Holy Christmas, Batman … they’re thinking, talking and writing about Christianity

Several times a year (today being one of those times) I’ll see a post on my Facebook timeline from some old friend or colleague, who I haven’t seen for years, saying something to the effect, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious.” Actually, that’s a verbatim quote from today on Facebook. But similar sentiments crop up several times a year, sometimes seemingly out of the blue, sometimes in relation to something I’ve recently written and posted on Facebook, or perhaps just re-posted from somewhere else. Usually it is framed more as a statement with a dangling question mark rather than a direct question.

The questioner in this case was a former roommate, who last I checked in with him on the matter about 30 years ago, was himself a committed atheist. And also a good guy, as we might say, principled and ethical. A good friend. A third member of our university roommate trio, who visited me after more than 20 years last summer, had also heard I was “pretty religious,” he told me. His wife, who I haven’t met yet, had suggested that before he visited, after reading some of my Facebook posts. My friend isn’t actually on Facebook himself but trolls his wife’s account from time to time, as do most Facebook objectors I know. A non-committal agonistic, he told me his response was sort of to shrug and say not to worry, “John’s always been a Catholic.”

When I hear or read this kind of thing, several things occur to me. One is the sobering fact that people I consider friends or former colleagues, who I worked with years ago, apparently in many cases find any connection between religion and me surprising and noteworthy enough to comment on. What, I wonder, does this say about how I lived my life in the years that I worked with or lived near them? As I said, sobering. And a bit rhetorical, as I’m not sure that I’d want them all to answer that, at least not on my timeline on Facebook.

As for their question, which might be paraphrased as, “When did you get religion?” how exactly does one answer that? I suppose Protestant evangelicals might point to their “born again” experience as that moment. Catholics …. well, infant baptism.

I can almost picture Pope Francis reminding me about the Sadducees, Pharisees and clericalism, should I start boasting about how religious I am. Pope Francis really is not a fan of legalism or legalists. He sees the Church as a big field hospital for sinners, of which he includes himself.

Given that I work 18 hours on Saturdays and Sundays, my parish priest might be surprised to hear how religious I am, too, given my mass attendance for the one mass I might attend weekly on Saturday nights at 6:30 p.m., after working 10 of those 18 hours, is pretty abysmal. No excuse. Sadly, “The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” many times and an after-work nap beckons.

But when I am awake, I do write about religion with some frequency. I also read about it, think about it and think it matters far more than most journalists understand. However, that’s not exactly a new realization that I’ve come to. Almost 18 years ago, I was among the 270 participants on both sides of that great divide, interested in the intersection of religion and politics in the public square, when I attended the first-ever Faith in the Media conference at the Carleton University School of Journalism in Ottawa for three days from June 7-9, 1998. The Peterborough Examiner, while it didn’t have a religion beat in 1998, graciously picked up the tab for their city hall reporter to go.

Toronto’s Roman Catholic archbishop at the time, Aloysius Cardinal Ambrozic, noted that the Church makes truth claims and demands, which are absolute, while the media tends to be liberal, and, as such, opposed to absolutes. “(The) media are adept at showing the ills of society, but not the remedies … Most of our media are not interested in Christ’s self-emptying death, only in sweating and weeping Madonnas. The media love religious kitsch.” But Ambrozic quickly added, “We, the religious professionals, are not very forthcoming sometimes, perhaps out of a fear of sensationalism. Nor do we always explain ourselves well. At other times we kowtow to the media when we should question its mindset.”

I had also been able to write about religion some during the early to mid-1990s at the Kingston Whig-Standard, where religious coverage was quite possible on weekends, especially if you initiated it. One of my more surreal moments of religion coverage came in June 1995, less than two months after Timothy McVeigh, radicalized after the Waco Siege and Ruby Ridge incident, killed 168 people when he bombed the Oklahoma City federal building, and I covered a conference in Kingston called “Take A Stand ’95: Defending Your Faith in the New World Order.”

Gary Kah, of Indiana, and Eric Barger, of Texas, two of the rising stars of the televised Bible prophecy circuit, told me it was tough going in the immediate wake of Oklahoma City to deliver their message. I imagined it would be.

