Considering Catholicism

Sam stands in the shadow of Mordor and says it plain: there is some good in this world, and it is worth fighting for. That sentence does something to a person. It raises the old question the materialist world has never quite answered—where does the idea of goodness even come from, and why does it make a claim strong enough that we keep going when every calculation says turn back? The natural moral law is written on the heart; a law implies a lawgiver; the ache for a goodness that costs something is not a malfunction but a compass. The Catholic claim is that the Good did not wait for us to climb to him. He came down—through a girl’s yes, lived as a man, died without retaliating, and rose so that the last word would not belong to cruelty. For those who have felt the pull, and the glimpses that enlarge rather than diminish, the trail does not end in a private preference. It leads to a living body that has kept teaching the same dignity, raising the same heroes, and setting a place at the table. The only question left is the one Mary answered. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

After an exhausting election season, it’s easy to argue about which way our country should go without asking what it’s all for. In a 1911 newspaper column, more than a decade before he became Catholic, G.K. Chesterton offered a test as old as mankind: can an honest man marry an honest woman, raise their children and give them a secure life? In this episode, we look at why every political and economic system should be measured by that standard, why the family comes before the state, and why financial security isn’t enough without freedom: to raise children in the faith, to settle our own affairs close to home (the Catholic principle of subsidiarity), and to love and preserve our homeland (patria). There’s no candidate to back or policy to push here, just some of the right questions to ask, and a little comfort for anyone worn out by the last few months. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Does God have a gender? Why does the Catholic Church use masculine pronouns like “He” and titles like “Father” and “Son”? In this episode, Greg explores the scriptural, theological, and traditional reasons behind this language, drawing on the Catechism, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. He addresses modern objections—Is it patriarchal? Why not “Mother” or gender-neutral terms?—and shows how this language shapes our faith and relationship with God. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

For secular folks this is Halloween, for Catholics it's the eve of All Saints Day, but for Protestants it's Reformation Day, when Martin Luther nailed his complaints against the Catholic Church to a cathedral door in Germany. Today, Protestants celebrate what they imagine is a heroic and prophetic scene. But as Greg explains in this snapshot, it's nothing to celebrate. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

A glimpse of something beautiful can put you on the road before you have a name for the destination. In this episode Greg returns to the moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam sees a white star through the shadow of Mordor, and to the way Tolkien and Lewis kept writing the same thing: beauty is not an ornament. It is a pathway. He traces that hunger through a childhood Christmas song, the Magi following a star, and the recognition that the Catholic house had kept that beauty and given it a face — Mary, the crucified Christ, stone and glass and a line of chant that was not performing an experience but letting you into one. The Catechism, John Paul II’s Letter to Artists, and Augustine all say the same thing in different words: created beauty never fully satisfies. It stirs a nostalgia it cannot finish. The draw is not that Catholics have better art. It is that this house is thick with it, and ordered toward the One who is beauty. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Catholicism does not lower the bar to make the faith easier to swallow. It treats people as adults and expects them to grow up — in doctrine, in moral responsibility, in the seriousness of the sacraments, and in the long conversation the Church has been having with itself for two thousand years. In this conversation with Ed, Greg and Ed talk about what it feels like when a church stops trying to entertain you and starts expecting you to keep up. They look at the features that get criticized as bugs — the depth, the obligations, the refusal to let a sin remain a secret — and why those things can feel like a relief after years of being told that God does not really expect anything of you. The draw is not complexity for its own sake. It is the sense that Christianity, if it is true, is a serious thing, and that a grown-up faith calls people to take it seriously. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Nine or ten at night, fog on a mountain road, and a Catholic chapel the size of a tool shed. A crucifix, a couple of benches, a place to pray. It was the first Catholic building Greg ever walked into, and it was quiet. A lot of people describe the same pull. An empty church on a Tuesday that is full of glass and saints and stories, and dead quiet. Confession lines, a candle, a priest anointing someone before surgery, five silent minutes while the vessels are purified after Communion. Not a lower volume. A room, and a week, that are not trying to fill every gap. Hell, in Lewis’s picture, is noise that never stops, because if it stopped you might hear something. The Church kept the other thing on purpose, from Benedict rationing even good speech to a parish that agrees to wait. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

A Christianity of new beginnings gets old. The megachurch was the recovery of real church, and before that the Jesus Movement, and before that some other return to the original, each one arriving as the source and aging into a period style. For a lot of people the pull toward Rome starts there: not in a proof about Peter, but in a wish to go upstream and find the water still moving. In the early 2000s that wish was unfashionable. Not arriving had become a spirituality, with books and sermons hung on an old U2 title, as if God sends people on a search he never means them to finish. Jesus says the opposite. Seek, and you will find. Once the thing you want is the source, most of the map goes quiet, and the only houses that can even scratch the itch are the ones that claim to be the thing still running from the apostles. This hour is about that draw — the weariness, the upstream instinct, and the moment the claim has an address. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Nearly five hundred episodes of this show have been about why the Catholic Church is true. That work was real, and it is not being retired. It was also incomplete. Most people do not start down the Road to Rome because they won an argument. They start because something draws them — a longing, a story, a seriousness, a beauty — before they can give the thing a name. In this short introduction to Drawn to Rome, Greg tells the part of his own conversion he usually leaves out: Tolkien, read as a kid who did not know the word Catholic, planted a hunger that Calvary Chapel, Calvin Seminary, and a long shelf of arguments never quite replaced. The books came later. They kept him from feeling crazy. They did not put his feet on the road. No one gets argued into love. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

Four true sentences became, for a lot of us, the entire gospel. They were a trailer. They were never the film. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. You are a sinner. Jesus is God’s only provision. You must receive him as Savior and Lord. Whether or not anyone still uses the name, those four sentences are the unexamined scaffold of a great deal of conservative evangelical Christianity — the invitation at the end of the sermon, the question that ends the conversation, the prayer after which you are told you are in. This episode is not a dunk on Bill Bright or on the first yes those sentences have actually produced. It is a look at how a short evangelism pitch became the whole movie for so many people, and at what the New Testament still holds beyond a decision: a Church, sacraments, repentance as a life, and a country that opens the further in you go. If you have ever felt that there must be more than the youth-group or Bible-church version of the gospel, this hour is an invitation to go further up and further in. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: [email protected] • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.