Where to Find Me, Fall 2021

Last week I ran into a local reader and subscriber at this blog, who naturally wondered where the heck I’ve been. Sick leave is the answer, I’m still on it, hitting about a 25% attendance rate at everything that counts as normal-life.

(No, it’s not COVID. Thanks for asking.)

What I didn’t know he didn’t know (and therefore other subscribers here may have the same question) is that I’ve also blogged at Patheos, and I resumed writing there this summer. My presence there is erratic, heavy on controversial topics, and exists because never-blogging does not work for me. (I have a second disorder called Can’t Shut Up.)

So if you have a disorder called Can’t Get Enough of Ornery Bloggers, you can subscribe at patheos.com/blogs/jenniferfitz and I can take the edge off.

Otherwise I’m largely offline. My Facebook presence is zero; I do tweet headlines and hit the the “like” button on things, but even when it seems like I’m itching for a fight, I’m really not. You’re certainly welcome to follow me there, @JenFitz_Reads is the active account.

How to Find a Great Speaker for Your Evangelization Event

I am doing zero speaking gigs at this time — no phone interviews, no zoom meetings, no radio shows, I’m pretty happy if I hold a conversation at all, with anyone, definitely not booking your parish or diocesan event. But of course you’ve read my book, or at least looked at the cover, and now you just have to have me, right? Nah. Here’s what you need to do:

Work through the book with a small group of picked volunteers from your parish or ministry. There are discussion questions at the end of each chapter, so you don’t need to prep anything.
Highlight the parts you really, really, really want your larger audience to know.
Pick the top three most important parts, and make slides about them.
Now, presto, you have a speaker able to address what is most needed in your situation.

You can always do a second talk on three more points another time. Visiting guest speakers make people feel good? But they don’t cause change. Change happens when individuals who are connected with each other in an enduring manner decide to take action on a single, mutually important goal.

You and your small group of locals who read the book together will know, in a way that neither I nor any other stranger can know, what the top three most pressing concerns for you are today. Bring those three concerns to your audience. Use the book to help you find the words and the explanations to communicate the things you already know but maybe struggled to articulate.

Then: Equip your audience. Maybe that’s just giving the encouragement people need to do what they already wanted to do, but were unsure about. Maybe it means removing obstacles. Maybe it means offering resources at your disposal. I can’t do that for you either. But you can do this.

The How-to Book of Evangelization is not a memoir of my amazing ministry, and it’s not a fool-proof recipe that you can replicate mindlessly. It’s the testimony of thousands of ordinary Catholics just like you who have each identified one area where God was specifically calling, and they made the decision to answer that call.

Like them, the only way for you to learn how to evangelize is to try it. You don’t need a speaker for that. You need an intimate relationship with Jesus Christ in the Catholic faith; you need prayer, fasting, and integrity; and you need to say yes.

That’s it.

The book has lots of information on ways that other Catholics just like you have managed to change lives and bring people closer to God. Evangelization is a skill, just like making friends is a skill: Some people are naturally good at it, most of us benefit from receiving a little mentoring. I profile or quote a number of major players in evangelization today, so if you want some tips on where to find a speaker or resources, dig in.

But even though I love to travel and I love to teach, I’m kinda glad that God’s seen fit to toss me in the closet for a while at just the wrong time. It’s not the wrong time. Me writing the book was about the fact that I care about this topic, I had spent years studying this topic, and I have the ability to write things down. Now that it is written down, you have what you need from me.

Enjoy and God bless.

Photo: Dietmar Rabich / Wikimedia Commons / “Peterborough (AU), Port Campbell National Park, Worm Bay — 2019 — 0863” / CC BY-SA 4.0

Saying Goodbye to the Person You Don’t Want to Be

It’s resolution season, but I want to talk about something deeper and more difficult. Resolutions are good. Less sugar, more sunlight, regular bedtime . . . some of these small changes can bring out a happier, more energetic, more you person, one you hadn’t fully understood was hiding inside. If you’ve resolved to start flossing, your dentist thanks you. Run with it.

But what if the thing you are struggling to let go of is tied to your very identity?

New Year’s resolutions don’t involve identity changes, I hope. If you have said to yourself, “I am a person who binges on junk food, and my very self would be annihilated if I were to limit that behavior to Sundays and solemnities, for that bag of Reese’s cups (the large ones loaded with peanut butter, like the Good Lord intended, not those pathetic minis) are who I am, and I should cease to be the person God created me to be if I didn’t help myself to the snack bowl every hour on the hour . . .” If you have said that to yourself, then I guess you have a situation on your hands, don’t you?

But usually resolutions are more about polishing and refining, bringing into the limelight the person you have already determined is the better you.

What if the change you are struggling with involves an aspect of yourself that feels essential to who you are? What if you examine your life, and discover your besetting sin, the thing that makes you most miserable, the thing you sometimes confess but usually rationalize, what if you discover that you love that sin because you view it as part of your very self?

To let go of that sin would be to lose your life, you fear.

That’s harder.

It takes precision surgery to be able to say, “I could still be meticulous and conscientious without being a slave to obsessive anxiety.” Or “I could still be passionate and spontaneous without following my every whim with no regard for what gets lost in the frenzy.” Or “I could still be a firm, authoritative, responsible parent without losing my temper when my children misbehave.”

My only message here is: It’s okay to free yourself from the part of “you” that is destroying your relationships and making you miserable. It’s okay to say goodbye, as many times as it takes, to that aspect of yourself that isn’t about your God-given calling, but in fact is overshadowing and dragging that calling down.

It’s a process. You didn’t get into this jumbled-up identity overnight. Even when you firmly resolve, “I am going to hold onto my talents and passions and spiritual gifts, but I am no longer going to let the vice I’ve been sheltering keep hogging up this space in my soul,” even then, the vice is so strongly planted that it will take years of persistent weeding (or a miraculous healing) to root it out.

So my new year’s wish for you is that, if you have been mistakenly embracing one of your faults as if it were integral to your self, that you’d muster the courage to bid it good riddance. Show it to the door. And when it comes back again and again, insisting it belongs in your heart and you can’t survive without it, kindly tell it you’ve had enough and it needs to move on.

***

In light of that pep-talk:

(a) If you are a Catholic writer, media personality, or social media conversationalist of any type, amateur or pro, and

(b) if the fault you’ve been confusing for your very identity as a communicator and evangelist is the “charism of being a jerk”, but,

(d) please consider joining me and a number of others for a small, free, online retreat-conference being hosted later this month.

