden's website (in English) follows:

POST-SECULARISM

21 April 2023

In a column in this morning’s Aftenposten, the Swedish scholar Joel Halldorf asks why Swedes connect more readily than Norwegians with the spiritual dimension of contemporary literature. He writes:

We [Swedes] were long considered the world’s most secularised country. Over some years, however, there has been a steady movement towards faith and religiosity, especially in the world of culture. The trend has often been remarked on in the media. It indicates that we have passed from a stage of secular rupture to a post-secular stage. This doesn’t mean that all Swedes are about to return to Christianity; but materialistic atheism is not longer regarded as the obvious final stop on humanity’s religious journey. Atheism is no longer the norm; the norm is openness to a many-faceted religious search.

This is well observed. Materialistic atheism does come across, now, as rather moth-eaten and old-fashioned. But we Norwegians tend to lag behind a little.

Where is the respectful discourse?

That the key pillar for building healthy relationships within and between societies is constructed from what amounts to a checklist of Christian principles is realised in this statement:  

New Atheists failed to realize that religion, especially Christianity, was the proverbial branch upon which they were sitting. For example, the freedom of expression depends on a number of assumptions, that there is objective truth, that it can be discovered, that it is accessible to people regardless of race or class, that belief should be free instead of coerced, that people have innate value, and that because of this value they should not be silenced. Every one of these ideas assumes the kind of world described in the Bible and mediated across centuries of Christian thought. Not one of these assumptions can be grounded in a purposeless world that is the product of only natural causes and processes.  

Notice, too, how Tucker Carlson, in the speech  that apparently led to his sacking from Fox News, stressed that neither mainstream political and social leaders, and certainly not those dedicated to performative activism, are looking to achieve the common good but are committed only to their own "truth". The corporate domain is likewise corrupted, with virtue signalling and the marketing of whatever is fashionable are employed as welcome means to swell profits.

The emotional harm and public disorder that is the inevitable consequence of the disregard for Truth in the form of well-based solutions to human problems are, in Tucker Carlson's word, "evil", which he described as “a manifestation of some larger force acting upon us”.   It's worth staying with his speech to grasp the horror he feels at the unwillingness of many players on the public stage to address reality. The horror arises as the hand of the devil provokes disorder and confusion.

 I don’t think we’re watching a debate over how to get to the best outcome. [...] There is no way to assess, say, the transgender movement with that mind-set.

Policy papers don’t [count] at all. If you have people who are saying, “I have an idea. Let’s castrate the next generation. Let’s sexually mutilate children.” I’m sorry, that’s not a political debate. That’s nothing to do with politics. What’s the outcome we’re desiring here? An androgynous population? Are we arguing for that? I don’t think anyone could defend that as a positive outcome, but the weight of the government and a lot of corporate interests are behind that.

[And] if you’re telling me that abortion is a positive good, what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice, obviously.

Well, what’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, that’s a theological phenomenon.

And that’s kind of the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional political terms. When people, or crowds of people, or the largest crowd of people at all, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history, decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, “Hey, let’s tear it down,” what you’re watching is not a political movement. It’s evil.

I’ll put it in nonpolitical or rather non-specific theological terms, and just say, if you want to know what’s evil and what’s good, what are the characteristics of those? 

I think the Athenians would’ve agreed with this. This is not necessarily just a Christian notion, this is kind of a, I would say, widely agreed-upon understanding of good and evil. What are its products? What do these two conditions produce?

 [G]ood is characterized by order, calmness, tranquility, peace, whatever you want to call it, lack of conflict, cleanliness. Cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true. It is.

And evil is characterized by their opposites. Violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganization, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil. That’s just true. I’m not calling for religious war. Far from it. I’m merely calling for an acknowledgement of what we’re watching.

Those of us who were in our mid-50s are caught in the past in the way that we think about this. One side’s like, “No, no, I’ve got this idea, and we’ve got this idea, and let’s have a debate about our ideas.”

They don’t want a debate. Those ideas won’t produce outcomes that any rational person would want under any circumstances. Those are manifestations of some larger force acting upon us. It’s just so obvious. It’s completely obvious.

Avoiding the hell self-will creates 

Carlson does recommend two remedies, the first being to recognise that the ideologies trumpeted all around us are not to be examined as to their actual value to the common good. The cult that would deliver the world from oppression proscribes free debate since it is not based on rational or scientific foundations. 

And I think two things: One, we should say that and stop engaging in these totally fraudulent debates, where we are using the terms that we used in 1991 when I started at [The Heritage Foundation], as if maybe I could just win the debate if I marshaled more facts.

I’ve tried. That doesn’t work. And two, maybe we should all take just 10 minutes a day to say a prayer about it. I’m serious. Why not?

And I’m saying that to you not as some kind of evangelist, I’m literally saying that to you as an Episcopalian, the Samaritans of our time. I’m coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I’m literally an Episcopalian. And even I have concluded it might be worth taking just 10 minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future, and I hope you will.

That call for everyone to pray for protection against the evil that the devil has sown in the world was the way Carlson ended his address to the members of society's aristocracy gathered at the Heritage Foundation's celebration near Washington D.C. , the centre of the most powerful nation in the world, and the most culturally influential nation in the world.

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Myth of progress takes a hammering

Sometimes it takes a time of humiliation and suffering for a nation to come to its senses. For the United States of America, World War II was just such a time, encouraged on its path of self-recovery by speakers such as Fulton J. Sheen who had a vast radio audience.

In a broadcast on April 12, 1942, Sheen stated that the war would bear fruit for Americans:

We are being stripped of our rags of self-righteousness and as we're stripped of these we will begin to be great. First of all we are beginning to die to that false notion that there's no such thing as evil. How often we have said in our schools in the last generation ‘There's no distinction between right and wrong’; ‘Good and evil are only points of view’; ‘There's no absolute’. But now we're dying to that false notion. We are all pointing our fingers across the seas and we're saying, ‘They're evil’, ‘They're wicked’, ‘These men are devils’.

