Brian Holdsworth

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com Every human society that we have records for, every civilization, has nurtured some moral code of behaviour. And in many cases, like the entire developed world of today, those societies have recognized the most critical elements of those moral codes with laws that inflict punitive measures on anyone who transgress those laws. But what does that mean? What are we allowing when we talk about morality? Morality can be described as a judgement between what ought to occur and what actually occurs. Now it’s important to notice that the natural sciences as a method of inquiry, in principle, cannot tell us anything about what ought to happen as compared to what does happen. The natural sciences are limited to consideration of the natural universe and are predicated on the assumption that the natural universe behaves according to fixed laws. And by fixed laws, we mean what always happens. When we describe gravity, we’re talking about what always happens when two bodies of mass come within proximity of each other. There is no option to choose something outside of those laws. There are no alternative possibilities to those laws. A planet cannot choose to break faith with its orbit. But remember morality tells us what should happen not necessarily what does happen and science only makes observations of what does happen and draws conclusions from that. But if the natural universe is all there is, then there should be absolutely no grounds for talking about what should happen. All there is is what does happen and that you and I, as fixtures of the natural universe, must be bound to those same inevitable laws. But in the case of you and I, we notice that there is more going on than fixed laws. We have an intellect and a will that govern the things that we do. We can choose between alternatives and because of this ability to choose and act with will, we recognize that we are responsible for the things we do. We don’t hold other natural elements responsible for their actions in the same way. If a tsunami crashes ashore and kills hundreds of people, we don’t denounce the oceans for their transgression. We don’t protest along the shorelines demanding that the ocean recognize the value of human life. We don’t say, you should not have done that. And the reason we don’t is because we recognize that it was behaving in an inevitable and deterministic way according to the fixed laws of the natural universe. But when a person does something we don’t like, we don’t say, oh he was just acting according to those same fixed laws. No, we say he is responsible for those decisions because he is governed by more than the fixed laws of nature. There is some agency and ability that he draws from outside those laws that frees him from them to some degree. But if the natural world can only be described by the fixed laws of cause and effect, and we either produce or inherit some quality that breaks free from that sequence, then we have to admit that we’ve found something that is pervasive in the human experience and which exceeds or transcends the natural universe. In other words, there is something, that is morality, that is relentlessly available to our perception and in our experience that portrays something more to reality than what we can see, taste, and touch. There is something metaphysical or spiritual in our experience and it’s a big part of that experience. So now that we understand that morality is something that exceeds the natural universe, what does this transcendent fact tell us about what lies outside and beyond physical nature? It tells us that whatever lies beyond is intensely interested in our behaviour, about right and wrong, unselfishness, and justice. It seems to be instructing us in becoming moral by affirming us in good behaviour and making us uncomfortable and ashamed about our bad behaviour. The only thing we can compare this to is a mind with will, purpose, and intention. We cannot talk about matter as if it were teaching or guiding us. And we cannot talk about it as if it were a natural law because as we’ve seen, natural laws don’t make allowances to disobey. And the fact that we can disobey and are not forced to conform ourselves to these moral instructions tells us a little more, I believe. It makes love or the free gift of self, possible. What good are marriage vows if the one reciting them has no choice? What good is a promise if it can’t be broken? Love acquires its significance because it does not have to be given. So, the fact that the power behind the moral law doesn’t force this law upon us, makes love possible. And it is this aggregate of variables that leads us to a very personal perception of that which lies beyond the natural universe.

Take a step towards building a necessary prayer routine by downloading Hallow here: https://hallow.com/brian/ Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com There’s a prominent current within Christianity that, maybe 20 or 30 years ago would have been seen as innovative, but today is about as common as the Church signs that it’s messaging appears on. It’s what I would call “come as you are” church culture. It’s the idea that you don’t need to make extra effort to dress or act a certain way when you come to church. Just be yourself like this is any other day. And this was the context in which I was introduced to church life as a young adult exploring different denominations. And, in a way, I’m grateful for it because it broke down barriers of intimidation for me. It made me feel comfortable enough to just show up without worrying about what other people would think of me and not because I wasn’t willing to adjust my behaviour, but because I didn’t know what to adjust it to and I was worried that whatever I did would be wrong. The point, for me, of going to Church was to learn how to be a Christian and while I appreciated being told that I didn’t have to worry about the way I dressed, this emphasis also taught me something – which is that it doesn’t matter how I dress for Church. And now that I’ve been a Christian for a while, my understanding of that has shifted quite a bit and if you’ll bear with me, I want to explain why.

Get your trial version of the full featured Hallow app by visiting: https://hallow.com/brian/ Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com In order to understand why I think Catholics should, generally, avoid criticizing the Pope and why I, especially, refuse to do so publicly, is by first understanding the Church through the analogy of a family. Because God is invisible and all powerful, he can feel remote from us, but out ofa clear desire to be close to us, he’s always made himself available to us in ways that we can experience and understand and that often comes in the form of our human relationships. The commandment to love God is so often paired with the commandment to love each other as if those two things are inseparable. We learn to love God through our human relationships. Jesus said that what we do for the least among us, we do for him. He also said that we will be known as his disciples by the way we love one another. And if you’re still not convinced, what about the obvious fact that God, in his desire to help us relate to him and know him, became one of us. He became human in the most profound example of our need to learn to love him through our human nature and experience. And what is a more profound example of human love, than the image of the family. The catechism says that, “Christ chose to be born and grow up holy family and that the Church is nothing other than "the family of God."” And since it is a family, and since God has always designed our relationship with him to follow the patterns of our human relationships, it makes sense that he would appoint a head for the Church, a Father, who we understand to be the Holy Father, the Pope. Now before anyone throws out the obvious objection that we are to call no man Father, as Jesus says in Matt. 23:9, you should remember that Jesus conceded the reality of spiritual fatherhood when he called Abraham, “Father Abraham”, in John 8:56. And in 1 Corinthians 4:15 St. Paul says that he became a spiritual father to them through the gospel. So, if the Pope is our spiritual father and, therefore, the head of our family, following God’s lead in learning how to love him by loving each other according to our human experience, we should ask ourselves, how is it that we are called to love our fathers. Well, for starters the 4th commandment tells us to honor our father and mother. So how do we do that? When I was a kid, I remember when things seemed to be unravelling in our domestic life as a family, my parents would call a family meeting where we’d have to get together at the kitchen table and work through our problems. And we hated doing that, but it was a necessary thing and probably the best way to resolve our issues. We would work it out internally. What we didn’t do, is broadcast to the world the things we didn’t like about our parents, or if we did do that, it would absolutely be in violation of the 4th commandment. I remember seeing a headline recently about one of Donald Trump’s nieces being involved in some tell all book that was designed to injure his character. Now, if that family has a patriarchal figure, I’m sure Donald Trump is it and whether you like him or hate him, he’s obviously a person who has had failures as a father figure in his family. Just the fact that he’s been married three times is a good indication. But when I saw that his niece was doing this, I couldn’t help but be repelled by it a little. It struck me as a serious betrayal, not just against Trump, but against the whole family. And the obvious reason is because it’s being used by his and the family’s enemies against their interests. When you attack the head of a family, you attack the family. There’s no separating those two actions. And this is definitely true of the Church. I can’t count the number of times people who are hostile to the Catholic Church have appeared in the comments on my videos with reasons why the Church is evil and why they will never join it while citing Catholic sources who have been critical of Pope Francis. Attacking the Pope gives ammunition for those who would attack the whole family. Read the full transcript at https://brianholdsworth.ca/digressions