It won’t fix you overnight. You’ll probably discover that some of the people in attendance, people like you who don’t want to be nasty online Catholics anymore, but also have no intention of abandoning their passion for communicating the truth and engaging in rousing, high-spirited discussions on controversial topics . . . you’ll probably discover some of your fellow retreatants are people you passionately despise.

And that’s rough, because we’ll be providing opportunities to overcome your bitterness and reconcile with those wrong-headed dunderpuffs who had the nerve to show face at your life-changing retreat.

If you’re feeling brave, please join us.

Book Review: 101 Ways to Evangelize by Susan Windley-Daoust

Susan Windley-Daoust is a theology professor, spiritual director, and now Director of Missionary Discipleship for the Diocese of Winona-Rochester. She graciously sent me a review copy of her new book 101 Ways to Evangelize: Ideas for Helping Fearless, Fearful, and Flummoxed Catholics Share the Good News of Jesus Christ, and having read it, I can give it unqualified “buy” recommend.*

Since my evangelization book covers similar ground, what I’d like to do with this review is explain how the two books fit together and who would benefit from each. (If you’re curious, SWD’s review of my book is here.)

Book cover image: Jesus Christ as a puzzle, mostly put together but with a few pieces still to go. — *Cover art:* 101 Ways to Evangelize by Susan Windley-Daoust

Overview of 101 Ways to Evangelize

Susan Windley-Daoust’s book is a compact, quick read, forty pages cover-to-cover. In it she provides a brief five-page introduction to the importance of evangelization and what evangelization is, and then launches into a well-organized series of sections that, combined, list 101 specific evangelizing activity ideas.

If you are familiar with the stages evangelization and discipleship laid out in Sherry Weddell’s seminal work Forming Intentional Disciples, the 101 suggestions are outreach ideas geared primarily towards people in the Curiosity, Openness, and Seeking stages of coming to Christ.

Image: The five thresholds: Trust, Curiosity, Openness, Seeking, Intentional Discipleship. Ideas in the book relate primarily to Curiosity, Openness, and Seeking. — *Screenshot of Amazon preview showing where the ideas for the book fit into the five thresholds of evangelization and discipleship.*

The first three suggestions of the 101 ideas are preparatory work for any evangelizing activity; the remainder are outreach or ministry ideas that can be done by parish groups, by street evangelization apostolates, or by individuals.

Each suggestion is very specific, such as “praying with college students before exams” or “free clinics, or referrals for free healthcare.” The suggestions cover a wide range of types of missionary activity covering all the physical and spiritual works of mercy. Most of the 101 suggestions get a paragraph of explanation, but where needed, there’s longer discussion including caveats and alternative formats.

Who’s the perfect audience for 101 Ways to Evangelize?

This mini-book is ideal for parish groups or individuals who are sold on the idea of evangelization, raring to go, and are looking for inspiration during the brainstorming process. For a ministry leader, this is a book that you can hand to the members of your group, perhaps ask them to focus on a few particularly relevant sections, and quickly build enthusiasm and a consensus on where to get started.

To assist with this, the companion site Creative Evangelization offers a variety of support resources. At Gracewatch, you can purchase the book in bulk in various formats, including a PDF with license to print.

101 Ways to Evangelize vs. The How-to Book of Evangelization

Inexplicable though it seems to me, I am wiling to entertain possibility that some readers of this blog don’t actually want to collect every single book on evangelization that they can. So here’s the run down of how the two books compare.

The How-to is a massive, bird’s-eye view of the entire process of evangelization and discipleship, from trust-building through sending out new disciples as evangelizers themselves. In contrast, 101 Ways provides a snapshot of the why and how of evangelization, and then focuses on generating ideas for specific evangelizing activities.

101 Ways has loads of ideas for street evangelization and parish outreach events. The How-to does include some sample activities, but is more focused on explaining the principles and strategy behind how parish evangelizing works in different contexts. I would definitely pick up 101 Ways if you are specifically looking for outreach ideas, because that’s 99% of what the book is, and Susan Windley-Daoust has not played in coming up with suggestions.

The How-to is big. 300 pages big. It’s a better choice for people who either want to learn about the topics outside the scope of 101 Ways, or who want to dig deeper into why different types of evangelizing activities work the way that they do. For many people in your parish, 101 Ways will be a better fit: It’s short, quick, and action-oriented.

If you’re in parish leadership charged with some aspect of making big-picture decisions about parish strategy, you want The How-to, because it will help you understand how different aspects of evangelization and discipleship fit together. It will help you make strategic decisions, and it will help you communicate with parishioners by giving you the words you need to explain how xyz ministry fits into the big picture.

But when it is time to mobilize the troops, 101 Ways will be a much better book for parishioners who aren’t big readers and who just want to get moving on outreach-oriented activities and events.

101 Ways is smaller and cheaper than The How-to. Oh, come on, we all know that matters!

For your personal needs, it’s just a question of what type of book you want and what kind of content you’d like to read. For a parish purchase, I’d say that The How-to is the one you give to your ministry heads, that you stock a copy or two in the parish library for people to borrow as-desired, and that you might purchase a dozen copies to be re-used with study groups over the years. In contrast, 101 Ways is the one you purchase in bulk for everyone in the parish, stick in the literature rack, or leave in the hymnal holders in the pews for people to peruse and perhaps prayerfully consider for inspiration.

Is one book better than the other?

Nope. Two different books for two different needs. You can read the samples at Amazon, but I’d say both of us have a similar style in terms of readability. We’re both coming from the same school of thought in terms of what evangelization is and how it’s done.

If you read 101 Ways to Evangelize and your appetite is whetted and you want to learn more about the huge topic that is evangelization and discipleship, check out my book. In contrast, if you loved my book, you’re all inspired by the conclusion and now you are raring to go, you’ll like 101 Ways to Evangelize for the many, many, many different specific outreach ideas to get you started.

It’s a win-win.

***

*You might wonder why my reviews on this blog are overwhelmingly positive. Very simple: If it’s not a good book, I don’t waste my time on it. In order to get reviewed here, a book has to (a) be interesting and well-written enough to entice me to read the whole thing, and (b) be of sufficient value to my readers that it’s worth my taking an hour to put together a review. I read, or begin to read, plenty of books that never manage to clear both those hurdles.