McVeigh himself was a baptized Roman Catholic but self-professed agnostic, who would later receive the Roman Catholic Sacrament of Anointing of the Sick, formerly known as Last Rites or Extreme Unction, administered through a federal Bureau of Prisons chaplain, minutes before his execution in the federal death chamber at Terre Haute, Indiana on June 11, 2001.

While it may have been tough going at the time in 1995, Kah and Barger are still going – strong, or at least, so it seems.

And the interesting thing is that much of what they talked about that June day more than 21 years ago has come to pass.

A “cashless” society, biometrics, including palm geometry and retinal scanning;  these things are no longer the stuff exclusively of the religious right and tin foil hat meme.

Or how about Implanted  RFID (radio frequency identification) chips? … hmm … sounds kinda like something from the pages of a script for one of the late Iowa filmmaker Russ Doughten’s movies, such as his 1972 film, A Thief in the Night, followed by its three sequels – A Distant Thunder in 1978, Image of the Beast in 1980 and The Prodigal Planet in 1983. Doughten, who earned his master’s degree from Yale Drama School in 1954, died at the age of 86 in August 2013.

While one friend on Facebook today was musing, “Heard you(‘re) pretty religious” another a few hours later sent me a link to Laurie Goodstein’s keynote address at the symposium on religious literacy in journalism earlier this month at Harvard Divinity School for the Religious Literacy Project.

I had read part of her speech last week. “I’m glad that we’re all here because we now have urgent work to do,” Goodstein said in her keynote speech Dec. 8. “Religious literacy has probably never been more important, or more of a challenge. The grounds are shaking, the fissures are cracking open all around us, and the faultlines all seem to intersect. Race, class, gender and underneath it all like molten lava: religion.”

Goodstein is the national religion correspondent for The New York Times. After earning a B.A. from University of California Berkeley and an M.A. from the Columbia School of Journalism, she began her journalism career in 1989 at The Washington Post.

She started as news assistant before becoming a metro reporter and then national reporter. While at the Post in both 1995 and 1996, she won two major awards for religion newswriting, The Templeton Religion Reporter of the Year and the Supple Religion Writing Award.

She joined The New York Times in 1997. “Her work for the Times has covered a wide range of topics and religious traditions, offering a nuanced rather than monolithic view of American Catholics, evangelicals, and Muslims, among others,” said Harvard Divinity School. “In 2004, she won the American Academy of Religion’s award for best in-depth news reporting on religion, an award she won again in 2009. In 2015, she also won the Religion Newswriters Association’s award for excellence in religion reporting. Her recent work has covered American evangelicals’ support for Donald Trump, the possibility of female deacons in the Catholic Church, and Muslim opposition to ISIS.”

I grew up Roman Catholic in an extended family of mainly Protestants (primarily United Church, but with a smattering of Anglicans) with a few Mormons and Jehovah’s Witnesses also added to the mix. I still have my dad’s 1927 United Church certificate for perfect Sunday school attendance. He was a member of the United Church when he married my mother in June 1942 – an era when “mixed marriages,” as they were quaintly called, were still rather uncommon and somewhat frowned upon by both Protestants and Catholics.

Eventually my dad converted to Catholicism of his own accord. But it was strongly suggested to me by my parents during my childhood that religion wasn’t a particularly suitable topic for discussion at large extended family events given the plurality of beliefs and the conviction with which they were held. I thought religion and politics were about the two most interesting topics one could talk about at the dinner table, so this imposed considerable restraint on me. Still, if my Uncle Morley and Aunt Dot weren’t bringing The Watchtower or Awake! around to the house on visits (and they weren’t), it seemed a reasonable accommodation. My dad and Uncle Morley found their common ground in a boat fishing. All in all, my parent’s live-and-let-live theology has struck me as increasingly wise as I get older.

Christmas dinner next week for many means travelling long miles only to be thrust together in close quarters with other annually seasonally-close family members and friends who hold somewhat different cultural, political, sports or even religious beliefs than you do.