Well if they're wrong then there must be a right. […] We're being forced onto God's side.

Fulton John Sheen was an American bishop (later archbishop) of the Catholic Church known for his preaching and especially his work on television and radio. Ordained a priest in 1919, Sheen quickly became a renowned theologian. For 20 years he hosted the night-time radio program The Catholic Hour on NBC (1930–1950) before moving to television and presenting Life Is Worth Living.

The theme of his broadcast of April 12, 1942, just a few months after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, bringing the US into World War II, was how his nation could learn from the suffering and sorrow enveloping them.

Above all the battlefields of the world, beyond the din of national slogans, or the scheming of foxes amid the debates of politics, or the selfish classes of economic forces… [good] will rise again not because of any reshuffling of politicians, or any new theory of economics, for their eyes for politics again will fail, economists again will blunder, foxes will be caught in their own traps, and schemers will be caught in their own schemes but because … 

And he goes on to talk about how victory in life comes through a willingness to suffer and die for the good and the true. 

Sheen looks at all the countries around the world enveloped in the world war or suffering under internal aggression as in Mexico where the government had been killing priests and persecuting Christians.

Sheen now applies the consequences of the "evil hour" of suffering and sacrifice testing Americans. As well as awakening them to the reality of evil, and the powerplay of the devil, he identifies other boons for a nation that had been heading on the wrong path: 

We're being stripped, too, of another rag, the false rag of self-expression.

[There are educators in the United States] who are still talking about self-expression. They want no discipline, no authority, no restraint.

But fortunately we're being stripped of that now by the war and sacrifices being imposed upon us. Now, like Nicodemus, we're beginning to see that nations, like men, must be reborn before they can live.

And finally, we're being stripped of another rag, the rag of progress. We've been saying up to this time that progress was in an ascending straight line; that the mere fact that we lived we got better – the blind cosmic forces were sweeping us on until we became kind of supermen.

But this war reveals to us just the contrary, namely, that no life becomes better unless it dies to the lower self.

This spring which we are now enjoying is not an ascending progress from the old spring. It is a result of the death of the old one.

So must all nations and civilizations die in this hour of darkness before they will come to the day of their victory. 

There will be an hour of humiliation, of this there is no doubt. Our choice as a nation is not between being humbled and not being humbled. The choice is who shall humble us. Will it be our enemies or will we humble ourselves?

Can we pass through that hour of that will bring us to the day of peace and if, therefore, we pass through that hour in such a way that labor lifts up its hand as Christ lifted up his in the carpenter shop in service of his father and, if capital like Joseph of Arimathea gives of its wealth for the service of [society]…

We have been like little eagles quite satisfied with the little nest of this world of ours, smug, satisfied and self-complacent. We forgot that we had immortal souls, we forgot that our souls had wings and we're destined for God who can carry us to heights above the earth. Because we forgot this destiny, God had to stir up this nest of America to unearth us from our smug worldliness and to make us realize that we had another destiny..

That destiny was for Americans of the war years as it is now,  to know love and serve the God for whom they and we were made.

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Collapse of US society — a family portrait

A snapshot of the state of collapse of society in the U.S. of A. is provided by the results of a survey on important values. The Wall Street Journal's headline on its report of its survey's findings was this: "America Pulls Back From Values That Once Defined It."

One of the best commentaries on the survey is by Katherine Boyle, the co-founder of American Dynamism, which invests in companies building to support the national interest. She writes:

Purpose is on the decline these days. A recent Wall Street Journal–NORC poll found that faith, family, and the flag—the constants that used to define our national character—have eroded in importance in the last 25 years. Only 38 percent of poll respondents said patriotism was very important to them, down from 70 percent in 1998. Of religion, 39 percent said it was very important, down from 62 percent.

Beyond God and country, a desire to have children and community involvement plummeted by double digits, too. Meanwhile, the once universal value of “tolerance for others” has declined from 80 percent to 58 percent in the last four years alone. We’re replacing “Love thy neighbor” with “Get off my lawn.” The only “value” that has inflated in recent years is the one that can be easily measured: money. 

It’s not hard to see why Americans are losing a sense of membership in any kind of mutual enterprise, especially since 2020, when the steepest drops in sentiment occurred. Between global lockdowns, a fentanyl epidemic, school shootings, seemingly inevitable great-power wars, and a looming recession, Americans are losing hope. It’s the sort of poll that if America were your best friend or your child, you’d urge her to seek help.

The decline in traditional values isn’t particularly new. The things that make people feel as though their presence matters, such as civic-mindedness and religious observance, have declined in tandem. From Bowling Alone in the late ’90s to Coming Apart in 2012 to a slew of recent “End of America” essays from every major publication, researchers believe these trends are accelerating further. This decline in civic belief and religiosity predated the mobile internet. We can’t blame the phones this time.

For a while, we tried in vain to replace the default traditional values with something equally noble or even more sophisticated. Classical liberalism, which upheld individual rights and liberty until we started hating half of the individuals in this country. New Atheism had a good run until “trust the science” became a meme. There was meditation. Yoga retreats. Eating clean. Worshipping politics and politicians. Chasing influence. 

But it turns out none of those things filled the national void either. Perhaps if they had, we wouldn’t see story after story about teenage depression and midlife crisis depression and deaths of despair. We have become a treatment-resistant Prozac Nation. 

Increasingly, the void is being filled with. . . you. A relentless focus on the self that tells us you are enough. When I asked ChatGPT for the origin of the phrase “You are enough,” it told me the saying is so ubiquitous it can’t give me an answer.

Ω See the survey results in full here. The survey runs over a wide range of subjects.

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Video: Eight weeks after fertilization

 This is what a "clump of cells" looks like 8 weeks after fertilization.

Watch the baby's movements; listen to the heartbeat here.