Custody of the Eyes, Revisited

Today’s topic is not a newsflash, but there might be someone out there who could benefit from hearing it again, this time with a little common-sense consolation thrown in.

***

So I’ve been running experiments on myself, and can confirm: Custody of the eyes works wonders.

You may recognize the term from chastity talks. For some of you, your introduction to the term was not during a kind of chastity talk you found very edifying; others may have had the opposite experience. Anyhow, we aren’t talking about sex today. Not even one bit. Deep breath.

***

If you’re new to the term, “custody of the eyes” means taking steps to avoid leading yourself into temptation. It refers specifically to choosing not to look at things that tempt you, but the concept expands to all the senses, physical and otherwise.

What kinds of things, other than sex since we are not talking about sex, might be tempting?

Eating that one kind of chips in the variety pack that your kids weirdly don’t like, even though they are the best flavor, and doing that eating despite the fact that there is no medical evidence your body would benefit, for any reason whatsoever, from eating another such chip again in your life.
Arguing manically with your beloved internet friend who is usually awesome, but happens to be horribly, horribly wrong about something. In your opinion.
Buying that perfect wardrobe item that you do not need because your closet is already full of other good-enough shoes and clothes and hats, ahem, but it’s a really good deal and it is so cute/practical/snazzy/fantabulous, but seriously: You don’t need it, and that money would do more good applied someplace else.

Perhaps you face other temptations as well. They could be temptations to do something that is always sinful under all circumstances, or they could be temptations that are sinful only because of how they affect you personally (example: a calmer spirit might be able to discuss that contentious issue without getting worked up into a frenzy), or they could be temptations that aren’t objectively sinful at all (buying that hat, if it’s part of your responsibly-budgeted splurge fund, and also it’s an awesome hat), but which sabotage your other, better goals.

We aren’t, on that last point, talking today about scrupling, where you obsessively worry that some harmless action is gravely sinful. We’re just saying: For whatever reason you’ve determined that xyz action is not the way you want to live . . . and yet you’re tempted to do it anyway.

Enter one tool to include in your spiritual toolbox: Custody of the eyes.

***

“Custody of the eyes” means you take steps to change the way you are living in order to not be as tempted as you otherwise might be. In emergency-mode, it means that if you’re walking past the hat store, look the other way. My, what fabulous road work the city is doing this morning!

But you don’t want to live in emergency-mode all the time.

This is what it’s like living in the land of temptation, true story:

You’ve determined, for good, sound, scientific reasons, that you would be happier and healthier if you did not eat the chips. Not the lousy chips, and not the fabulous flavor of chips that your children weirdly do not eat, even though the manufacturer has so generously included them in the variety pack that is the best price at your local mass-market merchant.
99% of the time, you are able to practice amazing willpower! You walk by the chips, sitting out on the kitchen shelf where your children can easily access their school lunch supplies, and you don’t even think about grabbing just one tiny bag of chips even this once.
Alas, given enough minutes/hours/days/months, you must run the chip-gauntlet 100 times. Your 99% success rate in avoiding temptation is not quite enough.

You don’t need to beat yourself up over this. It’s a tiny bag of chips. You aren’t allergic. They aren’t actually made of poison, despite the inflammatory rhetoric you read on that one healthy-eating website. It’s fine. But why live this way? Why constantly add to your already busy day that mental struggle? You want to eat fewer chips because you are certain you’ll be happier and healthier that way, and yet having to constantly look at the chips and make yourself not eat them isn’t exactly filling you with joy.

You don’t have to choose between those two fates.

You can put the chips in your teenager’s ancient minivan and instruct her to take them to school and give them to her friends — the ones who have the sense to know what the good flavors are, thanks.

***

Practicing strategic avoidance is life-changing.

When you make small changes to reduce the number of times in a day you have to battle against yourself, you free up so much energy for other efforts.

When you don’t or can’t make those changes — we aren’t in control of the whole world and all that happens around us — you are left working harder to accomplish less.

So let’s talk about a healthy philosophy of can’t.

***

You are not the supreme ruler.

In your life there are many things you can control. Maybe you can change your route to not walk past the hat store. Maybe you can uninstall the social media app that’s always sucking you into the outrage machine. Maybe you can move the deep freezer with the kids’ ice cream in it out of your new library in the old garage and down the hall to the laundry room you don’t visit nearly so often (sorry kids, I am not your ice cream bank; readers, we’ll discuss my laundry backlog some other time).

But you cannot necessarily always make the change you wish you could.

You might be able to convince your colleagues not to put the snack tray out in the hallway next to your desk, but maybe you can’t.

You might be able to automate some of the social media work you do, but maybe it’s impossible to carry out your career in a communications industry without actually, go figure, communicating with people.

You might be able to drop catalogs into the recycle bin without ever looking at them, but maybe you also have to sometimes purchase necessary items, and you really can’t help that the best vendor also sells hats.

You probably face a mixed bag of struggles. Whether you’re working through serious addictions or just trying to live a somewhat more tranquil life, there is only so much reorganizing of your life that you can do.

Do the amount of temptation-reducing that you can, of course. Be creative. Be willing to take drastic measures if you’re struggling with a danger to your spiritual, emotional, or physical health.

After that? Give yourself credit for the battles that are still left.

***

Living your life in emergency-mode temptation-fighting is exhausting. If your choice is, for example, paying the bills by going to that job with the perpetual snack tray always sitting out, or serenely sinking into bankruptcy due to unemployment, you have to go do the job. You have to spend all day passing the snack tray and telling yourself no and walking quickly and trying not think about it.

That stinks.

It’s hard work.

Realistically you are not going to have as much emotional energy for other spiritual activities after you’ve put so much willpower into avoiding the snacks as best you can using the only tool available to you at this time.

Acknowledge it.

Acknowledge that at this time in your life, you are running a spiritual marathon ten hours a day. By fighting the good fight you are getting stronger — even if one time in a hundred you pass the snack table and cave — but you are getting stronger by working out. Just like physical exercise, the spiritual and emotional exercise of resisting temptation is tiring.

Your capacity for that work can grow, but it can’t be instantly expanded to infinity.

So if your circumstances are such that you must constantly battle temptations you can find no way to avoid, applaud yourself for the work you are doing.

***

And of course, final note for those readers who aren’t presently dealing with this kind of practical struggle . . .

If you have been blessed with a low-temptation lifestyle, avail yourselves of the three pillars of the spiritual exercise regimen: prayer, fasting, and almsgiving. Otherwise your soul will grow flabby for want of spiritual work.