Get your free trial of the full featured Hallow app here: https://hallow.com/brian/ Studies confirm positive effects of prayer: https://academic.oup.com/aje/article/187/11/2355/5094534 https://psychcentral.com/blog/new-study-examines-the-effects-of-prayer-on-mental-health/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20391859/ Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com When I first became a Christian, and then a Catholic, prayer was one of those things that came with a lot of questions. How do I do it? Why should I do it? What does it do? What should I expect? And I think a lot of those questions can easily persist for people well into their spiritual journeys. And if you let it, the more you try to dissect it, the more confusing it can become. So a big one I want to explore in this commentary is, does prayer work and what do we mean by work? What is it that should happen when we pray? Should we expect that everything we ask for will be granted and if those requests aren’t granted, does that mean God’s not listening or he’s not there at all? Something I’ve seen in more than a few atheistic commentaries is a challenge that if Christianity is true and if prayer is effective, then why not setup an experiment where you set all kinds of people to work to pray for a sample of people who are sick and then take another sample and don’t pray for them and see if there are more healings within the group that was prayed for. This kind of scientific approach to the question of prayer should resolve the question around the efficacy of it right? But the problem is, an experiment like that would be based on quite a few fallacious assumptions. You see, science is based on the assumption that reality is governed by fixed laws such that when you make observations of a sequence of cause and effect, you should be able to detect a pattern of those laws. For example, when two bodies come into proximity to each other, you should be able to observe the effects of gravity and so establish a law of gravity. And that law tells us what always happens when certain conditions are met. But unless you think that prayer is like magic where you recite some incantation and it always produces an effect, like healing, you can’t treat it in the same way. For one, prayer is an interaction with a person and in the case of prayers for healing, the petitioner is making a request of someone who can either grant or refuse that request which is quite a different process from observing a physical law. Think of it like someone who goes to the bank to get a loan. There is no scientific precision to a process like that. My dad worked in commercial lending for a bank and he used to tell me that a lot of what he did was based on subtle hints and intuition about the person or company making the request. Whether or not he granted the request was based on a whole range of factors that made it so that the petitioner had no way of knowing if the request would be granted. Sometimes that reply is no and the only way to really evaluate why a request was denied is by knowing the reasons in the mind of the person who is denying the request. In the case of prayer, that means knowing and understanding the mind of God who has every possible variable accounted for which we cannot even begin to understand. The other problem with this approach to scrutinizing the efficacy of prayer is that it assumes that the effect of prayer or the reason we pray is to have our requests granted and that’s not really why we pray. We don’t make requests of God because he needs to be reminded. Like he’s up there going, “Oh right, you’re looking for a job, I completely forgot. Thanks for reminding me.” God’s knowledge is complete and his will is perfect, so our petitioning of him isn’t supposed to change his mind or tell him something he doesn’t already know. So it raises the question, why pray at all? Full transcript at: http://www.brianholdsworth.ca

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com I recently had an interesting conversation with an architect who defined himself as a classicist with respect to aesthetics, art, and design. And he explained what he understood that to be in an interesting way. He said that a classicist is someone who believes that there is an ideal form to be realized in design. Whether that be in car, a building, a smartphone, or whatever. And this is consistent with Classical and medieval thought up until the modern age and until the influence of philosophies like modernism took over in the art and design establishment which was a rejection of those earlier philosophies. Now, I expect that when most people hear a definition like that, they scoff at it. Because we’ve been so conditioned by modernist catch phrases like “beauty is in the eye of the beholder”. By that they mean that beauty is not objective, but is defined by those who judge a thing to be either beautiful or not beautiful based on their subjective tastes -- it’s nothing more than convention and preference. And the evidence for this argument is an appeal to the fact that everyone has different tastes. If you show a panel of people a piece of artwork, you’ll get different reactions from everyone, so how can we say that beauty is objective. Well, like I’ve argued in the past, you could use that same argument against truth itself. You could show an order of operations math question to that same panel and get as diverse an array of responses as you would to the artwork. That doesn’t prove that there is no right answer to the math question any more than it proves that there is no objective beauty. It just proves that we’re not very good at getting the right answer. And this evidence for relativism in beauty really only gained momentum after artists and designers stopped trying to produce work with an ideal form. Once they began embracing modernism, which is the philosophy that informs this idea and rejects classical thought, they stopped trying to portray the ideal form. So no wonder our appreciation for their work grew mixed. They weren’t trying to make beautiful work anymore. And here’s the evidence of that fact. If you took that same panel of people and showed them a building from the 19th century when classical thought in art and design still had some influence among artists, and asked them if they thought it was well designed, you’d get an almost universal affirmation to that question. If you did the same thing with a building designed in 1975, you’d get a much more mixed to negative response. And if that’s not convincing, do the same thing with a car. Take a typical commuter car designed in 1950 and ask the question and you’ll get a favorable response. Then show them a typical car designed in 1990 and it will probably get laughed at.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com When most people hear the word authoritarianism, it naturally conjures a range of negative associations. We tend to think of dictators, wars, and genocides. And it’s probably a good thing that it does produce those kinds of associations because despotism isn’t something that anyone wants, but it seems to me that the unprecedented fragile peace and prosperity that so many generations have known now is never far from that edge. I know that sounds really provocative for many people, so just bear with me for a second. Let’s start by defining what authoritarianism is. It’s the advocacy of strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom. In other words, if you’re looking for a solution to a problem, instead of letting individuals find a practices that work best for them, we all look to some authority to provide a solution and then insist that everyone strictly abide by it. And there are quite a few glimpses of this kind of thing, alive and well, in our society today. Every time someone says, “The science is settled”, they’re making an appeal to authority. They’re saying, the people who know better have definitively said so, and therefore, we all need to adjust our voting habits, our policies, and even our laws to reflect what they say. That is authoritarianism. So why might that be a problem? GK Chesterton, who always has a witty and precise way of making his point, said this: “It is a good sign in a nation when things are done badly. It shows that all the people are doing them. And it is bad sign in a nation when such things are done very well, for it shows that only a few experts and eccentrics are doing them, and that the nation is merely looking on.” And I tend to agree with him because the point about us living our lives isn’t to do everything perfectly right. The point is that everyone gains enough experience to learn what we’re supposed to learn in the time that is given us and that includes making mistakes as one of the best teachers. So in a fascist or communist state, only the people who have been given explicit permission to do certain things or say certain things are able to do so. The rest have to wait for their marching instructions. They become nothing more than cogs in a machine fit for someone else’s utilitarian ends. But if that thought isn’t scary enough, what about the fact that placing all of our trust in authorities depends on the premise that those authorities will conduct themselves ethically. Read the whole transcript at www.brianholdsworth.ca

