casual theology

“Christ Jesus is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn of all creation. For in him were created all things in heaven and on earth, the visible and the invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers; all things were created through him and for him.” Colossians 1:15-16 (Second Reading from 15 th Sunday of Ordinary Time – July 10, 2022) I must confess that I love Stranger Things, the streaming series on Netflex*. If you’re not familiar with Stranger Things, it’s a sci-fi/horror show set in a fictional Indiana town in the mid-80’s where our core group of characters battle evil forces from the Upside Down, another dimension that is a corrupted copy of their own world. I love how they’ve nailed the whole 1980’s vibe from the music to the clothes to the freedom we had as kids to roam the town with little parental supervision. The storylines are suspenseful, and you get attached to the characters. The primary hero figure is Eleven, a girl with telekinetic superp...

  “Give them some food yourselves.” Jesus’ words to his disciples were surprising, challenging, and seemingly impossible. They responded as most of us would have, taking a quick inventory of their resources and realizing their limitations. In making such an outrageous suggestion Jesus was trying to get his students to live by faith not by sight. As St. Paul would often refer to in his letters, Jesus was trying to get the disciple to be transformed by a renewal of their minds (Rom. 12:2), to no longer behave like unspiritual men, but as spiritually minded disciples (1 Cor. 2:14-16). It is important to keep in mind when the feeding of the multitude took place. Sunday’s reading was taken from Luke 9:10-17. Leading up to this event, the disciples had witness Jesus calming the storm (Luke 8:22-25), a woman healed just by touching is garment (Luke 8:43-48) and Jesus raising a girl from the dead (Luke 8:49-56). Furthermore, the disciples had just returned to Jesus after he had sent them...

 “Not only that, but we even boast of our afflictions, knowing that affliction produces endurance, and endurance, proven character, and proven character, hope, and hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” (Rom. 5:4-5, Second Reading for Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity, 6/12/22) Paul speaks of boasting in our afflictions, elsewhere he makes a point that we should boast of our weakness (2 Cor. 11:30, 12:5, 12:9). It seems so countercultural to boast in what we cannot do or over situations that look more like failure than success. We want to herald our victories and revel in our strengths. But in the upside-down nature the Kingdom of God, we are called to embrace the very things that seem to disqualify us in the eyes of the world. This was true of the Twelve that Jesus chose: poor and uneducated fishermen, an outcast tax collector, and a political extremist. As the saying goes, “God d...

Have you received the Sacrament of Confirmation? Did you know that the Catholic Church teaches that when we are confirmed we are receiving the same grace and outpouring of the Holy Spirit that the disciples received on the first Pentecost? In fact, the Catechism of the Catholic Church makes it clear that Confirmation “perpetuates the grace of Pentecost in the Church.” (CCC 1288, 1302) The Catechism also uses that terminology to describe how the Mass perpetuates Christ’s sacrifice on the cross. (CCC 611, 1323) That’s powerful when you stop and think about it. Many of us are familiar with the idea that the sacrifice of the Mass, through the Sacrament of the Eucharist, is representing Jesus’ work on the cross; that is, at every Mass we are being reconnected to the one event of Calvary. It is significant that the Church uses the same verb, perpetuate, when describing what happens in the Sacrament of Confirmation. We receive the same Spirit, the same outpouring, the same grace, as the first...

On multiple occasions over the past year I’ve had a reoccurring dream. I find myself in an insane asylum where the inmates have taken over and have the appearance of zombies. I was going from room to room looking for other trapped people, some asleep and others unaware of what was happening, and leading them to escape. At the same time, I encounter a few of the insane zombies and I am able to cure them so they become “normal” and leave with us. I believe this is a prophetic dream speaking to the nature of our culture and our mission as Christians. In the early telling of the story of Narcissus in Greek mythology the young man become enamored with his own image and committed suicide after despairing that no one could love him as much as he loved himself. It’s from this story that modern psychology takes the name Narcissistic Personality Disorder to describe an individual with an inflated sense of their own purpose and a lack of empathy for others. The Mayo Clinic lists the followin...

I don’t know about you, but sometimes it feels like the past year has been one long Lent. The coronavirus pandemic began shutting down society just a couple weeks after Ash Wednesday last year. Since then, we have experienced prolonged times of imposed fasting and abstinence. It has felt like a long spiritual desert where our religious practices and community gatherings have been disrupted. Like Jesus in the wilderness, as a church and a nation we have experienced a season of temptations which we haven’t always resisted. Our faith in institutions, religious and secular, have been put to the test.   I listened to an interview on the radio about the impact that quarantines and shut-downs may have in the future as people’s habits—like dining out, traveling, or going to movies—have changed and they may not go back to some of those things as restrictions are lifted. The same can be said for churches. Many who may have been attending Mass out of habit or obligation have had the better pa...