I was going to find a good hat picture to illustrate this post, but today’s Wikimedia Image of the Day is too beautiful to skip. Photo of horses grazing in Parco Naturale Tre Cime by kallerna, CC 4.0. Click through and scroll down for some related close-ups.

On Doing Evil that Good May Come of It (TLDR: Don’t)

So here’s something that happened yesterday: A guy who should have known better, a stalwart defender of virtue and reason, posted a video on Twitter of a group of tween girls dancing in an explicitly sexualized manner.

It was a long clip, to my memory (I’m not going to click on it again, so if my memory is faulty, we’re going to have to live with that) beginning with low-grade “this is not something I’d want my daughter doing.” Gradually the girls’ dancing became increasingly erotic, to the point that it definitely transitioned into “yes, this is blatantly, undeniably sexualized near-porn,” and I didn’t continue watching after that.

(The girls’ costumes, I should note, would have been fine as bathing suits, for children playing sharks-and-minnows or jumping off the diving board . . . but no amount of clothing could cause the dance this conservative Christian posted to be any other than erotic.)

Anyhow, that was my two minutes of previewing Cuties, a film I was willing to consider might not be nearly what Netflix promoted it as, and a film that I still suspect was attempting to be a serious entry in the discourse against the hypersexualization of tweens and young teens. I even considered that the video this person-who-should-know-better posted was in fact a deepfake designed to hype up the political divide, though alas with a bit clicking around, the reports from those who viewed the film in its entirety confirm the dance sequence was genuine. IMDB briefly posted a warning, in reference to another scene in the film, the FYI it was technically in violation of US child pornography laws. Yikes.

So. We revisit a very old topic, and if you like, you can scoot on over to the The Junior Moral Theologian’s DIY Kit, where I lay out all the moral issues in more detail. Here I’m just going to repeat myself a bunch of different ways:

You may not do evil that good may come of it.

Having a good intention does not make an evil action a good action.

The fact that something good resulted from an evil act does not make the evil act good.

This is the non-negotiable of any viable ethical system. Might you find yourself in a horrible situation, in which you are forced to choose among several terrible options, and, in your desperation, choose the one with the least-bad outcome? Certainly. It’s a fallen world and in the worst circumstances we might find ourselves doing the unthinkable. It happens.

That does not make the evil action right. It just makes it the thing you did at a time when you didn’t see any other way.

In the case of, say, a Christian commentator with a large following choosing to post erotica, or a secular filmmaker choosing to train and pay young girls to perform that erotica, we are not speaking of desperate persons forced into a corner and struggling to find any way out.

But, and let’s be very clear here, neither of these two is any different from the rest of us.

Both, we can charitably assume, are in fact seeking to accomplish something good. The commentator was seeking to warn audiences that the film in question was morally objectionable. The director was seeking to warn audiences that the sexualization of young girls is a serious problem in our day — and before you scoff at that, I can attest from my viewing of the excerpt that the girls’ faces as they performed absolutely communicated a sense of being lost, of not understanding, of not liking, and yet of feeling like they had to do the thing in order to be approved. The stated artistic goal was accomplished in the scene I saw. The obvious (to you and me) problem, which makes the film unviewable for persons of good will who are duly forewarned, is that the director went about communicating her (valuable) message in a way that was, in fact, harmful to the girls working for her.

In the same way, the commentator who posted erotica in order to warn against erotica was exploiting the victimization of the girls, and also putting erotica in front of his readers, in the name of an otherwise good purpose.

The habit of using evil to do good is absolutely embedded in our culture.

In theory we consider lying (that would be a direct, explicit violation of the Ten Commandments) wrong, but in reality our culture has long categories of lies that are acceptable because they are done with good purposes in mind.

If Catholics are wacko extremists on medical ethics, it’s because our society considers the killing of innocent persons to be only wrong if it’s done for unpopular reasons.

National Public Radio hosted a non-ironic, softball interview on the justification for the violent destruction and theft of the property of innocent persons.

I’d be remiss in this list not to mention the whole justifying of adultery as if the average man or woman just had “no choice” but forsake their vows? And yet people will say that, and think that, in the most banal of circumstances.

Maybe you aren’t guilty of any of these, or at least not lately.

Before you get too convinced you aren’t like those other sinners: I challenge you to try to get through a full week without doing something you know is wrong — even if it’s just a little bit wrong — with the motivation of seeking a higher good.

Sin is like this. For most people, most of the time, sin is not fueled by a desire to do something horrible, it’s fueled by the twisted-up quest to experience something we’re convinced will be good.

“Less evil” is not good.

One of the reasons I expect it was so easy for the director of Mignonnes to justify her decision to pay young girls to perform erotica (and in one case, per IMDB’s original warning to viewers, to expose her breast on film) is that her film was about how normal these behaviors have become.

(FYI for those wondering: The acceptability of pornography is far more entrenched in respectable French society than in the United States. That’s me reporting first hand experiences among the married-with-kids, stalwart-citizen, professional class of the late 1980’s. Not something I read in a book. What I have seen in real homes among people who met every definition of “respectable” in their era.)

The director of the film was not asking the girls to perform something forbidden and illegal (though Netflix should know that the reported frontal-nudity scene is in fact illegal in the US, however award-winning it may be elsewhere). She was asking them to recreate what persons like myself got accused of prudery for objecting to when it appeared at the Super Bowl half-time show this year — albeit in the wholesome USA we have adult women do this to show how “liberated” they are, while the girls from the dance companies, the very best girl-dancers, handpicked to perform on the field on the biggest TV night of the year, look up in adoration. We reserve the actual girl-erotica for dance competitions on other weekends, thanks. So, from the director’s point of view, she was requesting the girls repeat what they already were willing to do, and may well have done before, only this time framed in such a way that viewers would be shocked into realizing just how wrong and destructive it is.

That good intention doesn’t justify the evil.

And that’s a shame, because there’s every reason to believe the director was attempting to open a very important conversation on sexual exploitation — just like the commentator who posted the erotica was trying to legitimately warn viewers away from the film that fell so badly short of its mark.