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com The second Vatican council was an ecumenical council of the Catholic Church hosted over several years and presided over by 2 popes (John XIII & Paul VI). Up until this point in the Church’s history, councils were called in order to resolve some controversy as in someone’s been teaching something that is creating confusion and debate and so the Church needs to gather to prayerfully consider it and offer a clarification. That’s one of the ways that we get dogmas in the Church. They are the result of someone teaching something wrong somewhere, and the Church stepping in to correct it with dogmas and anathemas – which were like condemnations of the erroneous teachings. But when Vatican II was called, there was no specific controversy they were attending to. There was no dogma to be defined or heresy to be condemned. Every council in the Church’s 2000-year reign before this was a dogmatic council but V2 was going to be different. It was going to be a pastoral council. And right off the bat, characterizing the council as so fundamentally novel compared to everything that came before it seems like a bold thing to do for a Church built upon tradition – a tradition that is constantly pressured to compromise that tradition both from the outside and from within. To make such an audacious stride towards innovation, which is a strong current within modernism, you’d think you’d want to have a lot of safeguards in place to make sure that things didn’t go haywire or to be at least prepared for the eventual potential mess that could erupt. So the council was going to focus on a way to interact with and evangelize the contemporary world. It was a response to a dramatically shifting and emerging global culture in order to ensure that the Church and her message would continue to be relevant in the contemporary world. An interesting correlation is that the Church has been in a dramatic free fall from whatever relevance it still held at the time of the council. If the intention was to more effectively speak to the outside world and its ability to do so has faced nothing but decline since then, I think any reasonable person would admit that that’s worth taking a very hard and honest look at. Some do, and they take a largely negative view of the council. Others will relentlessly defend it and explain those consequences away with speculations like: those things would have happened and worse if it wasn’t for the council. But there’s really no way to know that for sure. All we do know is that the goals of the council remain unrealized. Read the whole transcript at www.brianholdsworth.ca

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, http://www.veleztranslations.com I think most people can sympathize with the experience of apprehending some weird trait about our biology and then wondering, “why does that exist”? Maybe it’s something like hair in a weird place, or the shape of a toenail or something like that. Or maybe it leads to more complicated questions, like why do our bodies undergo changes like male pattern baldness? What is the reason? Some of these kinds of questions seem to have obvious answers like why do we have eyebrows? Obviously to more easily facilitate the act of flirting. But male pattern baldness doesn’t have an explanation that is so immediately available. In times that were more unanimously religious, people might have responded to that question by explaining that it helps us grow in humility in opposition to pride which is the root of all sin and evil. As a man ages, he acquires more wealth and status and if he kept his youthful good looks, temptations towards lust and pride would overwhelm him. So, as a mercy and aide to his sanctification, God saw fit to see to it that his sexual appeal should decline to help him keep his commitments to his family. But today, we’re far more scientific than such speculations, so we would prefer to have a natural answer to a question like that: one that resolves to keep things at ground level rather than up in the clouds. And of course, the answer we’d expect would come through a Darwinian framework. And since Darwin himself suffered this fate, he may have asked the question himself as he fumbled with his combover each morning. Whatever the explanation is, for anyone with any familiarity with Darwinism, evolution, or survival of the fittest, we know that it would be some attempt to explain how it encourages the survival of the species. But when a naturalist or a Darwinist says that the reason a trait exists is for the survival of the species, they’re just begging for the very obvious next question which is, “what is the reason the creature has traits that help it survive?” or “why is survival of the species a good thing?” Saying “survival” is the reason is just kicking the can further down the road. It seems to me that when we attempt to answer the question, “what is the reason for…[fill in the blank]”, we’re admitting, we’re conceding that there is purpose and meaning behind the way a thing is or the way all things are. These kinds of question arise when we perceive something that seems like it shouldn’t be. We expect things to be a certain way as compared to how they are and when those things contradict, we are faced with a feeling that reality is unreasonable when it ought to be reasonable. Read the whole transcript 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’ve been watching with strained interest the recent episode that is being referred to as the cancelling of JK Rowling, who is famous for writing the Harry Potter books, by gender theory and transgender advocates As unpleasant as the whole thing is, I think it gives us a good indication of where society is, where it’s going, and what lessons all of us, including progressives could learn from this emerging cancel culture. So, if you’re unfamiliar with the unfolding controversy it started when Ms. Rowling tweeted concern that progressive theories about gender and sex could erase the lived experience of women who have endured discrimination and oppression for their sex. She also wrote a blog post or two elaborating her thoughts in more detail. And the swift response from the ambiguous corners of society where the morally superior few reside was to announce that she had incurred the penalty of being cancelled for stepping outside the boundaries of progressive orthodoxy. Celebrities who were made famous for starring in the Harry Potter films were also quick to join in the denunciations and reaffirm their allegiance to the creed that Ms Rowling could not sign on to. And if you aren’t familiar with this concept of cancelling, it’s what happens when you transgress the loosely defined and ever-changing doctrines that are promoted and promulgated from who knows where, maybe the media or academia. And once you do, you are expected to begin a public spectacle of repentance for your ignorance and then spending the rest of your life in obscurity and isolation as a penance for your indiscretions. Read the full transcript 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’ve done a few videos in the past criticizing certain persuasions within art and music, especially in the context of sacred art, and I have to admit, that’s pretty easy to do. It doesn’t take a brilliant or courageous person to debunk something. It’s not, however, all that easy to assert something good or true in it’s place. It’s not easy to propose something that is then subject to the same potential for debunking. And so, to be fair, I thought I owed it to the ideas I’ve criticized to propose criteria that produces good art. Number 1: it should be revelatory. It should communicate something that the artist has captured that the rest of us could benefit from. Either an experience of beauty, a form that is rarely seen, or a movement that urges us to our highest callings.It should produce in us a gratitude for having been exposed to something that has enriched our understanding of truth, goodness, beauty, or ourselves. Number 2: it should be skillfully produced. If there are two artists with the same talent and instincts and all other things being equal, but one of them disciplines themselves through practice and good habit so that their ability to produce the art is higher than the artist who does not take those pains, then the one who has made the greater investment and sacrifice should be recognized for having more merit. Number 3: it should be unique. Someone who has mastered the paintbrush isn’t producing good art if they are only replicating what other artists have done. Say they can masterfully copy a great work of art. That demonstrates, skill, but it isn’t enough to be a photocopier. They should be able to produce something unique. Something that penetrates insights and visions that have not yet been seen. Number 4: It should inspire. It should produce feelings of humility in its viewers as well as an inspiration to be and do better ourselves. It should ignite something within us to understand that human beings, including ourselves, are capable of great things if we only tap into the virtues that we can choose to start building now if we want to. Number 5: It should be beautiful. By beauty, I don’t mean flowery or delicate or something like that. I mean as an attribute of being which transcends all our other categories.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translations by Vélez Translations, www.veleztranslations.com Past video on Catholic belief in the Eucharist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lVuHT1XdPeg I thought I’d start by addressing that concern because for Catholics, Holy Communion or the Eucharist is the reception of the God of the Universe incarnate for us in space and time. If we truly believed that, don’t you think we’d treat the moment we interact with that substance with severe caution? Like, imagine if you lived in the Marvel universe and some superhero walked up to you and said, I need you to take this, it’s one of the infinity gems, it’s a substance of incredible power. You’d probably have a lot of questions and reservations about being in contact with something like that. Like what’s the protocol with this thing? Even our prescription medications come with a whole litany of instructions to ensure that we take them exactly as instructed because they are a persuasive substance that will produce considerable effects so you want to make sure that they produce the right ones based on how you use them. Well, the Eucharist, is the bread of life. It’s the medicine that can heal your eternal soul, as long as you receive it as instructed by the experts. If you recognize the expertise of pharmacists and doctors when it comes to your prescriptions, because they’ve spent years studying this stuff and you haven’t, then we should, likewise, recognize the expertise of bishops and theologians when they tell us how we should treat the Eucharist. The other reason this isn’t a trivial thing is because the way we practice our faith can create a sense of community and harmony among believers or it can create division and discord. And the current state of affairs, I think, lends itself to the latter so I think it’s important that we try to have these difficult discussions in the hopes that it will educate those who sincerely just want to practice the faith authentically. So in case you didn’t catch the title of this video, it’s about the Catholic practice of receiving communion in the hand, which is the defacto norm in the Church today, even though that’s NOT the actual norm, which is pretty startling for people like me who, when I converted to Catholicism, was taught that it doesn’t matter. I’ll start off by saying that I only receive communion on the tongue and the reason I started doing that was because I felt prompted by the Holy Spirit to try it and so I did and I’ve found that my appreciation for the sacredness of that sacrament as well as my sense of humility and reverence for it have increased. It’s helped me to better worship God and appreciate who I am in relation to him and that’s purely anecdotal, but if it’s enough for you, then I’d encourage you to give it a try and see if your experience reflects mine. If you need reasons, then let’s explore that.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com My previous video about Harry Potter: https://youtu.be/iqTL49cybZc For further reading: There’s No Scientific Basis for Race—It's a Made-Up Label: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/magazine/2018/04/race-genetics-science-africa/ Origins of concept of race: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_(human_categorization)#Historical_origins_of_racial_classification