In terms of the latter, this happens even among Christians, hard as that may be to believe, marking the birth of the saviour some 2,000-plus years ago in Bethlehem – or is it Nazareth? Take your pick.

The Gospels of Saint Matthew and Saint Luke opt for Bethlehem, while Saint Mark and Saint John seem to lean more toward Nazareth.

As for the year, month or day of Jesus’ birth, you can likely rule out Dec. 25 for the latter two and settle on sometime between 7BC and 4BC for the year. Pope–emeritus Benedict XVI in his book, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives wrote that Jesus was born several years earlier than commonly believed because the entire Christian calendar is based on a miscalculation by a sixth century monk known as Dionysius Exiguus, or in English, Dennis the Small.

Given these antecedents it perhaps should come as no surprise then that Roman Catholics and their Protestant brethren some five centuries almost after the Reformation still don’t see eye-to-eye on some of the theological fine points of Christianity. In fact some evangelicals are pretty sure Catholics aren’t really Christians when it come right down to it and remain “unsaved” if they’re not “born again.”

The Catholic response is often a dismissive exercise in pulling rank and saying, in essence, “we were here first” and we are therefore synonymous with being “the Church.” As in one and the same in an unbroken line from Saint Peter to Pope Francis.

How this might play out at a Catholic-Protestant Christmas dinner has been nicely illustrated by Chris Castaldo, lead pastor at New Covenant Church of Naperville in Naperville, Illinois. Castaldo, who was raised as a Catholic and who had an uncle who was a cardinal,  several years ago did a 4:38-video promo for his book, Holy Ground: Walking with Jesus as a Former Catholic, where he plays the role of the Catholic brother, “Vito” at the Christmas dinner because, he says, he was a natural as a former Catholic – and “a Long Island Guido” – to play the role.

“Pastor Dave,” Castaldo’s good friend, Lon Allison, pastor of teaching and evangelism and missions at Wheaton Bible Church in West Chicago, Illinois, plays the Protestant minister.

The video, which can be seen at http://vimeo.com/2702601, is based on a true incident that happened to Castaldo as a minister at College Church in Wheaton, but whereas the actual incident happened right in the church, the fictional video setting has been moved to the family Christmas dinner. To say more about it here would make me a spoiler.

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Rejoice: Canadian Catholic author Michael D. O’Brien’s Elijah in Jerusalem, the long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, has just been published

Michael D. O’Brien, the Ottawa-born Roman Catholic author and painter, has just had Elijah in Jerusalem, his long-awaited sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published by San Francisco’s Ignatius Press, one of the largest American publishers of Catholic books, which was founded by Father Joseph Fessio, a Jesuit, in 1978.

He has worked as a professional artist since 1970 when he had his first one-man exhibit at a major gallery in Ottawa. Since 1976, O’Brien has painted religious imagery exclusively.

When one says Elijah in Jerusalem is the long-awaited to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, they should perhaps qualify that by making it clear long awaited by readers. Not necessarily O’Brien, who told Joan Frawley Desmond, senior editor of the National Catholic Register in an Oct. 15 interview, that he had not originally intended to write a sequel to Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, published in 1996:

“No, I didn’t,” O’Brien told Frawley, in response to her question asking if he had intended from the beginning almost 20 years ago to write a sequel? “Though the idea of a sequel was often suggested to me by readers, I rejected it for many years,” O’Brien said. “However, during the past few years, powerful images and scenes for the continuing story kept arising in my imagination, begging to be set down on paper. So I prayed and waited. Then came a moment when it was clear that I should write the book – and that the time was now.”

The father of six children, O’Brien, and his wife, Sheila, live in the village of Combermere in eastern Ontario’s scenic, historic, and very rural, Madawaska Valley, about 125 miles west of Ottawa.

I have known about O’Brien, who was briefly both an agnostic and an atheist as a young man, and his work since at least the mid-to-late 1990s, around the time Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, was published, but only got around to reading the novel a couple of years ago. It was a true delight from cover-to-cover. A few years earlier, I had read Plague Journal, one of the novels in his apocalyptic and dystopian 1990s’ trilogy, which also includes Strangers and Sojourners and Eclipse of the Sun. Plague Journal is set in the near future, composed of both written and mental notes made by Nathaniel Delaney, who is the editor of a small town newspaper. The story takes place over a five-day period as he flees arrest by a federal government agency during the preliminary stage of the rise of a totalitarian state in North America. Delaney is one of the few voices left in the media who is willing to speak the whole truth about what is happening, and as a result the full force of the government is brought against him.

