Questions from the Unsettled Mind

This podcast documents and exposes an ongoing infiltration of a Catholic parish in Columbus Ohio by a charismatic ethnonationalistic, misogynistic, political insurgent leader of the men's-only group The Arena, connected to Christ the Cornerstone Covenant Community and St. Paul's Outreach.

The Church has taught from the beginning that there is only one baptism, namely that baptism in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit that Jesus tasked his apostles with spreading to the four corners of the earth.

Imagine if you knew that Jesus was coming back to judge the world and bring in his kingdom in exactly 17 months.  What would you do?  You might quit your job and cash out your retirement.  No sense saving for what’ll never happen!  Some people have done that.  You might get all serious about your faith, thinking that maybe you need to make up for some missed masses and som...

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

Many Catholics are puzzled by the embrace of incoherent ideas and straightforwardly bizarre practices advanced by the cultural elites in contemporary American society.  How can young men claiming to be women seriously expect to compete in women’s athletics?  But they do.  And they are competing.  How can women in their final weeks of pregnancy discredit the fact that they are c...

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

Imagine entering a quiet church, looking about to ensure no one else is there, then walking up the center aisle toward the altar, bowing, and sitting in one of the first couple of pews on the right.  You drop the kneeler and take on the position of a supplicant to God, beginning your prayers.  But unlike the many times you have done this in the past, you suddenly feel a wave of heat to y...

Other than the Pope, no person rankles Protestants more than Mary, the mother of Jesus.  Protestants see what looks like hysterical Marian worship in many videos of third world Catholic masses, hear Mary described as co-Redemptrix and the Queen of Heaven, and observe her being called theotokos , the very “Mother of God.”  If Mary is divine, then who needs Jesus?  How many Gods do th...

I’m writing this question at the outset of Advent, which might seem an odd time with the season’s emphasis on the birth of Jesus to instead write about marital infertility.  However, the Christmas story does not begin with the annunciation, but instead with an infertile couple, Mary’s relative Elizabeth and her husband Zechariah.  So, Advent is exactly the right time to approach this tra...

As Congress continues to be briefed by numerous whistleblowers concerning a significant program to recover and reverse engineer extraterrestrial UFO technology, we appear to be ever-closer to what UFO-researchers call “Disclosure.”  Disclosure is the moment when government officially acknowledges or reveals the existence of alien life, particularly, sophisticated and advanced extraterrestrial...

Because the choice of the priesthood or the consecration of a nun (just two examples of the non-marital vocation) is unnatural insofar as it requires non-marriage as part of its discipline, it’s quite rare.  People accordingly figure that there must be some means by which God selects who will join this separate vocation.  And as such, they say that God “calls” people to it.  Biblica...

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

This question haunted me for a very long time during my slow philosophical education into the Faith. I could clearly see why God had to be all-knowing and all-powerful if he were infinite, but why good? It wasn’t until I read into St. Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Contra Gentiles that I finally understood the essential nature of divine goodness, something, it turns out, that some 1,500 years earlier, Socr...

After Jesus rose from the dead, the Church started thinking about everything Jesus had said, what he had done, what God had said about him, and what the Hebrew Bible (our Old Testament) had prophesied about him as Messiah.  They recalled how Jesus had called himself both the “son of man” and the “son of God,” and they were accordingly struck both by how human he was and also how divine he was...

The answer to this question is “no, never” or “yes, and a lot more often than you might think,” depending on exactly what we mean by a “lie.”  The problem is complicated by the multiple ways people use that term.  For example, you’ll often hear someone confess to you, “I lied,” when what the person really means is nothing more than, “I made an error.”  But being mistaken is not the...

Knowing God is understandably a major problem for creatures like ourselves.  We are the bottom rung of rational creatures, heavily linked to our physicality that narrows the extension of our minds.  Nearly all of our knowledge is derived through our sensory systems, yet God is not subject to sensory inspection.  What color is God?  Does God smell of citrus or hickory wood smoke...

The term “judge” seems to connote different things in different contexts. Legally, we think of the judge as the person who oversees the judicial process, ensuring that the law is followed. We tend to feel pretty good about him. Morally, we often think of judgment as something suspicious, that we’d best tend to our own affairs rather than sticking our noses into everyone else’s business, judging th...

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

One of the more surprising stories in the Old Testament book of Exodus receives little attention, perhaps because the story is so short. But Moses is up on Mount Sinai receiving the Law, and God tells him that He intends to come down into the camp and meet the people in three days. Moses accordingly reports God’s intention to the people down below who tremble with fear (they can see the fiery shak...

My wife and I recently found ourselves at a dinner/musical performance where a young female singer began her set with a question to the audience: “How many of you have ever met a goddess?”  We were mildly alarmed when some forty percent of the audience raised their hands.  Was it possible that paganism was making major inroads into the American heartland?  Were Athena, Aphrodite, an...

A British empiricist philosopher named David Hume is famous for his skeptical arguments attacking the notion of a natural morality. Hume claimed that no moral (“ought”) claims could be derived from descriptive (“is”) claims. From the mere fact that something happens to be a certain way, it doesn’t follow that it’s supposed to be that way. Hume assumed that things just happened to be the way that t...

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

Religious people are often obsessed with the question of how to get into the kingdom of heaven, how to guarantee a spot there rather than the fiery alternative. But sometimes what heaven is seems less important to us than getting in, and that failure to consider heaven’s nature might well inhibit our entry. In fact, I suspect that asking how to get into heaven isn’t all that different from asking...

Human beings possess gifted imaginations. One misuse of this remarkable faculty is to reconstruct reality so that it fits our own vices. Sometimes we reconstruct the world so that we are “forced” to obey a set of absolute moral requirements maintained by the authority of an angry deity, an unrelenting Church, or a social order that still occasionally expects conformity. Against that, we sometimes...