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Spanish translation provided by Vélez Translations: http://www.veleztranslations.com I think it’s safe to say that every person of good will finds racism and its various expressions repellent and reprehensible. No good person wants to see innocent people discriminated against, victimized, abused, or worst of all murdered by those who insist on acting on an incoherent creed of supremacy and hatred. And when I say that, I truly believe that I’m describing most people. Most people care about their fellow man enough to detest racism. So if that’s true, I think it’s a safe bet that we’d all like to find meaningful solutions to resolving that insidious influence in our communities and in our countries which means that fundamentally, the majority of people are on the same side. When it comes right down to it, we want the same thing. We want equal opportunities for everyone, we want irrational hatred dispelled, and we want people to live in peace regardless of their racial background. In the words of Martin Luther King Jr., a person should be judged by the content of their character and not the color of their skin. But in order to truly find meaningful, constructive solutions, we have to understand the problem. We have to properly and accurately diagnose it. Just like any illness, if you want to find the right medicine, you have to accurately diagnose what is wrong and if we don’t, we’ll just cause more damage and unfortunately, I think we’re seeing a lot of that happening as this issue gets swept up in an appetite of escalation. We so easily get caught up in trading in a currency of injustice by refusing to respond in measure and equal proportion. Some people like to say, an eye for an eye leaves everyone blind. Actually, it doesn’t. It leaves everyone with one good eye. That’s the whole point of that biblical teaching. It’s to ensure restraint. It means that if someone steals your car, you don’t find justice by firebombing their house. Long before we ever get to the more difficult teachings in the Bible like, love your enemies and turn the other cheek, or the teachings of mercy, at the very least, we have to learn to learn what justice is by responding proportionately. If someone steals $40 from you, justice demands $40 is returned. Not a thousand dollars - an eye for an eye. But the discourse in the media or online is about escalation and revenge. Nobody seems to be having rational conversations. This is not how reasonable people respond to real problems in the interest of finding meaningful solutions. For those of us that do want to take the difficult high road in seeking those solutions, the best place to start is by defining the terms we’re working with. Language is the means by which we understand each other and we can’t have peace and harmony unless we understand each other. But what we see happening far too much in debates that have a political ingredient is the manipulation of language to prevent sides from coming together and I see a lot of that taking place in the debate around racism and racial justice. And that’s something we need to be especially attentive too because accurate understanding of words creates wisdom and knowledge and knowledge is powerful and liberating to those who have it. So what does it tell you when people in powerful positions, whether in the media or in political activism, deliberately work to confuse our language? It shows that they want to confiscate that power. The less power the majority of us have, the more easily we are manipulated for someone else’s ends. And as much as I’d like to explain that further, that’s not what this video’s about so I’ll just leave you with an encouragement to read an essay by Josef Pieper called “Abuse of Language, Abuse of Power.” It will help immunize you against that kind of manipulation. So, let’s start with the definition of racism. Because that’s a serious word and a serious thing to accuse someone of. But we see people in politics and in the media brandishing it casually and recklessly which again, leads to confusion about what it means. Here in Canada, our Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau made a statement about the issue recently by saying that anti-black racism is happening in Canada everywhere… every day. Which leaves me with the impression that if it were that pervasive, you couldn’t lave the house without witnessing it. Well, to know if that’s true, again we have to come back to a consistent understanding of what the word racism means. Racism is the tendency to act antagonistically towards people of other races because of the belief that your race is superior. The ingredient of racial superiority is essential to the definition. Read the rest at https://brianholdsworth.ca/digressions

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com As the lockdown wears on and we go from being swept up in the novelty of it all where we find ourselves taking selfies with our stockpile of toilet paper to facing the reality of it and asking questions like, “how we’re going to pay our rent?” I can understand if you’re starting to struggle with the justifications for shutting the world down over the pandemic and wondering if that’s a fair trade-off. As a Catholic, this question was renewed for me recently when I started to read reports of churches and dioceses re-opening but under such heavy restrictions that they might as well not. And in thinking about it I felt like I had a bit of a breakthrough that might help you sort out what you think of all of this. I’m reminded of a passage from GK Chesterton’s Heretics which I had alluded to in another video recently but can’t remember which one. He said something like, man fell twice. First in the Garden where he gained the knowledge of good and evil. And then at another point in which he lost the knowledge of good and can now only speak of the evil that he enthusiastically denounces. I’ve noticed that our response to this pandemic has revealed how right Chesterton is. Our solution or solutions to the pandemic have been exclusively focused on simply avoiding evil and giving into fear of the consequence of that evil: namely the potential for many people to die. And there’s nothing wrong with appreciating that possibility. But there’s a trade-off taking place and we are blind to it because of our inability to describe what our chief goods are. Any philosophy or any articulation of what humanity should be doing must start by asking questions like, what is a human being, what is our purpose, and what is our highest good? All the great thinkers up until the modern age started there and while many would get it wrong, that never discouraged them from assuming that these are the most important questions and every attempt to live our lives well is a reply to those questions. But the modern world has discarded any attempt to explicitly answer those questions of an ethical nature as mere opinion rather than ornaments of knowledge among all the other things we know. So while we seem to be utterly incapable of articulating what it is that we are to do and to seek in life, we haven’t lost our ability to anticipate negative things and evil outcomes and it is that awareness that has monopolized our response to the pandemic. Any affirmation of what we should do to achieve some good, if it competes with the risks that we’ve identified, then it’s met with sloganeering like, “you’d rather old people die than wear a face mask is that it?” And now that politicians and leaders are trying to find ways for us to return to work and frankly, live our lives, is getting a lot of push back from those who can’t see anything other than possible bad things that could happen. But that’s the trade-off. Morality is a two-sided equation. St. Thomas Aquinas says that the first precept of natural law is, “good is to be done and pursued, and evil is to be avoided." It involves both, but we are paralyzed and prevented from doing any good in our daily lives right now. Goods like working, getting an education, worshipping together, visiting those who are lonely and in need. And in fact, we’re so terrified of certain kinds of obvious evils, like the risk of infection and death, that we can’t see a couple steps beyond that to other kinds of risks like the fact that suicides have dramatically gone up in certain places. And that can only be a consequence of the fact that we’ve stripped people of the only good things they had in order to preserve their lives. Except, that obviously doesn’t work. We can’t avoid what is good to prevent evil. If that’s the trade-off, and I’m afraid that in many respects, that’s what we’ve exchanged, then it isn’t a surplus good. Our lives are meant to be lived in the pursuit of good ends through our actions which should all accumulate to some ultimate good. As a Catholic, I recognize that highest good as knowing and loving God and the acts that performs this love is in worship and participating in the sacraments and loving my neighbor as myself and at the moment one of those things is impossible while the other is severely restricted. We are forfeiting our highest good so as to avoid evil and while I thought about that, an analogy came to mind. What if I told you that the next time you received the sacrament of Holy Communion, you would die? Would you abstain from it for the rest of your life in order to preserve your vital signs or would you gladly accept the loss of your temporal life in the hopes of gaining eternal life according to the promises of Christ? Read the rest of the transcript at: brianholdsworth.ca