Artwork: Paul Gaugin, Breton Girls Dancing (1888), via Wikimedia, Public Domain

How’s it Going, Jen? Mid-August 2020 News & Links

A few quick updates as I hopefully get back into the swing of things? Maybe? Here’s all that’s been going on since I last fell off the internet:

(1) I took a leave of absence from social media because I had started losing my temper at people who were wrong. The break was surprisingly beneficial — I say surprising because my primary mode self-correction consisted of watching Agents of S.H.E.I.L.D. Best I can tell, it’s what happens if you cross C.S. Lewis with Tom Clancy with Hollywood Sci-Fi with an Evangelical Presbyterian. Season 3 is when it gets blatant.

Didn’t see that coming, though, tip: Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2. is a straight-up pro-life morality tale, except seedy and brilliant — if you happen to like campy sci-fi comedy-adventure infused with a potty-mouthed and hilarious Theology of the Body theme. (Parental supervision strongly recommended. None of this is for little kids.)

(2) Had to take a healthy, athletic teenager to the ER for extreme shortness of breath on exertion associated with a respiratory virus of unknown nature. She’s fine now. Also, our ER experience provides a few theories on why certain minority communities might be experiencing a higher rate of COVID-19 morbidity and mortality. –> All is not well in public health, guys.

(3) I’ve got two more here at the castle who’ve succumbed to a respiratory ailment of unknown nature, possibly the same one as the teen, possibly something else. In the effort to keep those three distanced from the remaining residents, I was doing an awful lot of zig-zagging around providing food service and so forth. That’ll keep you busy. I finally gave two men a kitchen in the camper in the yard so they could do some of their own cooking. Mr. Boy was appreciative, SuperHusband is not amused. Heh.

(4) Oh oh! and during all that? Our 18 y.o. came back from college for the one week we get to see her until Thanskgiving, we think, and it was absolutely vital, if she wished to return to school, which she does, that she not catch any kind of respiratory ailment. Huge thanks to the friends who housed her, fed her, and did airport shuttle so that she could limit her time with us to sitting outdoors and far away. Fun times. People prayed for us, though, and it was fine.

So that’s been most of it. In writing news:

NCRegister: “On the Limits of Identity Politics” If you missed it, it’s up and some people liked it. There should be another piece running soon on a Catholic approach to the problem of gender dysphoria, but I don’t see it yet? Next in my queue is an essay I’ve been failing at pulling together for an embarrassingly long time, but which introduces Cathy Lins, who specializes in parish mental health ministry, and who has a brand new forum here: Trauma-Informed Parishes. Go say hello to Cathy and soak up everything, because she knows what she’s about.

FYI the rumor that I “started a new job” at the Register is a product of Facebook’s determination to turn everything, at all, ever, into click-bait hype for your friends. What happened is that I realized I had put my blogging status at Patheos and here at the Conspiracy in my “about” details, but that the Register was missing. Crazy me went to rectify that oversight and next thing we know everyone’s congratulating me on my new promotion.

Um. I’ve been promoted to someone whose author bio is slightly more accurate? Kinda?

Books I finished reading, highly recommend, and plan to review in the days ahead:

Blorging: Ads aren’t functioning as well as usual (possible cause: widespread power outages?) so it’s a great time to wade through my latest entries at the mosh pit of religious plurality, if you haven’t taken the plunge lately:

“Speaking of Clerical Corruption”

We the laity are capable, if we work together, of investigating allegations like the ones above, and we are capable of creating landing places for discarded priests, seminarians, and religious to build new lives for themselves after they are persecuted for whistle-blowing. It’s too big a job to be done by one person, and too important a job to be left solely to one faction or another among the increasingly fragmented faithful.
“Education vs. Childcare vs. Public Goods”

Because of these harsh economic realities, there is tremendous pressure for schools to open back up, full-time as-per-usual. Parents need the low-tuition* childcare that schools provide, and to not provide that care is to leave parents in a serious bind.

Catholic social teaching has a different answer, and yes I know when I say it most people will swear it’s preposterous, but here me out below. There’s another way, and its worth considering.
“Breathtaking Beauty in Church Controversies over Kinda-Boring Stuff”

If you are like me, you never for a moment even considered the possibility that the I in “I baptize you . . .” was a make-or-break part of the baptismal formula. (I also never contemplated varying from it.) It was simply there, and it seemed logical, and what else was there to know? Now we have something to ponder. What’s going on with this one little pronoun the CDF is so worked up about? Turns out the answer is more interesting than I had guessed.

And today, prompted by this morning’s readings, and weirdly taking a twist into presidential politics (I didn’t see that coming even if you did): “How to Treat Gentiles and Tax Collectors”.

–> If you don’t care to think about the voting question, scroll directly down to the bottom to see the photo that inspired me to wrap up my meditation on what to do about terrible Catholics with a link to the Epic Vacation series here at the Conspiracy, because, top of page 2 of the E.V. category, I was reminded of my “What it Takes Not to Be a Nazi” photo tour and reflection on visiting a WWII cemetery, many memorials, and a concentration camp in eastern France.

Book reviews! Spoiler alert: I answer the question of what to do about terrible Catholics in those 300 fun-filled pages of The Beast. So far there’s one review up at Amazon, which I dared read because the reviewer kindly gave the book five stars. I quote the review in full:

Jen Fitz’s clear, sensible advice for the modern evangelist is a must-read. She has years of experience with dealing with many situations a lay Catholic may experience in explaining their faith. The book is well-organized and helpful for anyone who wishes to learn more about how to spread the Gospel.

Thank you, anonymous reader!

FYI – if you’ve read the book and would like to say something good about it, I’d be most grateful if you’d say so over at Amazon, where book publicity ekes out its living these days. Even more? I’d like you to loan your copy to someone who could use the inspiration or affirmation.

Thanks!

Today we illustrate our post with this photo of Ella the Snow Dog (CC 2.0) because:

Presently the 9th grader’s multi-year campaign to get a dog is gaining momentum but also hit a snag in the road called “Parents are doing their best to make sane, responsible decisions,” and
It’s mid-August in the Deep South, so even though it is unseasonably cool (low 90’s!?!!), “snow” is a very popular theme around here.

FYI because I love you, I scrolled through many pages of search results for “cute dog photo” in Wikimedia to bring you the very best. You’re welcome.