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Mysteries of space keep confronting us

Andrew Griffin, science reporter at the UK's Independent, highlights some of the gaps in our understanding of the world around us when he digs into findings arising from the wonderful achievements of the James Webb space telescope. Humans, it seems, are still at the kindergarten level on the learning curve when it comes to cosmology.

The findings from the Webb telescope are these, Griffin writes:

The James Webb Space Telescope keeps finding galaxies that shouldn’t exist, a scientist has warned.

Six of the earliest and most massive galaxies that Nasa’s breakthrough telescope has seen so far appear to be bigger and more mature than they should be given where they are in the universe, researchers have warned.

The new findings build on previous research where scientists reported that despite coming from the very beginnings of the universe, the galaxies were as mature as our own Milky Way.

It's noteworthy that Griffin has used the term "warned" in describing the reaction of the scientific community to the findings. 

This seems to be because, as Griffin declares:

[A paper just published] suggests that, if scientists have not made a mistake, we may be missing some fundamental information about the universe. 

It suggests that the information from the JWST proposes a profound dilemma for scientists. The data indicates that there might be something wrong with the dark energy and cold dark matter paradigm, or ΛCDM, that has been guiding cosmology for decades.

Mike Boylan-Kolchin, associate professor of astronomy at the University of Texas at Austin, the author of the new paper examining the unusual galaxies, says:

 “If the masses are right, then we are in uncharted territory. We’ll require something very new about galaxy formation or a modification to cosmology. One of the most extreme possibilities is that the universe was expanding faster shortly after the Big Bang than we predict, which might require new forces and particles.”

Professor Boylan-Kolchin’s paper, ‘Stress testing ΛCDM with high-redshift galaxy candidates’, is published in Nature Astronomy. The earlier research that he reworked was described by Griffin in this way:

Scientists found six galaxies, which together threaten to change what scientists know about the beginnings of galaxies in our universe. Researchers say they refer to the objects as “universe breakers” and that they are in tension with 99 per cent of existing models of the universe.

A scientist involved in Webb Telescope research, Joel Leja, assistant professor of astronomy and astrophysics at Penn State, states:

“We expected only to find tiny, young, baby galaxies at this point in time, but we’ve discovered galaxies as mature as our own in what was previously understood to be the dawn of the universe.”

If they can be confirmed, they suggest that our history of the early cosmos may be wrong, and that galaxies grew far more quickly than we realised. That would require changing either our models of the universe or our understanding of how galaxies began.

“We looked into the very early universe for the first time and had no idea what we were going to find,” Leja said. “It turns out we found something so unexpected it actually creates problems for science. It calls the whole picture of early galaxy formation into question.”

Erica Nelson, co-author of the new research and assistant professor of astrophysics at the University of Colorado Boulder, tells how nothing is settled in the theories astrophysicists often pontificate on:

“If even one of these galaxies is real, it will push against the limits of our understanding of cosmology,” said 

And even other objects would still be shocking, researchers say. “Another possibility is that these things are a different kind of weird object, such as faint quasars, which would be just as interesting,” said Professor Nelson.

The search for the reality around us goes on, and in the meantime we can enjoy our amazement at the splendour of it all, and thank God.  

Ω See also:

'James Webb Space Telescope images challenge theories of how universe evolved' at phys.org  

Wonder at the latest hi-res images from @NASAWebb  available to view and download here 

The luminous, hot star Wolf-Rayet 124 (WR 124) is prominent at the center of the James Webb Space Telescope’s composite image in the constellation of Sagitta.

In the image, WR 124 is surrounded by a ring nebula of expelled material known as M1-67. It is one of the fastest runaway stars in the Milky Way. The image is a  combination of near-infrared and mid-infrared wavelengths of light from Webb’s Near-Infrared Camera and Mid-Infrared Instrument. Credits: NASA, ESA, CSA, STScI, Webb ERO Production Team.

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Parenting gets political where we all lose

Political theory thrust into parenting. Photo by Kindel Media

Here we dive into why the family is so important for the health of society: If the family is dysfunctional, society is doomed. A doctor cum parenting expert has provided us with insight into how the permissive society is prompting a set of parenting behaviours that bodes ill for the mental and emotional well-being of children, and that means ongoing trouble for us all, society as a whole.

Leonard Sax MD PhD is a practicing family physician, a PhD psychologist, and the author of four books for parents, including The Collapse of Parenting. In an article this month, he tells us what he is now observing in his interactions with parents and children at his practice:

A mom brought her six-year-old daughter into the office with a fever and a sore throat. I asked the little girl to open her mouth and say “Ah.” She shook her head and clenched her mouth shut. “Mom, it looks like I’m going to need your help here," I said. "Could you please ask your daughter to open her mouth and say ‘Ah’?” Mom arched her eyebrows and replied, “Her body, her choice.”

Wow. This mom was invoking the “My body, my choice” slogan of abortion-rights activists to defend her 6-year-old daughter's refusal to let me, the doctor, look at her daughter’s throat.

I have been a family doctor for nearly 34 years. Until recently, I saw no connection between politics and parenting. Left-of-center parents were no better and no worse parents, on average, than right-of-center parents. Some left-of-center parents were Too Harsh, some were Too Soft, and some were Just Right; and the same was true of right-of-center parents.  

Eight years ago, I wrote a book called The Collapse of Parenting, which became a New York Times bestseller. I wrote the book because I had noticed that more and more parents were becoming too permissive. As I showed in the book, that trend toward permissiveness wasn’t confined to families in my practice: scholars now find that the culture of the United States is increasingly a culture in which “children rule.” 

Sax identifies the trending root of the problem:

Every day that I am in the office, I now encounter parents who believe in “gentle parenting,” or its close relatives, mindful parenting or intentional parenting. The gentle parent lets the child decide. The gentle parent never uses punishments of any kind, not even time-outs. [...] 