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com With the lock down in effect, everyone with school aged children is getting a taste of what home schooling could be like and according to at least one survey I saw, a significant number of parents have an increased appreciation for homeschool and some have indicated that they intend to keep doing it after the lock down is over. So as someone who went to public schools when I was growing up but has chosen home schooling for my kids, I thought I’d be ideally positioned to share what I think is the most important advantage or each. So, like I said earlier, I was raised in a public school setting and I think my own experience is a revealing use case for what makes these two approaches distinct and where the advantages lie in each, so I’ll start by sharing a bit about my own story. Believe it or not, I have been accused by a few people of being intelligent and since a surprising number of people are willing to listen to me mumble my way through these commentaries, that seems to further advance that premise. But, according to my public school record, I was incredibly mediocre in my academic performance. None of my peers would have suspected me of being exceptionally clever and if they had any doubts, a quick report card comparison would have dissuaded them. But I scraped by and went to college in the hopes of becoming a graphic and web designer, which I did. And then I landed my first job and it was the only job I was qualified to do and probably the only one I would ever be qualified to do, but something strange happened around that time too. I became Catholic and this led to an emersion in reading philosophy and theology which exposed me, for the first time in my life, to studying what was known in the liberal arts as dialectic and rhetoric. Dialectic was the study of logic and rhetoric was the study of persuasive communication. Now, I wasn’t formally studying these things as a student would have, but I was getting exposed to them and they were wearing off on me and they had a dramatic effect on me. I started to grow in my ability to think critically and logically as well in my ability to articulate my thoughts accurately and persuasively. And it was this exposure that conditioning that caught the attention of the kinds of people that could provide access to new opportunities for me in my life. I often found myself getting invitations and access to important people and not really being sure why I was there. The YouTube channel is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. I wouldn’t be doing this and I wouldn’t be approached by the kinds of opportunities that it has afforded me without that exposure. And frankly, it unlocked new aspects of my intelligence and my personality and equipped me for a wide range of challenges in life that I would have had no idea how to confront but have since seemed to navigate with a confidence I wouldn’t otherwise have. And this was all because of the fact that I had grown in my ability to think logically and communicate persuasively which are traits that I had very little exposure to because the emphasis in my public school formation was on STEM fields. There was no time for philosophy and whatever attention we paid towards language was just enough to get by for academic purposes. Nobody ever would have guessed that reading classical literature would provide any value beyond priggish dinner party conversation. But the classical liberal arts place a huge emphasis on these disciplines which included grammar, dialectic, and rhetoric and they were called “liberal” arts because they produced liberty in the student. They freed a person from the bonds of ignorance ineptitude by asking the most fundamental questions about life and then offering the best answers that we have produced as a thinking species. And in my case, I have found myself achieving greater degrees of freedom, flexibility, and opportunity. My public school formation funneled me towards a one dimensional career and if I ever wanted to stray from that, it would have cost me significant time and money to redirect from the path I had chosen when I was 17. But a person who is educated in a broad spectrum of disciplines that are meant to produce a person who is fully acquainted with their identity as a human being and aware of the deep questions of life rather than a gear in an economic machine. Read the whole transcript 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 once observed an online exchange between a couple people, one of whom is what you might call a Catholic celebrity which is just to say he’s a high profile Catholic commentator. Over the course of the conversation the less renowned debater made an appeal to St. Thomas Aquinas to which the celebrity replied with something like, “St. Thomas is fine for some, but give me Rahner, give me Kung, give me Congar.” That little exchange on the surface just appears to be a couple nerdy Catholics describing their favourite theologians but in reality, it’s a depiction of a deep divide that exists in the Church today that most of us probably aren’t aware of and it’s important to understand because it speaks to why there are these competing currents in the Church today and how we should discern between them. Going all the way back to the earliest days of the Church, leaders and evangelists started confronting a question that wasn’t easy to answer which was how do we reconcile faith and reason which represented two kinds of knowledge. Faith is a knowledge that comes to us from God through revelation. It’s God giving us the answer key to life and encouraging us to trust him and to follow it. Reason is our ability to access what is true through our intellectual capability. And the reason this challenge emerged so quickly is because of the Church’s collision with the Greco-Roman world through its evangelistic efforts, because they had a tradition of reason through the deposit of knowledge that came through great thinkers like Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle among many more. And this tension was kind of neatly put by Tertullian who was an early Church father who said, “What does Athens have to do with Jerusalem.” And by that he wasn’t describing two nationalities or cultures. He was using these cities as metaphors for faith and reason, Athens representing the tradition of reason, and Jerusalem representing the place where God dwelled and where the people lived by faith. We also see right at the beginning of John’s gospel he describes Jesus as the Logos identifying God with reason and in Acts 17, we see Paul appealing to the Athenians by reason and argument. So from the absolute beginning of the Church there’s a recognition of the legitimacy of reason as a means to knowing truth and persuading others. But how they inform each other, how much we should rely on one or the other was unresolved. Some believed all we needed was faith and this current was known as Fideism. Some took a more rational line and believed that our reason could apprehend all truth. And this tension played out through the Church for centuries until scholasticism and St. Thomas Aquinas arrived who introduced a concept that helped resolve the question for a lot of people. He said that Grace does not destroy nature, but it perfects it. Because the trouble with reason is that it’s a human faculty and the problem with human faculties is that they are clouded with sin and our fallen nature. So how much we can rely on them has always been a difficult question to answer. If you follow the Protestant line of thinking on this, our nature, and therefore reason, is completely broken and we can’t rely on it at all which is why Luther said that reason is a whore (Luther had a way with words). He was promoting a renewed emphasis on faith and or Fideism which is why there are so many currents within Protestantism, especially American fundamentalism, where people say things like, just have faith. It’s why so many people backlash against their fundamentalist upbringing because when they started to ask questions and employ their reason, they were met with slogans like, “When in doubt, faith it out.” And that’s unfortunate because that’s not the ancient tradition which has been one that has tried to balance the legitimacy of both faith and reason. And St. Thomas took a massive stride forward in our ability to do that when he said that Grace perfects nature. Yes, nature is compromised, but when we expose ourselves to God’s grace and his willingness to make his goodness available to us that we might be transformed, then our nature, reason with it, becomes elevated and perfected into a condition where we CAN rely on it. Thomas did much more than that as a prolific thinker and writer, but this contribution to Catholic thought made it possible for faith and reason to live in a kind of harmony until the Protestant Reformation became a loud voice for fideism once again.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com I would never say that I am a Capitalist because I think it’s degrading to place oneself in a posture of subservience to an ideology like that. The only label or category that I find doesn’t reduce us to something less than we are is Catholic because Catholic means the whole – the whole picture, the whole truth. That’s what I follow. I’m not some tool of an economic policy. As a Catholic I can appreciate attempts to offer solutions to human problems in both capitalism and socialism, but neither of them offer a complete solution because both of them treat the difficulties of humanity as merely material which reduces us to our basic needs, like a herd that needs to be fattened and fenced in. A movie I saw recently that I enjoyed a lot more than the critics was Passenger starring Jennifer Lawrence and Chris Pratt.The story is about a spaceship carrying a number of passengers who are in a state of suspended animation for the duration of the long journey but one of them accidentally wakes up. He’s basically alone on a cruise ship with all the food and entertainment he could want, but his situation reminds us that having our material needs provided for isn’t nearly enough to satisfy the spectrum of that which makes a person human. So he begins to entertain the dilemma of waking up another passenger. Now I think a lot of people think that’s the missing piece. We are an animal with needs, we have basic needs, but we also have social needs or we get lonely and depressed. But I don’t think that really captures the problem. This hierarchy of needs seems to suggest that we are mere consumers that must have our appetites satiated, including our appetite for relationship. But we don’t just need to have relationships. We need to have purpose. We need to experience life as an amelioration of moral choices that have eternal consequences. We are moral agents and we have to exercise that moral agency and if we don’t, we become bored, restless, sterile, and malaise. And this moral agency is best experienced and tested in our relationships with others. It’s easy to think of ourselves as patient, kind, generous, and agreeable until someone with a different temperament and different wants and preferences competes with your own. The experience of trying to blend your life with someone else, to try to provide for someone else, and then to care for the lives that are produced through that union at the most critical and vulnerable stages of life is the most intense immersion into a confrontation with your moral quality. It isn’t just that we get lonely without the opportunity to have and experience relationships with others, it’s that we stop having opportunities to learn and grow as moral beings and the moral dimension of our souls decays into ruin. Capitalism doesn’t seem to appreciate any of these aspects of our humanity or human life and if it is meant to provide solutions to human flourishing and happiness – or what Aristotle called eudaimonia, then Capitalism falls critically short of those requirements. Pope St. John Paul II said this, “In reality, while on the one hand it is true that Capitalism shows the failure of Marxism to contribute to a humane and better society, on the other hand, insofar as it denies an autonomous existence and value to morality, law, culture and religion, it agrees with Marxism, in the sense that it totally reduces man to the sphere of economics and the satisfaction of material needs.” Christopher Dawson said, “Both Communism and Capitalism agree in putting economic things first and in ordering society to an economic end, and consequently they are both far more opposed to Catholicism than they are to one another.” Chesterton had a point when he said “It is Capitalism that has … destroyed the influence of the parent in favour of the influence of the employer; that has driven men from their homes to look for jobs; that has forced them to live near their factories or their firms instead of near their families; and, above all, that has encouraged, for commercial reasons, a parade of publicity and garish novelty, which is in its nature the death of all that was called dignity and modesty by our mothers and fathers.” And I would add that it is capitalism that turns people like the Kardashians into role models and pornography into your 13-year-old son’s new best friend. And that’s because the aim of capitalism is profit and economic growth. It doesn’t account for the moral implications of those ends. If it thrusts highly dysfunctional people into the cultural looking glass and normalizes their abnormal lives, as long as it generates revenue, the aims of Capitalism are satisfied. To read the full transcript, visit https://brianholdsworth.ca/digressions

