Understanding the Bible: The Literal Sense

From the Catechism (109) of the Catholic Church: “In Sacred Scripture, God speaks to man in a human way. To interpret Scripture correctly, the reader must be attentive to what the human authors truly wanted to affirm and to what God wanted to reveal to us by their word.” Keep the above quote in mind…

Dialoguing with Doubters – Part 2 – Spiritual-but-not-Religious and Agnostics

Those of you who are generally familiar with the history of Christianity know that, within the past 500 years, Christianity has splintered into approximately 30,000 sects. No, not that is not a joke. There are more flavors of Christianity now than Baskin Robbins could have ever hoped to match with ice cream flavors. Religion in…

Dialoguing with Doubters – Part 1 – Atheists

Once upon a time, I was an atheist. Not just an atheist who simply did not believe in God / a higher power / whatever you want to call it: I fell into the camp of “new atheist”. But what do I mean by “new atheist”? The term first became popular within a few years…

Why it is necessary to separate tribalism from Catholicism

How many times have you heard someone say, “I am not a fan of organized religion”? Or “I am spiritual but *not* religious”?  Or the usual criticisms about the Catholic Church: “It’s dogmatic, it has a lot of doctrines, it is ‘patriarchal’”? Those views have unfortunately become rather popular in our Western society. And they…

From Catholic to Protestant – to Catholic to Atheist to Catholic again — How I found my way back *home*

It was Spring of 1990. I was rocking a bi-level mullet (“business on top / party in the back”), a short sleeve button down shirt with the sleeves rolled up to make my developing arms look quasi-muscular, a knock-off pair of Docker style Khaki pants, and oversized Nike high tops that were like wearing laced…