But Sax is not alone in grasping how disabling this behaviour is for parents, who live in the misery created by a little dictator, and for the child who is in great danger of never learning self-restraint or a willingness to relate or repair. Sax continues:

Jessica Winter, writing for The New Yorker, [...] predicts that the next generation can “anticipate blaming their high rates of depression and anxiety on the over validation and under correction native to gentle parenting.”

The source of the mentality of the parents following this fashion is of significance:

As a family doctor, I simply did not encounter this kind of parenting 10 years ago. Now I see it every day. And the parents who are practicing gentle parenting are (in my experience) almost always politically left-of-center. 

This change may help to explain some new findings regarding political views and depression in teenagers. Researchers have known for decades that teenage girls are more likely than teenage boys to be depressed. But some recent studies have called attention to the intersection of politics and depression among adolescents: namely, the finding that left-of-center adolescents are increasingly more likely to be depressed than right-of-center adolescents. This finding is so pronounced that left-of-center boys are now more likely to be depressed than right-of-center girls.  

Though there are several possible explanations for the explosion of depression, especially among girls, Sax says that for him the issue is not an academic one but one that presents itself as a matter of experience from which he can draw ready conclusions:

I am now encountering more and more parents like the mom I described in the opening paragraph, parents who might best be described as aggressively permissive. They believe it’s actually virtuous to let kids decide everything. And those parents are not randomly distributed along the political spectrum: they are, as I said, overwhelmingly more likely to be left-of-center. Conservative parents, especially conservative church-going parents, still insist that their kids open their mouths and say “Ah” when they bring their kids to the doctor with a fever and a sore throat. 

This is a big change. As recently as 10 years ago, it wasn't unusual to find left-of-center parents who were authoritative, even strict. That is less common today. In my experience, permissive parenting is now more common among left-of-center parents than among right-of-center parents. That’s important, because researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to young adults with “less sense of meaning and purpose in life, less autonomy and mastery of the world around them.” Other researchers have found that permissive parenting leads to lower emotional intelligence and lower personal growth. 

Still other researchers report that permissive parenting is associated with an increased risk of drug and alcohol abuse, and lower academic achievement, while authoritative parenting is associated with lower risk of drug and alcohol abuse and higher academic achievement. The children of permissive parents are more likely to become anxious and depressed. Two decades ago, Brad Wilcox showed that conservative religious parents were most likely to be authoritative—both strict and loving. From my perspective, that’s even more true today. 

Today, when I counsel permissive parents on the importance of being more authoritative—setting rules and enforcing those rules, while communicating love for the child—left-of-center parents are more likely to push back. They tell me that they don’t want to be “controlling” or “coercive.” A decade ago, I could have persuaded such parents that kids need structure, rules, and consistency. Today, I don’t have much luck with permissive left-of-center parents: “Her body, her choice.” 

I am a family doctor, not a politician. I am not suggesting that left-of-center parents should adopt right-of-center politics. I just ask that parents keep politics out of their parenting. Your child, your teenager, needs you, as the parent, to provide structure, to set boundaries, and to lay down guardrails that are enforced. This has nothing to do with Blue states vs. Red states or Democrat vs. Republican. This is about what every kid needs to thrive.

In his article, Sax refers warmly to an article by New York University professor Jonathan Haidt which has the title: Why the Mental Health of Liberal Girls Sank First and Fastest.

Haidt notes how use of smartphones and absorption in social media, with liberal girls the fastest and most thoroughly to be involved, led to new set of social mores and ways of thinking. He accepts that through the powerful influence of the young, especially in a university setting, the elite of society largely turned healthy mental and emotional norms on the head, in what he terms reverse Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). By that he means that whereas this therapy emphasises personal agency in treating depression, those absorbed in the word of social media espoused a set of untruths that are the opposite of what makes for recovery from depression. Haidt reports the research findings that:

Many young people had suddenly—around 2013—embraced three great untruths:

They came to believe that they were fragile and would be harmed by books, speakers, and words, which they learned were forms of violence (Great Untruth #1). 

They came to believe that their emotions—especially their anxieties—were reliable guides to reality (Great Untruth #2).

They came to see society as comprised of victims and oppressors—good people and bad people (Great Untruth #3). 

Liberals embraced these beliefs more than conservatives. Young liberal women adopted them more than any other group due to their heavier use of social media and their participation in online communities that developed new disempowering ideas. These cognitive distortions then caused them to become more anxious and depressed than other groups. [...M]any universities and progressive institutions embraced these three untruths and implemented programs that performed reverse CBT on young people, in violation of their duty to care for them and educate them. 

Sax and Haidt, from different vantage points, observe how society, under the influence of what has become fashionable on social media, has already taken on board principles governing parenting and thinking that harm the child and family life, and damage the delicate strands that hold society together.

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God at work in this world through prayer

The Statue of Liberty is one of those objects that has significance beyond its copper and stone reality. This is from the National Endowment for the Humanities, a government body:

The Statue of Liberty stands in Upper New York Bay, a universal symbol of freedom. Originally conceived as an emblem of the friendship between the people of France and the U.S. and a sign of their mutual desire for liberty, it was also meant to celebrate the abolition of slavery following the U.S. Civil War. 

Last year I watched as boat after boat took hundreds of people to the island on which the statue stands. On that hot September afternoon, they were prepared to wait in the sun in order to achieve their goal of reaching what was perhaps a place of significance to themselves as new migrants, or to their forbears among the millions who had entered their new homeland through New York harbour, or to just try to tap the deep sentiment felt by so many others.

Amalie Henden writes about the figure of the Black Nazarene:

For more than four centuries a statue of Jesus carrying his cross has become an important part of faith for Filipino Catholics. The life-size statue of Christ is located in  Manila, the capital of the Philippines. On January 9 every year, millions of people turn out on the streets to get a glimpse of the historic statue of Jesus of Nazareth. 