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com If you’re Catholic then it isn’t news to you that many in roles of authority within the Church have fully embraced modern and post modern art movements as perfectly appropriate for the use of sacred art. Even though the intellectual and philosophical movements that animated this cultural shift feature a lot of agnostic and atheistic tendencies and even though, if you connect it to modernism itself, you may, or may not know, that Pope Pius X condemned it as a heresy. But so what? Maybe, as many will insist, we need to embrace new and innovative ways of expressing the faith. We need to ensure that the gospel doesn’t grow stale and irrelevant. And I agree with that if it means we should continue to build upon what came before and steadily improve as we strive to communicate beauty and the story of salvation history. But modernist movements did not do that. They discarded what came before them and held them in contempt. This was, in many cases, literally done as Church sanctuaries that were masterpieces of religious art and craftsmanship were the victims of enthusiastic church professionals who were all to happy to embrace these new trends. The reason I think modern art is intrinsically incompatible with Christian worship isn’t because I don’t like it, although I don’t, and it isn’t because it lacks universal appeal, which it does, and it isn’t because it violently clashes with it’s surroundings, which it does. It’s because it doesn’t meet what I believe to be an essential criterion for sacred art according to Christian doctrine and to explain what I mean, I think we need to revisit what has been a seemingly timeless controversy in the Church which is whether or not using images in worship is idolatrous. Protestants took up this controversy in the 16th century when they began smashing stained glass windows and beheading statues but these iconoclastic tendencies have been with us since at least the 8th century when the Eastern Church had to confront the exact same speculation. And of course, the reason this controversy and confusion exists is because of the 1st commandment in the decalogue which says that we shalt not have any strange gods before the true God of Israel and that it forbids making images to worship. But iconoclasts took this to mean that all imagery was forbidden lest we fall into idolatry. After all, it says right there in scripture, “You shall not make for yourself an image in the form of anything in heaven above or on the earth beneath or in the waters below.” But does that mean all imagery is idolatrous? Well, it can’t mean that because just a few chapters later in the book of Exodus, God sanctions the use of carved images for religious piety by telling the Israelites how they are to fashion the tabernacle with two carved angels on each side of the cover. And this is tricky for Christians because our faith is a sacramental faith in which the invisible is made visible. In which matter, space and time, and sound are employed to communicate the reality of the spiritual life and there is no better example of this than the incarnation of Jesus in which the invisible God becomes human so that we can meet him face to face, hear his voice, and know him like we know most other things that we can see and touch. And so, it is our instinct to follow that pattern and to make visible that which is invisible through art that can clarify what might otherwise be difficult to understand and visualize. When we talk about God’s interactions with us through the stories we find in scripture, we refer to it as revelation. God’s work since our estrangement with him has been to reveal himself to us as a prerequisite to relationship with him. He wants to make himself MORE explicitly known to us. And that is the principle that sacred art should follow. It should be used to make spiritual realities or the stories in the Bible less ambiguous than they might otherwise be if they were just left to our imagination. And this is exactly what Christians aspired to do by telling the stories of the Bible through representative imagery. It was used to enhance our prayers, help us feel closer to God as we worshipped him, and to teach and catechize the faithful, especially in places and times where literacy was low. But that’s not what modern art does. It embraces the abstract and the novel and abstraction is the opposite of revelation. They portray the stories of scripture as something more incorporeal when that is the exact opposite of how God chose to reveal himself, in unmistakable and material presence available to our senses. Abstraction doesn't reveal the reality of salvation history – it obscures it. And when revelation is obscured, it leads to confusion, and when you’re praying in a state of confusion, you can easily be led from that disorientation into idolatry.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com If you were to look around at the world in which Karl Marx, the founder of Marxist Socialism, lived in, it would be easy to detect the disparity that he railed against. In the case of Europe, it was also still a very Christian continent which meant that the teachings of Jesus about caring for the least and the last were well known among people at every level of society. So the fact that so many went without the material well-being that they needed was an easy sore spot to level accusations by would-be revolutionaries. Marx called for a simple and almost obvious solution. He sees the problem as a mathematical one. The reason some people have their basic needs met and some don’t isn’t because there isn’t enough wealth or resources to go around. It’s because some have far more than they need. And that’s a true. So for Marx and his supporters, the solution is simple. All we need to do is balance the equation. The problem is, the reason some have too much and some have too little isn’t because we’re bad at math and it isn’t because our political systems are inept, even if they are. The problem that Marx completely overlooks is the hearts of men which are easily corrupted as Galadriel recites in the opening of the Fellowship of the Ring. Wealth, power, and honor are among our greatest temptations and when they come into our grasp, we are confronted with a profoundly moral choice to either keep it all for ourselves (which is the wrong one) or to do what we can to make sure it is distributed to all who need it and are willing to collaborate in it’s generation and cultivation (the right one). But Marx couldn’t address these kinds of moral questions because they belonged to the world of metaphysics and religion. Marx wanted a purely materialistic and atheistic solution to what he saw as a merely material problem. But questions of morality cannot be explained through the physical sciences or observation of the material facts. The physical sciences tell us what always happens and then interprets from those observations certain laws. Morality is the definition of what ought to happen, whether or not it does. To address moral difficulties, you need to go beyond the material facts into the realm of the transcendentals like truth and goodness which brings you to the fringes of religion and with it, a concessions that reality describes far more than just the material facts. So, the mathematical question for Marx and his advocates has always been the same. It’s a mere material and mathematical redistribution of wealth. Create a political and economic system that confiscates all wealth generated and redistribute it according to the quantities of x and y. Then nobody will ever go hungry or live in poverty again. But in every attempt to implement these good intentions, that has not been the case. What we have seen instead has been starvation, oppression, fanaticism, mass murder and a complete disregard for the dignity and rights of individual citizens. So why is that? Well, I would say it’s obviously due to the inherent blind spot Marx and therefore socialism has always had for the frailty of our resolve to do the right thing. We are easily tempted to greed, lust, gluttony, sloth, and pride. We crave wealth, honor, and power for ourselves. As an atheist, Marx’s anthropology rejected religious notions of humanity’s fallen nature. Again, this was merely a mathematical problem to be resolved systematically, but the glitch in every system is going to be humanity’s moral defects. In order to redistribute wealth, you have to commission and invest a minority of people to do the work of balancing the equation. That minority will have access to all the wealth, and therefore power, and then be entrusted to redistribute it. Instead, what happens, every time this has been tried, is that this minority keeps an inordinate amount of it for themselves and their friends and then uses the very system that was supposed to exist to guarantee justice for all as a tool to protect their own interests against the masses. St. Thomas More, who was a statesman and one of the many victims of Henry the VIII coined the term utopia which literally means nowhere land. He recognized that there will never be a paradise on earth because a necessary ingredient in human society is our moral infirmity. Atheist revolutionaries of the modern age rejected all aspects of the preceding religious ideas and along with it the doctrine of the fall. After discarding them, they went on to try to implement a system that would either prove they were right or that previous Christian generations were right. If you asked me, the failed experiments of 20th and 21st century communism confirm that it was the Christians who were right.