OSV Book Launch Webcast – Transcript Draft

Thank you to everyone who came to the webcast today! A link to the recording is forthcoming (whenever it’s ready to go — I don’t know how much work is involved in that, so I’m going to assume OSV’s tech people are superheros and it might not be this. exact. instant, but the event went well so it’s not headed to the circular file, we know that). I did confirm that OSV’s software does not have an option for creating captions, so here’s the first pass at a transcript:
Jennifer Fitz Webcast Notes – Temp Draft – June 30, 2020

There are some typos in there — surprisingly few — and I am proud of myself for using the spirit of self-control to not fix them live on the air while viewers waited, so you’re welcome, but as a result I was only able to go back and fix the one that was especially terribly bad, but not the others that are harder to remember and will take more time to find again. So a better draft will be issued at a later date. This is still word-for-word ten gazillion times better than you get off YouTube’s auto-transcript function, though if you want I could replace every theology term with a brand of beer in order to give you that experience? If you like? Nah. You do it yourself.

We did have time for some open Q&A at the end, and that is not in my notes above, but I will write up better, more succinct and accurate answers to all the questions we covered in the Q&A so we have that.

***
Meanwhile, a follow-up question: Would you be interested in more webcasts in the future, and if so, what would like me to talk about? Ideally topics that don’t involve more embarrassing stories about myself. Thanks! (You can weigh in at the discussion group.)

Got the word today that my book is shipping, and by that they mean my ~~Christmas Present~~ author copies are on their way. Woohoo!

What to Expect from a Saint

Over at the blorg yesterday I wrote about how, whatever St. Junipero Serra’s sins might have been, an authentic desire to evangelize is not one of them. Figures I’d say something like that. Today I want to address a deeper question: What are we to think about the problematic behavior of saints and other heroes?

Let’s begin with some foundational principles.

We know that the Christian faith is unchanging, and we know that the moral law is unchanging. Murder is wrong yesterday, today, and tomorrow, forever and ever amen. Jesus Christ is the Savior of humanity yesterday, today, and tomorrow, forever and ever amen. Thus, the first thing we should look for in a saint: The moral and spiritual ideals towards which a saint strives are unchanging ideals.

–> We expect a saint to love Jesus Christ and to practice and proclaim the Catholic faith as best he or she is able.

Saints overcome obstacles, but they aren’t omnipotent.

From our lives, from common sense, and from the historical record, we can know that there are obstacles to living out our Christian ideals.

Some obstacles are internal, such as physical or mental illness. These roadblocks to practicing the faith don’t make us less faithful. What they do is cause us to have to put more effort into loving God, who sees and acknowledges the heart. While some saints may have awe-inspiring external, easily-visible accomplishments to their name, others do not.

Other obstacles are created by our society, our culture, or the people around us. In another era, a saint might have been able to care for orphaned children by simply opening the doors and welcoming those in need. In our time, extensive regulations may prevent an individual, family, or religious association from being legally allowed to provide care.

–> When we look at a saint’s life, we have to realistically assess the resources and opportunities that were available to that person living in that era.

Culture clouds our human thinking.

While the natural law is written on the human heart, we know that human beings are fallen creatures. We are tempted to do what is comfortable and self-serving, and often we let our desire for gratification color our understanding of the Gospel.

Thus it is hard for a saint, or anyone, to overcome his or her weaknesses.

Furthermore, our culture affects our ability even to contemplate what the Gospel might be asking of us. A type of generosity or piety or morality that was encouraged and accepted in one time or place might be rare or nonexistent in another. When a given concept of Christian morality or devotion is simply not on the radar in our own time and place, it is very, very hard to look over the walls of our native culture and consider a better way of living.

I’m hard pressed even to provide an example, because I know that for any specific suggestion I make of an area where modern Americans struggle with recognizing and articulating the faith (and some other cultures did not), my suggestion will be dismissed as “ridiculous” or “extraneous” or “old fashioned” or “obsolete” or something else. We cannot see what lies beyond the walls of our own cultural prison.

–> We can expect a saint to respond freely and generously to those aspects of the faith which were understood and practiced in his or her culture, and to make sincere but not always successful attempts to discern and apply Christian doctrine counter-culturally.

Culture feeds certain types of piety.

In contrast, every culture has its virtues as well. What is often very confounding in the lives of the saints are the examples of virtues that are foreign to our time, but were considered ordinary piety in the saint’s time. Here I will give an example.

In our time, the practice of physical penance is virtually unknown. We allow for the merits of offering up unavoidable suffering, but even that is counter-cultural. One of the great challenges of our time is fighting evils such as abortion and euthanasia, which are fueled by a culturally-driven placing of the avoidance of suffering as the highest good. Even Christians have difficulty understanding why some of the suffering that life brings might, at times, have to be endured when there is no moral way to avoid it.

We do have a limited understanding of the value of physical penance. Specific acts of self-discipline are practiced by the most-rigorous of religious associations, and minor acts of self-denial are encouraged for all Catholics during the penitential season of Lent. However, even there, in our time we always temper any mention of corporal penance with warnings not to overdo it, not to commit self-harm, and so forth. I am absolutely at one with my wider spiritual culture in that regard.

In contrast, in other eras, we see that the benefit of physical penance was considered of greater value than the avoidance of physical harm that might result. Hence we have countless examples of saints and ordinary Catholics and even non-Christians carrying on astonishing displays of self-inflicted or self-allowed suffering that, to our modern mind, are contrary to faith and reason.

What’s going on with that? Shouldn’t the saint have known better?

Keep in mind those cultural walls. When your spiritual culture is telling you that xyz is the greater good . . . if your greatest desire is holiness, you will seek after that good.

–> We can expect saints to be willing to go to extremes to pursue paths of holiness encouraged in their time and place.

Saints take strange shapes.

Where does this leave us? It leaves us with saints who consistently love Jesus Christ, and everything else is a toss-up. Saints are people who strive for holiness, but that striving is going to be shaped by his or her personal limitations, by cultural boundaries, and by the types of piety and service that are most encouraged in his or her time and place.

Saints can still surprise. We look with special awe at those saints whose lives were wildly counter-cultural, because they stand out not only in their time but in ours.

All the same, some saints can make us uncomfortable with just how wrong they seem. When that happens, there are three questions we should ask:

Is the legacy of this saint the right legacy? Perhaps I’ve been passed a message about this saint that is honestly not what makes this saint an example of holiness.
Is this attribute of the saint just a plain old sin? Every saint recognizes his or her need for the Redeemer. Unless it’s the Blessed Mother we’re talking about, we know for a fact that some of this saint’s actions were sinful.
Is this attribute of the saint a virtue I need to know about? One of the great gifts of the saints is that they allow us to peek over our cultural walls.