The Black Nazarene is the focus of mass piety in Manila

In no way do those Filipinos massed around the carved wooden figure of Christ believe that the figure itself is the source of healing or relief from worldly difficulties they seek by touching the figure. Instead their hearts and minds are raised to the God who loves them and has not left them as orphans but offers them simple ways to reach him. The statue of Mary in their car, or the picture of a saint on their wall, brings for the ordinary person God's reach into this world. God continues to pitch his tent among us. 

 John Piper, the prominent American pastor and scholar, approaches the question of idols this way:

... We should probably define an idol (and I think this is a biblical definition) as anything that we come to rely on for some blessing, or help, or guidance in the place of a wholehearted reliance on the true and living God. That’s my working definition of idol. So you can see that would cover, for example, a rabbit’s foot in your pocket, or a picture of a saint hanging on your wall, or a relic from some sacred shrine sitting on your mantle, or the more forthright images taken from Hindu or Buddhist temples, or the golden calf that Aaron made while Moses was on the mountain.

In his consideration, Piper expresses the typical Protestant view in condemning just about everything that has a religious import, though I join him in listing reliance on a rabbit's foot or similar token as a sign of a superstitious mindset, that is, one that tacitly presumes there is some force other than God in control of our lives.

The distinction I would make with Piper, however, coming from the Christian tradition of employing images of Jesus as the Good Shepherd or healing the paralytic and the adoration of the Magi and so on  is that such image-making has been examined by the Church several times over the centuries and has been found to be in accord with scripture and the practice from the beginning. Image-making of Christian themes was well established by the time of the iconoclastic outburst around Spain's Synod of Elvira (AD 305–306). 

Among its array of housekeeping admonitions, the synod produced Canon 36, which states, "It has seemed good that images should not be in churches so that what is venerated and worshiped not be painted on the walls." Scholars within and outside the Church sees this stance as finely nuanced:

Canon 36 was a compromise solution in its silence on the subject of private Christian art. Never adopted outside of Spain (although many other canons of the Synod of Elvira were), Canon 36 is tacit evidence of a significant point of transition in the development of a distinctly Christian artistic culture, one that was leaving the venerable Judaic precedent of the Second Commandment behind as the Church cautiously accepted its increasingly mainstream status and the powerful socio-political dynamic that was a part of this. (Source: here and here)

Protestant angst over the use of Christian imagery expresses apprehension that tends toward aggression because of a deeper anxiety over being in a generally heretical state vis a vis the historic, that is, the apostolic Church. 

Ignorance is rife among Protestants because of lack of knowledge of Church history, about what the historic Church taught before Luther concerning the use of symbols, including images and statues, in cultivating one's relationship with God. However, in practice, there is a similarity of language as to how Protestants describe persons of holy importance ‒ for Catholics, read saints ‒ and in describing actions of holy service or objects used in that service.

John Piper abhors, for example, turning to a picture of a saint "for some special protection, or blessing, or guidance..." but the controlling component of his denunciation undermines the Protestant je ne servirai pas at the Christian tradition when he concludes his definition by stating "... that we don’t think we could get by just looking to God". For Catholics, I repeat, the holy picture or statue points to God, is a reminder of God in our midst, that by God's grace we can live as the saints did before us, and that the mystical body of Christ is as real as anything in the material world around us. The statue or picture or crucifix is a visual stepping stone to a closer reliance on God's power and it's a portal in his love. In the same way, Christians generally delight in having around their home scripture verses or or post uplifting graphics on Facebook, such as this one:

But there lies the Protestant confusion: They turn to writers, to preachers, to pastoral leaders for protection, blessing, guidance and help, but they won't let Catholics do the same just because the persons the Catholic appeals to is dead, where a devotional picture or statue is the stand-in for the admired saint. Protestants spread prayer requests to all and sundry as a way to appeal to God for help for a particular need. But they don't respect the Catholic practice of asking saints who are face-to-face with God to intercede in like manner. Key to the Protestant confusion is their rejection of the constant Christian practice of asking the dead to intercede before God : 

With the exception of a few early Protestant churches, most modern Protestant churches strongly reject the intercession of the dead for the living. (Source) 

This is in the face of the Church's tradition, based on its teaching authority in interpreting scripture :

The intercession of the saints: "Being more closely united to Christ, those who dwell in heaven fix the whole Church more firmly in holiness. . . . They do not cease to intercede with the Father for us, as they proffer the merits which they acquired on earth through the one mediator between God and men, Christ Jesus . . . . So by their fraternal concern is our weakness greatly helped." (Catechism of the Catholic Church #956)

An additional comment might be relevant here:

In ecumenical conversations agreement has been reached that "asking the saints to intercede for us expresses the solidarity of the church wherein all are meant to be of mutual support to one another. Analogous to what is done among living persons, the request directed toward a saint to pray for us is a precise expression of solidarity in Jesus Christ, through the ages and across various modes of human existence." (Fiorenza)

Of note is how similar is the language that both Protestants and Catholics use in describing the work of certain individuals in Christian service. One hears of the living and the dead that such and such a person is powerful in prayer, that they have the gift of healing, that they can help in untying any knot in life. For a Catholic the tradition has meant some of the language is abbreviated because of a common understanding of what is being spoken of. It is simply understood that the saints help us by God's power. Miracles still happen.

For example, St Anthony of Padua is the one to go to if something has been lost,  St Joseph of Cupertino is the patron saint of taking tests and of students, and St Teresa of Avila is patron saint of those who suffer headaches and migraines. In this note that in calling on Teresa in the midst of a migraine attack, for example, the sufferer is calling on Teresa to pray to Jesus whose divine power is being invoked.