St. Corona Prayer cards: https://bit.ly/2yD7eVB Music directed by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Music composed by Roman Hurko. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://www.romanhurko.com In times of crisis like we find ourselves in today, it’s easy to ask the question, why does God allow us to suffer like this. With all the things my own family has had to go through over the past couple weeks, I definitely had a moment where I had to retreat away into a quite place in our house and let it all out and I honestly can’t remember the last time I did that. I hope there’s something to be said about how something like deprivation and suffering can teach us to be grateful for the good things that we have because long before any of the current tribulation that we are all going through, there was a disturbing trend in the world that I think is worth revisiting. According to a 2016 survey conducted by market research company YouGov, only 6% of respondents in the USA believed that, all things considered, things were getting better. In the UK and Germany, the number was 4% and only 3% in France. But in reality, based on all the metrics that governments and sociologists like to measure, especially those related to material well being, things have dramatically improved over the past several centuries and instead of rattling through all the statistics, I’m going to leave a link in the description on YouTube for you to read up for yourself. Source: https://ourworldindata.org/a-history-of-global-living-conditions-in-5-charts So how is it that we can have so much to be grateful for and yet our instinct is to decry how bad things are and insist, against all facts, that they are getting worse. The simple answer is, because there’s something wrong with us. We either take good things, like health, safety, and wealth for granted, or we abuse them. When things are going our way, we easily succumb to the mistaken idea that there’s nothing wrong with us and that’s when we do something stupid like start wars or become so blinded by our ingratitude that we can’t appreciate how good things are until it’s all taken away. If there really is something wrong with us, and I’d say it’s evident that there is, then the best thing for us is for reality, or the universe, or God, to announce that fact through some kind of adversity. Now it’s easy to resent God for this kind of thing as a kind of remote puppet master who is indifferent to our suffering. There’s a scene in a movie that I liked when I was a teenager although I’m sure if I saw it now, I’d think differently. But the movie was the Devil’s Advocate in which Al Pacino plays the Devil and he accuses God in this one scene of being a quote absentee landlord. And then he congratulates himself for being in the muck with the people while God looks down from Heaven. Well, maybe according to most conceptions of God, but you certainly can’t say that about God as he is proposed by the life and teachings of Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus who was God incarnate, who was the word made flesh. Not only is Jesus a God who willingly becomes a tenant in his own creation, but he chooses the worst accommodations. The last thing you can say about God is that he’s an absentee landlord remote from the human experience. Jesus is a revelation of a God who willingly suffers alongside us when he doesn’t have to. He experienced the most unspeakable physical torment, psychological anguish, and social rejection imaginable so that when you or I go through something similar, God can stand next to us and relate to that experience, not as a divinity removed from our story, but one who can say he knows what we’re going through and he will help us through it. Even feelings of abandonment by God. Jesus cried out on the cross, my God why have you abandoned me? So that when I broke down in the dark in my storage room where my kids couldn’t see me, God himself knew exactly what I was going through and he was there to pick me back up to try again. That’s what Christians commemorate this week at Easter. Friday is the day that Jesus suffered torture and death and Sunday is the day he rose again from the dead a fact that changed the course of history. If you have never explored that story for yourself, now is as good a time as ever to take another look. You may just be surprised by what you find.