What we don’t need to do is be afraid. It’s okay to have weird saints in our spiritual family tree. We are not a religion that worships mortal men. We are a religion that worships Jesus Christ. Allow the Lord to show when and how to learn from this or that saint, and when you need to recognize that so-and-so just isn’t the best spiritual companion for you right now.

Is this person helping you grow in love? Is this person drawing you closer to Jesus Christ? Whether it’s a saint in heaven or someone you know here on earth, those are the qualities we look for in spiritual friendships. It doesn’t matter whether so-and-so is so helpful to your friend or your mom or you favorite priest. Choose to surround yourself with the people who make you a better Christian.

Photo: Crystals of dried Coca-Cola, courtesy of Wikimedia Image of the Day, CC 4.0, by Alexander Klepnev. I was going to settle for a renaissance peoplescape of Heaven, but then there was this. So this is what you get. Probably the best use of Coca-Cola yet.

Making the Mass Present in Your Soul When Your Body is Absent from It

I want to talk about making use of the interior life.

For me, and sometime soon I will lay out the whole long story, the Eucharist is the center of my faith. No matter how miserably I’m spacing out during Mass, from the moment of the Sanctus I suddenly wake up to God; from there the consecration, the Agnus Dei and fraction rite, Ecce, and finally my own reception of the sacrament are when the Mass really does something life-changing for me.

Y’all wish that change would last a little longer and be a little more visible in my life, but to God a thousand years is a like a day, so hang on, He’s working. This is the time of week (or time of day, when I can get it) that I am most aware of that work happening.

Therefore having to not go to Mass is something I dislike intensely.

Reading prayers, even very good prayers, or watching the Mass on TV are not the same. They can be valuable, but I don’t love them and I don’t get the same sense of God’s presence and intimacy apart from the Mass.

And yet sometimes I have to not go to Mass.

You might be in this situation right now, and you might be struggling with that reality, because you want, more than anything, to be with our Lord in the holy sacrifice of the Mass. So I’m going to talk to you about my interior life, and maybe it can help you with yours.

Slacking vs. Slaking

I can be a pretty lousy Catholic. Everything I am going to say does not apply to situations where I’m spiritually slacking. There are times when I let myself get so wrapped up in the delusion of being “self sufficient” from God that what prayer I do manage, what obligations I do fulfill, are not about intimacy with the Lord.

But, fortunately we have the Sunday obligation, and the Mass does its work on me, and so I can count on most weeks getting some spiritual first aid by the time the consecration rolls around, even if I’ve been committing low-level spiritual self-harm all week long. And of course some times I am, in fact, seeking God throughout my week, and taking time to be with Him, and that’s the spiritual state I’m going to be talking about now.

See, when you are seeking God, if something happens that keeps you from Mass, your soul can be disposed to receiving Him even when you are separated.

This is a mystical thing, not a theological treatise, so don’t get hung up on vocabulary. I am talking from the point of view of my lived experience, and if you would like to translate that into precise definitions of this or that category of prayer, you can do that. I’m just going to tell you what I know.

And what I know is that when you are thirsting for Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, the Lord will slake that thirst.

How to Be Not Afraid

This is the thing that has worked for me, so if you are now facing the absence of the sacraments and that fills you with anxiety, try this thing:

Mentally put yourself there in the sacrament. If it’s the Eucharist, mentally put yourself in Adoration before the Lord. See, feel, hear, smell, taste in your mind that moment when you and Jesus are together at Mass. If it is confession you cannot access, as you make your act of perfect contrition at home, see, feel, hear, smell, taste in your mind that moment when you and Jesus are together in Confession. The scene or the thought or the quiver in your gut that you experience will be unique to you, so I’m not going to give you too many words of instruction. Just mentally try to make present that moment of spiritual lightning that strikes, or that wave of spiritual refreshment, or that warm, powerful embrace of consolation, that in the past you have felt when you diligently seek the Lord in the sacrament.

I don’t have your brain. Maybe there is a hymn, or an image, or the wafting scent of incense, or some other tangible thing that helps you make your experience of the sacrament again present to you. Maybe it is the position of your body. Maybe it is the memory of a particular person who touched you profoundly at a time when you received the sacrament — a priest’s advice in the confessional, or the lady in the pew who held your hand at the sign of peace, or whatever it is — there could be some particular memory that helps you re-call, re-summon, your experience of the sacrament. Don’t be afraid if it’s something weird. Maybe the wood of your kitchen table reminds you of the wood of the pew and somehow that’s your thing. I don’t know what crazy way God has put together the connections in your brain.

But figure that out.

And then when you are saying to yourself, “I hate that I can’t go to Mass on Sunday,” or whatever it is that you are missing, stop and take some time to mentally make present that sacrament. Allow yourself to experience it again. Allow God to bring to you, right in your bed or at your desk or at your kitchen sink, the grace that you experienced before.

Time with an Infinite God

The thing is that though we live in time, God lives outside of it.

God is able, with your willingness and cooperation, to deliver back to your awareness the grace that He bestowed on you already, about which you have forgotten. He who knew what would happen today, and tomorrow, and three weeks from now, has poured out on you all that you need to survive this time of desolation.

I don’t mean that this is a substitute for the sacraments. I don’t mean that if you ought to be going to Confession today or Mass today, and though you could obey the Lord’s call, instead you plan to sit in your lounge chair and surf the internet, that you can just sub out thirty seconds of imagination and prayer for the Lord’s desire and command for you to find Him in the sacrament. No way no how.

But if for some reason (perhaps acting on obedience to your bishop though you do not agree with his reasoning, and yet you know very well his authority is divinely-ordained, or perhaps acting in justice towards those to whom you owe care and protection) you are kept from the sacrament you desire, I do know that in those times, the Lord can supply what is lacking.

Artwork: William-Adolphe Bouguereau, The Virgin With Angels, courtesy of Wikimedia, Public Domain.

How to Look Like a Saint While Heading to Hell*

Head’s up: This post is not g-rated, and it does dissect the allegations in a real abuse case.

To all but those few who knew his secrets, the news about Jean Vanier comes as a complete shock. (Count me among the shocked). How can this guy who did so much good — a guy who was seriously being considered for canonization — have been guilty of such crimes?

This is a question we can’t just set aside as impossible to answer. It is not impossible to answer, and since sin didn’t go to the grave with this latest scandal, we have a responsibility to understand and act on the answer. So, unpleasant though it be to launch into this topic right now, here are the three things that make it possible for an evangelist to live a double life.