A student of the Bible will read such statements as: "Elisha promised [the kind woman of Shumen] that she would hold her own son within a year...". When the woman's son died - "Elisha sent [his servant] on a nonstop journey to Shumen with instructions to lay his staff across the boy's face", suggesting an expectation that his staff would serve as an instrument of God's power in reviving the boy. Later, the same text reports: "Elisha enjoyed friendship with the Shummanite woman whose son he had raised from the dead". This is normal, everyday language for a believer who knows that behind the agency of the human actor in God's service is the divine power of  Father, Son and Spirit. And so, in typical Sunday School parlance, "Elisha" is the answer to the question of who healed Naaman.

Elisha also provides an example, along with his staff, of God using secondary causes in achieving outcomes divinely willed. Take this instance, and note the language: "Elisha died and was buried. A man's body that was thrown [by panicked pall-bearers] into Elisha's tomb touched his bones and miraculously sprang to life. In life and death, God's power actively flowed through Elisha." This is from Bible Study Fellowship material.

Briefly, the matter of Catholics giving credence to the use of relics of saints to effect healing of a spiritual or physical nature, or the use of water from a pilgrimage site such as Lourdes, hinges once again on God's respect for the material. So in Acts 19:11-12 we have it that: 

God did extraordinary miracles through Paul, so that even handkerchiefs and aprons that had touched him were taken to the sick, and their illnesses were cured and the evil spirits left them.

As for Peter and the Apostles:

The apostles performed many signs and wonders among the people. [...] Yet more and more people believed and were brought to the Lord—crowds of both men and women. As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on beds and mats so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds gathered also from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing their sick and those tormented by impure spirits, and all of them were healed. (Acts 5: 12-16)

I hope these thoughts support a greater understanding of God's way of leading us to himself through the agency of those he calls for special service, both living and dead.

Ω For a fuller exposition on this subject, especially about how Catholics are not afraid to participate within the material world that Jesus was willing to be born into, go to this resource.

Ω See this account of a miracle arising from the intercession of St John Henry Newman.

Ω Leave a comment and, if you like this blog, read the same posts at my Peace and Truth newsletter on Substack, where you can subscribe for free and be notified when a new post is published.

What bowing before the Cross means to Catholics

By means of the wood of the cross Christ won the salvation of us all

Imagine you're in the midst of a storm so severe that you have to leave home to reach a place of safety. You are not sure that your car will be able to make it through the floodwaters, but it's all you have to rely on. You take your family and essential documents with you and abandon your home. Though the buffeting from the wind is frightening and the other challenges to the car's ability to cope are numerous and extreme, it excels in passing through all the life-threatening dangers and it carries you to the haven you had hoped to reach. 

Given the car's outstanding performance, would you and your family have a new-found respect for that piece of machinery that had preserved your lives? I'm sure you would. And in the past, when families kept vehicles for a longer time than is the custom now, you might have bestowed a name on it to express your bond with it, and you might pat it in an affectionate way.

In a somewhat comparable way Catholics over Easter have shown a profound respect of, or a deep sentiment toward, and express their close bond to, the cross that Jesus Christ died on. The cross is the means of our redemption, so that we are saved from punishment for our offences against God, who is Being itself, far beyond our comprehension, but by means of the cross, able to be identified as the "tremendous lover" of every single one of us. 

At the recent solemn Good Friday ceremonies, whereas during Lent the crucifix and statues of the saints, those heroes in the service of God and humanity, have been covered in a mournful purple cloth, the celebrant gradually uncovers the cross, exposing once again the figure of Christ. But the focus is as much on the cross itself. The celebrant intones: "Behold the wood of the cross, on which hung the Saviour of the world." To which the congregation responds: "Come let us adore." Cue Protestant outrage as the people then go forward to bow or genuflect before the cross, even kiss the figure of the Christ or the wood on which the figure hangs.  This part of the Good Friday ceremony is sometimes described as the "adoration" of the cross, at other times as "veneration". As to terminology, we have to note the variations in the rich Latin and Greek usage the Church follows.

Harking back to the analogy above with the car that has earned respect, we respond to the cross in our parish church or chapel because of what it symbolically represents as to our redemption. The Church requires churches to always display a crucifix because it "calls to mind for the faithful the saving Passion of the Lord". For centuries before Luther tried to put paid to this kind of pious practice in his battle with the Church's application of the granting of indulgences, Christians had been honoring the cross with processions and acts of honor, even "creeping to the Cross", which was encouraged by kings of France and England. This entailed crawling on one's knees.  

The human responds to the material as much as any other creature of the animal world; we learn through our senses; we understand complex ideas when we can apply them or compare them to the practical or to something our environment. Therefore:

Few events are more emotional for a Catholic than assembling with hundreds of others and in procession adoring our crucified Jesus on the cross, to see individuals genuflect, kiss his feet, watch as parents lift up their children to do the same. Despite our grief, we know that without the crucifixion, without the instrument of salvation, there is no Resurrection – which means no life for us. Every blessing, every grace, every sacrament we have results from Christ's sacrifice on Calvary.

Is this adoration of the cross, this reverent homage before the symbol of the means of our redemption, to be equated with bowing before idols, meaning gods? Nonsense!  

Having applied our heart and mind to what the cross means, and so strengthened by this sign of God's love, we can take up our own cross each day and continue in a positive way our journey through life: "To journey through life, in imitation of the One who 'endured the cross, despising the shame, and is seated at the right hand of the throne of God' (Letter to the Hebrews 12:2). 

By his use of the wood of the cross, "by every step of the condemned Christ, every action and every word ... he reveals to us the truth about God and humankind". We have to observe, learn, and respond with a reverence for the ordinary evoked by the awe-inspiring outcome made possible by a mundane "tree", which provided beams that lifted up the suffering servant to glory. The cross is at the centre, so we pray: May we hear the astonished seraphic voices calling to each from other around the cross, “Holy, Holy, Holy, is the LORD of hosts! The whole earth is full of His glory!” 

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IVF — Does 'can do' mean 'should do'?

Infertility can be an incredibly painful challenge. But is IVF the answer?