Music conducted by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Music composed by Roman Hurko. Find out more about his work as a composer here: www.romanhurko.com It may surprise some, as I’m embarrassed to say it did me when I learned that there has never been a matriarchal society in the history of human civilization. There are no records of societies in which women played the lead role. In every place and in every time, men have assumed the dominant positions of power. We’re not even talking about most of the time, like 80% of the time men have been the dominant sex and 20% of the time women. It was men 100% and women 0%. So at some point in human history, there had to have been a deliberate relinquishing of the power and control that men had because it isn’t something that just naturally occurs. If human beings are given enough license to do what they want and let the chips fall how they may, men will end up in control. So for women to have ever made any strides towards having a say in how society conducts itself, it must have involved men being compelled to look to women for their influence and in the case of Western civilization, we have Christianity and the influence of the Catholic Church to thank for that. Even if our understanding of the middle ages is full of prejudice and inaccuracies, one thing that is true is that it was a far more violent time than what most of us in Western Civilization are used to today. The nobility was composed of a military class and because that was something of a vocation for them, they found it irresistible to find reasons to fight each other, a lot. But the Church, never one to go with the flow of trends and fashions, wanted to curb these inclinations among Europe’s elite, so they first tried to promote a peace movement, in fact the first ever peace movement in all of human history, called the Peace and Truce of God. Chief among its demands was the protection of non-combatant members of society such as the clergy, women and children, and the peasants class. And while the movement enjoyed some success, it wasn’t enough to produce the full effect of what the Church had envisioned and the Church noticed something fairly obvious which was that this tendency towards violence was primarily a masculine tendency. We often hear people say thing like, if women ruled the world there’d be a lot less war. Well, that’s pretty much what the Church thought too, so it continued to push this peace movement into what became the chivalric code or Chivalry. And instead of imposing this code of behaviour through law, it was popularized through medieval literature, especially Geoffrey Monmouth’s tales of King Arthur. Monmouth was a Catholic Cleric who wrote about an idealized brotherhood of knights who used their resources and aptitude for combat in the service of others and in the cultivation of virtue rather than as a vehicle for selfish ends – like the acquisition of wealth and land. And this new code of behaviour placed an especially high premium on the deference of behaviour to the sensibilities and genius of women. Devotion and honor in the service of women is at the heart of chivalric codes. It meant that if a Lord or a Knight was compelled to resolve some problem violently, they should first consult and honor their wives or ladies to decide the best course of action and that if violence was necessary, it should be conducted in an honorable and civilized manner. And in a world in which women never had a say in politics, governance, or basically anything at all, this was a revolutionary shift towards a world in which the wisdom of women would be heard and able to balance out the sensibilities of men – offering a more completely human vision of the world.

Music conducted by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com With all the suffering that many are already experiencing and anticipating, maybe there's a silver lining. This my first completely unscripted video so I know I'm rambling a bit in it, but it does come together in the end if you have the patience to see it through. I hope this provides a glimmer of hope for everyone watching.

Music conducted by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Anxiety and depression can be debilitating. They can make you turtle up and opt out from the business of living life and despair is the crippling result. When we lose any sense of purpose, meaning, or hope, it’s the kind of thing that can completely derail your life – which is to say, we need hope to live. We need hope to give us a reason to get out of bed in the morning and live our lives as if there was a good reason to do it. But what is hope? Hope is something that people of nearly every walk of life admit is a good thing. Politicians and ideologues of every wind of doctrine employ the language of hope because they know how universally appealing it is. Hope could be described as our willingness to look forward with the trust that things will get better. But what is that based on and what do we mean by better? Because if by better, we mean that all of our wishes and expectations will be satisfied, what are we basing that on? Is it past experiences? Because if we find ourselves in a place of struggle and adversity in the present, it can only be because the past didn’t deliver on those expectations. So what makes us think the future will be any different? This, for me, forces us to confront the fact that there are two opposing and competing views out there with variations in between. One is that God exists, he created us with a purpose, and he is intentionally invested in our lives. The other is that there is no God and that our existence is the consequence of an incalculably long sequence of cause and effect propelled by random chance. Yet both the theist and the atheist need hope to survive. The consequences for giving into despair are the same. They are crippling doubt, anxiety, lethargy, and varying degrees of self destruction. But if we both need hope to survive, what informs it? Is it irrational optimism that insists everything will turn out great in spite of our past experiences and any reasonable forecast for the future? That doesn’t seem to work. Nothing in my experience tells me that living a lie is healthy for my body or mind. If you’re an atheist, you believe that your life came about through random indifferent chance. You’re an accident of the natural processes of the universe assembled through an impossibly unlikely sequence like trillions of monkeys typing on keyboards until one of them accidentally writes a Shakespearean play. You will live 80 some years if you’re lucky which, when compared to the 13 billion or so years of the universe, is a number so small that it might as well not be measured. You will drift around a mostly vacant universe until you die without any discernible rhyme or reason. If hope means looking forward to some anticipated good, what grounds does an atheist have to do that? For an atheist, looking forward means anticipating the ongoing process of aging and deterioration until your eventual demise and nothing more. If you’re a theist or a Christian, like me, you can also anticipate suffering and death as you look ahead, but you can do so with the consolation that this process will lead towards the ultimate fulfillment of your life, what every religion calls salvation or deliverance. To be a Christian doesn’t mean to expect God’s going to make everything turn out how you want it to in this life, in spite of what every televangelist would have you believe. It means that your suffering comes with a purpose. That it has the potential to sanctify you and transform you into what you were created to be. Both the atheist and the theist need hope to fend off despair. But the atheist has no way of reconciling this need with his or her perspective and nothing truly to place their hope in. Therefore either hope is irrational or their belief which contradicts hope is irrational. To concede the former is to embrace despair and death. To embrace the latter is to admit that atheism cannot be true. As CS Lewis said, “If I find in myself a desire which no experience in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that I was made for another world. If we can recognize that we need hope to survive but there is nothing in our material prospects to fix our hope on, perhaps it’s time to concede that our hope should be placed in something that transcends the material world. This is what has always been my safeguard against the potential effects of anxiety. I still get stressed like anyone else, but at the end of the day, I’m consoled by the fact that no matter how bad things get, my experiences, including and especially my suffering, are accumulating towards an ultimate good which is the only good reason to justify our inescapable need for hope.

Music conducted by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com Let me start off by admitting that the title of this video is a bit hyperbolic. Of course there are writers out there who are capable of creating good original fiction, but I don’t believe I’m just indulging the cantankerous old man within me when I say, most fiction in all its various mediums is bad and getting worse. The fact that so many new movies coming out now are all remakes that fail to surpass the originals in critical reception is just one noteworthy indication of what I’m talking about. Another is the fact that comic books are what inspires the most successful cinema today and I have nothing against comic books but when they become the primary source of literary inspiration for our story telling, I think it’s a safe to say we’re suffering a state of decline in our story telling ability. And this is an ongoing debate within the film community – whether or not comic book movies are true cinema because the effect of this decline and loss of a once great story telling medium is felt even among those who have a vested interest in keeping the machine running. Even among genres and franchises that should be a sure thing, we find controversy over the critical response with deeply polarized opinions. The ongoing attempts to bleed profits from the Star Wars and Harry Potter franchises is a perfect example of what I’m talking about. So in the reluctant admission that we seem to be losing our ability to tell good original stories it got me wondering about what it is that is essential to a good story and what is lacking in today’s crop of film, stage, and literature.

Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com This past Wednesday was Ash Wednesday and it’s not uncommon on this occasion, in the age of social media, for people to take selfies of themselves with ashes on their foreheads. In fact, there was even a hashtag coined by someone to encourage the practice. And when I saw that this was trending, at least in Catholic circles, I have to admit, I found it a little off putting so I posted something on Facebook saying that it struck me as contrary to the spirit of penance and then I asked if I was wrong about that and there were quite a few responses in the comments both endorsing and opposing my reaction. So, that gave me some more insight into why people think it’s a good idea and why not so I thought it would be worth exploring in a video. But, there’s a risk in commenting on something like this after the fact, because we’re much more likely to attempt to justify what we did or did not do than try to see the arguments or principals objectively. So I’d invite you, if you’re watching this, to try to be as honest and objective as possible and know that I’m not trying to wag my finger at you or condemn anyone for their actions. Instead, I think this is a really important conversation about how we share the faith and evangelize because this is a massive struggle in the Church and so I think it’s really important for us to talk about it even if it means an honest look at our own behaviour.