#1 Stealth Predators Test the Waters

It doesn’t matter whether we are speaking of consensual affairs among willing adults or the most nefarious rape, if you want to live a double life, you have to move carefully. Read this account of an abuse-survivor’s story to see how it’s done. I chose this story in particular because it shows you exactly how a predator avoids detection (though in this case he got caught sooner rather than later), because we’re looking at a case where the predator tested the waters, fish got away, man had to move on.

What to note:

The predator (priest in this case) starts by building a trusting relationship.
Early on, the idea of secrecy or covert-ops is introduced (“tell your mom you’re seeing me for spiritual direction”).
The first abuse is an action that can be explained away.

Hence the insistence by the predator’s superiors that the abusive encounter was merely a “boundary violation.” Let’s be clear: A man pressing his erect penis against a woman’s body, even through the barrier of clothing, is engaging in sexual activity. No decent man will know he has an erection (this is not something men are unable to detect) and choose to physically press his pelvis against the body of a woman who is not his wife.

Legit foreplay for a married couple. Not legit under any other circumstance, and no sane adult man is going to let a teenage girl become aware he has an erection by physically putting her in contact, even through clothing, with that part of his body. Nope.

And yet we see in this sample case that the behavior gets excused. Why? Because it was chosen by the predator for the ease with which he could wiggle away from the charges. The girl was mistaken. Either she doesn’t know what she’s talking about (because how does a young teen know what an erection is), or if she does know, then obviously she’s a hussy and she’s making a false accusation — bad family, dontcha know. I’m concerned someone might be abusing her, and that’s why she’s acting out. And gosh, I shouldn’t have hugged her, I shouldn’t have let her sit on my lap, it’s just that she reminded me so much of my niece, and she really seemed like she wanted a hug, and listen guys, I realize I had a lapse in judgment. I’m so sorry. I realize my mistake, and I’m not going to let it happen again.

A predator who gets away with his or her crimes is someone who operates carefully.

#2 Toxic People Choose to Surround Themselves with Enablers

Obviously the predator has to move beyond those initial tests. So how do you get away with your abusive behavior when sooner or later word is bound to get out? You do this by making sure that no one close to the facts is going to report.

To a toxic person, there are two types of people in the world: Those who will tolerate the abusive behavior and those who will not. The non-tolerators are systematically removed from the toxic person’s circle of friends.

Much of this is self-chosen by the healthy person. If you have a boss who underpays and overworks, the simplest thing to do is look for another job. If that friend is always dragging you down with gossip and drama, you start hanging out with different friends. If a relative is taking advantage of your generosity, you set firm boundaries.

In ministry, self-respecting volunteers and paid staff don’t stick around long if toxic people are in charge. They move on early. Gradually, without ever having been caught at any serious crime, the predator-in-charge finds him or herself surrounded only by those who will, for whatever reason, look the other way at sinful behavior.

And of course the career-climbing predator has additional tools available to help clean out the org chart. Whereas a holy person will not lie to sabotage a fellow employee, a skilled predator is well able to build a case against those who need to be eliminated. An insinuation there, a careful retelling of the facts here, and next thing you know that volunteer who wouldn’t shut up about actually following child safety procedures is out the door. Once you are in charge of a ministry, it’s easy enough to find some pretext for making a staffing or organizational decision to unload the contingent who gets in your way.

Reality to consider as we pray for our priests? It is almost impossible for a pastor of souls to know what is really going on in his parish or diocese. Unless he makes a powerful effort otherwise, his life is going to be saturated by the company of people who revel in winning the game of being part of the priest or bishop’s inner circle, and people who want to play that game are not healthy people. Thus even a holy man is likely to end up enabling toxic behavior — and it’s hard to be a holy man.

#3 The Devil is Prowling and Sinners Lie to Ourselves

Allow me to quote the St. Joseph’s Baltimore Catechism: Venial sin is worse than the measles.

As an expert sinner, let me tell you, it is very, very easy to talk yourself into sin. Venial sin, mortal sin, all sin. The smarter you are, the better you can be at making up rationalizations for why this sin here is not a sin at all, and that one over there is maybe just a teeny tiny sin, especially after you consider all the mitigating circumstances.

The degrading nature of sin is plain as day to those who aren’t caught up in the self-built snare of lies used to justify the sinful behavior. That’s why sin hates daylight. When you suspect you are sinning, you work hard to hide to the sin. Sometimes you do this by acting in secret; other times you camouflage the sin so it passes as no-big-deal. If it must be discussed, you come up with words and phrases that make the sin sound like something harmless, or perhaps even something healthy.

This does not mean that adultery is just the same as making a frowny-face at your husband when he interrupts your phone call. This does not mean that abusing a child is the same thing as that time you let the kids have brownies for dinner. What it means is that the more intentionally we engage in the battle against even our smallest sins, the more easily we can understand how people who are dedicated to a life of good can also be deceiving themselves into committing serious evils.

The teeny-tiny devil who helps us justify our little sins is just a miniature, cute-faced version of the big devil haunting the peripheries. To commit a little sin, tell yourself a little lie. To commit a big sin, tell yourself a big lie. Same process.

There is no easy solution to all this.

What we want is to be able to say, “Now that I understand how this happens, I can prevent it from ever happening again!”

Not so much. All we can really control is our own behavior. We can choose not to be complicit in corrupt activities. We can grow in our own holiness so that we are more aware when someone else is pulling out the excuses to justify a sin. We can teach our children and other souls in our care how to recognize and avoid sin in ourselves and others.

To the extent that we have authority to do so, we can take steps to battle against the structures and excuses that enable serious sin to flourish.

Meanwhile, free will’s a bear. Be as good as you can, help fight evil where you can, and then fast and pray.

That’s what you can do.

Photograph: French cuirassier during a re-enactment of the Battle of Waterloo, courtesy of Wikimedia CC 3.0.

*Lord willing, Jean Vanier repented of his sins and is now enjoying the delights of Heaven. May we all benefit from the bountiful mercy of Jesus Christ who will do anything He can, even die for us, that we each might be saved from our two worst enemies.

How to Find a Great Speaker for Your Evangelization Event

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Saints overcome obstacles, but they aren’t omnipotent.

Culture clouds our human thinking.

Culture feeds certain types of piety.

Saints take strange shapes.

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Slacking vs. Slaking

How to Be Not Afraid

Time with an Infinite God

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