On the podcast this week, I sit down with Dr. Lauren Rubal, a former IVF doctor, to discuss the real world of IVF, her transformation, and her new approach to holistic & compassionate women's healthcare. pic.twitter.com/mocOkRDrfv

— Lila Rose (@LilaGraceRose) April 8, 2023

God in human flesh — evidence that rings true

An intense life...betrayed by Judas's kiss. From The Taking of Christ by Caravaggio (1602)

Happy Easter-time to you and your loved ones!

Here's something I read over the weekend:

Isn’t it amazing that even the name Jesus Christ can cause tension and discomfort?

Some people say it’s because that name reminds people of negative experiences they had at church or of violent Christian history. But the words “Christianity” or “Catholic Church” don’t cause the same anxiety. I would argue that this name stirs strong feelings in people because the name itself has power. And the name of Jesus has power because the person who bears that name is God in human flesh and has infinite power.

Why should we believe such an incredible claim? Here are three reasons:

1. Jesus believed he was God and he’s someone we can trust.

Jesus saw himself as more than a human prophet or teacher. For example, Buddha said, “Be ye lamps unto yourselves . . . hold fast to the truth as a refuge,” whereas Jesus said, “I am the light of the world” (John 8:12). Jesus also said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life; no one comes to the Father, but by me” (John 14:6).

Another clue to Jesus’ divine identity is that Jesus acted like God. For example, he forgave sins, which is something that only God has the authority to do (Mark 2:5-7). In John 20:28, Jesus’ disciple Thomas addressed him as “My Lord and my God.” Jesus did not correct Thomas, because what Thomas said was true.

2. We can trust the New Testament documents.

There currently exist over 5,500 copies of Greek New Testament manuscripts. There are also 15,000 copies written in other languages like Latin, Coptic, and Syriac. The first complete copy of the New Testament can be dated to within 300 years of the original documents. Now, compare this to one of the most famous examples of ancient Greek literature: Homer’s Iliad. It was written in the eighth century B.C. and, although a few fragments of the Iliad can be dated to within 500 years of Homer, the oldest complete copy was written in the tenth century A.D., or 1,800 years later!

Because there were so many copies of the New Testament in the ancient world (including thousands more that didn’t survive to the present day), no single person or group could have gathered them all up and changed the story of Jesus. Also, unlike the biographies of people like Alexander the Great or Buddha, which were written centuries after those figures died, the Bible’s descriptions of Jesus were written within a few decades of his death either by eyewitnesses or people who knew the eyewitnesses to Jesus’ ministry.

The Biblical scholar F.F. Bruce put it bluntly: “There is no body of ancient literature in the world which enjoys such a wealth of good textual attestation as the New Testament.”

3. The first Christians worshipped Jesus as God.

The earliest Christian writings show that they believed Jesus was the “image of the invisible God” (Col. 1:15), in whom the fullness of deity dwells bodily (Col. 2:8-9). Jesus had the “form of God” and a name to which every knee shall bend (Phil. 2:5-11). The Bible even calls Jesus “our great God and savior” (Titus 2:13).

When a second-century Roman governor named Pliny the Younger asked Christians to worship the gods of Rome, they refused. In a letter explaining this behavior to the Roman emperor, Pliny said that Christians “were in the habit of meeting on a certain fixed day before it was light, when they sang in alternate verse a hymn to Christ as to a god, and bound themselves to a solemn oath.”

Remember also that the first Christians were converts from Judaism. For over a thousand years the Jewish people made themselves distinct from their pagan neighbors by refusing to worship an animal or a man as God. The Jews of Jesus’ time would never have believed Jesus was God unless his miracles, including his Resurrection from the dead, proved it.

Since Jesus did prove he was God, we can trust him when he says: “I am the resurrection and the life; he who believes in me, though he die, yet shall he live, and whoever lives and believes in me shall never die. Do you believe this?” (John 11:25-26)
​​​

This is an excerpt from Trent Horn's bestselling book Why We're Catholic. Read the book for yourself - it's concise and cheap, though it's the product of an experienced exponent of Catholic insights into God among us. Go here to buy your own ebook version. Other versions are available. 

Without God we struggle in vain to live life to the full.

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She's Here! Amazing UNMEDICATED BIRTH Video!

New parents overwhelmed by the joy of new life, and full of amazement at their role in the process that has given them a daughter.

See, too, how parenting provides a more intense life experience, and a greater degree of happiness:

Parents and the childfree: A neuroscientist explains who is happier | BBC Science Focus Magazine

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God — who died out of love for us

In Passion Week, God dies for us. Graham Sutherland's Crucifixion 

New Testament writings scream out that Jesus is God, if one is prepared to accept the message the written word seeks to convey. An accidental crossing of paths with the outfit called Spirit and Truth, which has created its own Bible version, drew my attention anew to the number of "Christian" outfits that have gone their own way and believe neither that Jesus is both man and God, two natures in the one person, nor in the existence of the Trinity of Father, Son, and Spirit, three persons in the one Godhead.  

Local churches or groups like Spirit and Truth celebrate their modern-day exegetical brilliance but, in fact, are merely harking back to the theories espoused by Alexandrian priest Arius (died 336) that the Council of Nicaea of 325 condemned as not part of the deposit of teaching of the Apostles. Typical of the Unitarian brand of Protestantism, which, as a whole, labors under the burden of sola scriptura, where everyone wants to be their own rabbi, as Luther himself put it, is this from Spirit and Truth:

GOD 

Yahweh our heavenly father alone is God. He is loving, kind, good, just, merciful, faithful, and righteous.

JESUS

The son of God and Messiah whom God made Lord over all. He was born of the virgin Mary and did not personally exist prior to his birth. He lived a sinless life, and through his sacrificial death on the cross, he atoned for sin and inaugurated a new covenant.

HOLY SPIRIT

One of God’s many titles in Scripture is the Holy Spirit. Scripture also uses “holy spirit” to describe God’s gift to all who believe. The holy spirit unites believers together as his people in Christ. Believers with God’s holy spirit can demonstrate that spirit in a variety of ways to show the power and presence of God in them as God inspires and energizes them.

I'm not going to give a link to this group because its distance from the apostolic deposit of what Christians belief is so great, and its exegesis is so wayward. I'm using it somewhat as a strawman. As one writer put it:

The Bible very seldom says in so many words “Jesus Christ is God” [cf. John 1:1, Matt11:27, Matt 16:16, John 20:28]. For the most part, we have to be willing to follow the implications of the language to see what the authors are really saying.

It’s possible, of course, to try to avoid the implications of this language by reinterpreting titles such as “Son of God,” “Lord” and so forth to refer to something other than divinity. Arian-type sects such as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and Mormons do it all the time.

To dwell a little on the gospels' language referring to Jesus, the divine person – Jesus is not a human person, though he has both human and divine natures; his humanity was united to the divinity of the pre-existing God the Son, and God did not change.

Spirit and Truth uses Matthew's account of Jesus before the Sanhedrin as a proof that Jesus is not God. According to that group's perspective, the high priest was convulsed with anger at Jesus' response because Jesus claimed to be the messiah.

However, it is clear the text shows that it was the subsequent statement that the Sanhedrin would "see the Son of Man seated at the right hand of the Power" and  "coming on the clouds of heaven" that drew the dramatic rending of garments and loud condemnation of Jesus as a blasphemer.

As the Jerusalem Bible states in its footnotes at this point, "the blasphemy lay not in Jesus' claim to be the Messiah but in his claim to divine rank". It explains why this is so: 

"The Power" is equivalent to "Yahweh". At this critical moment Jesus abandons his policy of "messianic secret" (cf. Mk 1:34), and unequivocally acknowledges – as he had already acknowledged to his intimates (Matt 16:16) – that he is the Messiah. But he goes further and reveals himself not as the human Messiah of traditional expectation but as the Lord of Psalm 110 (cf. Matt 22:41 fol), and the mysterious personage of heavenly origin whom Daniel had seen in vision (Matt 8:20). Henceforth the Jews will not see him except in his glory which will be manifested first in the victory of the resurrection and subsequently in the victory of the Church (cf. Matt 23:39 and 24:30).

Scripture scholar Raymond Brown (died 1998), not always a stalwart of moderate biblical readings, all the same gives a valuable overall view of how the Church's historical insight into the ontological (concerning being) reality of Jesus is crucial to understanding God's love for human beings. He writes in An Introduction to New Testament Christology (1994):

If Jesus is not "true God of true God", then we do not know God in human terms. Even if Jesus were the most perfect creature far above all others, he could tell us only at second hand about a God who really remains almost as distant as the Unmoved Mover of Aristotle. Only if Jesus is truly God do we know what God is like, for in Jesus we see God translated into terms we can understand. A God who sent a marvelous creature as our savior could be described as loving, but that love would have cost God nothing in a personal way.

Only if Jesus is truly of God do we know that God's love is so real that it reached the point of self-giving. This is why the proclamation of Nicaea was and is so important — not only because it tells us about Jesus, but because it tells us about God. Indeed, were it otherwise, the Nicene proclamation would scarcely be faithful to a Jesus who preached the kingship of God.

So also  the proclamation of Chalcedon about Jesus as true man (as well as true God) has enduring value, even for those who cannot pronounce Monophysitism*. Again, unless we understand that Jesus was truly human with no exception but sin, we cannot comprehend the depth of God's love. If Jesus' knowledge was limited, as indicated prima facie in the biblical evidence, then God loved us to the point of self-subjection to our most agonizing infirmities. 

A Jesus who walked through the world with unlimited knowledge, knowing exactly what the morrow would bring, knowing with certainty that three days after his death his Father would raise him up, would be a Jesus who could arouse our admiration, but a Jesus still far from us. He would be a Jesus far from a humankind that can only hope [as to] the future and believe in God's goodness, far from a humankind that must face the supreme uncertainty of death with faith but without knowledge of what is beyond.

On the other hand, a Jesus for whom the detailed future had elements of mystery, dread, and hope as it has for us and yet, at the same time, a Jesus who would say, "Not my will but yours"— this would be a Jesus who could effectively teach us how to live, for this Jesus would have gone through life's real trials.

Then his saying, "No one can have greater love than this: to lay down his life for those he loves" (John 15:13), would be truly persuasive, for we know he laid down his life with all the agony with which we lay ours down. We would know that for him the loss of life was, as it is for us, the loss of a great possession, a possession that is outranked only by love.

In the 4th and 5th centuries the question of Jesus as God and man was not an abstract question debated in the scholars' chambers; it was a question of what God and Christianity were all about.  

* This is the thesis condemned as heresy that Jesus had only a divine nature, not two, namely, human and divine.

To conclude, but staying with Brown's understanding of who Jesus Christ is arising from his exegetical research, we can come to know God in his essence because of the revelation of the life of God that Jesus reveals. Brown writes in the text cited above:

For John, Jesus' previous existence with God is more than a creedal dogma; it is the linchpin in understanding the whole Christian life. 

A human child gets life from a father and mother and has the same kind of life that they have. The divine Son has the same kind of life that the Father has, and so Jesus not only brings a word to be believed but embodies a life to be shared. We may sum up Johannine christology in these words of Jesus (6:57):

Just as the Father who has life has sent me,
and I have life because of the Father,
so the person who feeds on me
will have life because of me.

 What a future awaits us! The nature of the transformation of our entering into his own divine life that Jesus speaks of is termed "divination" or "deification" or theosis in Greek. This aspect of our future has a long history in Christian mediation. Though we never share ontological union with God, by our striving to "feed on" the divine Jesus, we are endowed with intimate fellowship with the Father and the Holy Spirit, and with Jesus Christ himself, God who became human to reveal the depth of God's love for us.

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