O’Brien is an original yet orthodox thinker, writing a novel again with themes rooted in a Catholic view of spiritual warfare, the end times and the Second Coming. While it is not quite uncharted Catholic writing territory, eschatological and apocalyptic themes are often more associated with Protestant premillennial dispensationalist evangelical writers, say Tim LaHaye and Jerry B. Jenkins, and their best-selling 16-book Left Behind series.

O’Brien is interested in exploring the battle between good and evil in history, but also through the souls of individuals, and God’s desire for human beings to choose to love him through an act of free will. Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Notre Dame-educated Chicago Catholic writer Thomas O’Toole has written, “follows not the simplest interpretations that ‘Revelation’ refers solely to John’s own time,” or “it is exclusively a meditation on the end of things,” or even “a map of the Church’s history.” Rather, it is the interpretation ‘favored by most of the Church Fathers … a theological vision of a spiritual landscape’ that combines all three.”

O’Brien himself, in a talk given by him on Sept. 20, 2005 at Saint Patrick’s Basilica in Ottawa, said, “There is always a battle over every soul. Even if our times prove not to be the times toward which St. John’s Revelation is pointing, each of us must go through a kind of small ‘a’ apocalypse. Each of us certainly will be given a capital ‘R’ revelation at the moment of our deaths when we experience our personal judgment, when all that we are, all that we have done or neglected to do will be revealed.

“The Greek word apokalypsis means a revealing or unveiling. During our lives in this world each of us will indeed face the beast, which is the devil, our ancient adversary, the enemy of our individual souls and of mankind as a whole. In some form or other we must learn to personally resist him and to overcome him in Christ. At the same time we must understand that there will come a point in history when all his malice, all his devices, all his rage will be released in a final vicious attack upon the entire Body of Christ. It will be intense; it will be brief. If we find ourselves in the midst of those three and a half years of total persecution, it will not feel so brief. Yet we must always keep in mind that his time is coming to an end; indeed he is already defeated by the sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross and there remains only the final battle through which the Church and the world must pass.

“We are in the final battle, we are in the apocalypse, we are in the book of Revelation, which the Church, beginning with most of the Church Fathers, believes to be a vision of the entire unfolding of salvation history after the Incarnation, culminating in the total victory of Christ over the entire cosmos and its restoration to the Father. The book of Revelation is not a schematic diagram or a flat blueprint or a purely linear timeline. It is a mysterious multidimensional vision which surely contains linear-chronological aspects, but that is not the whole thing. Indeed it is not the main thing.”

O’Brien told Frawley earlier this month: “Satan attempts to mesmerize, like a serpent paralyzing its victim with fear before devouring it. The many fronts of evil are components in the vast and complex war between good and evil  the war that will last until the end of time. As the forces of evil, visible and invisible, appear to spread and grow ever stronger, we who follow Jesus must keep before the eyes of our hearts the ultimate truth of his coming victory. A healthy balance is needed in our pondering of ‘end times’ questions. We should remain prayerfully alert, but we should never allow ourselves to become obsessively over-focused on the darkness. Again, the eyes of the serpent can delude us into discouragement and even despair.”

In the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist interpretation of Bible prophecy, which posits a pretribulation secret Rapture – there is a belief that Christians will be taken up from earth in a sudden, silent removal of true believers by God prior to a time of tribulation and the Second Coming. For this belief, pre-tribbers rely heavily on Saint Paul and 1 Thessalonians: “For the Lord himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. And the dead in Christ will rise first; then we who are alive, who are left, shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.”

That, to be clear, is not a Catholic reading, nor would it be O’Brien’s reading, of 1 Thessalonians or Catholic theology, as the passage describes a very loud and public event, not a secret Rapture. We do, as does O’Brien, however, believe in a future Antichrist, and a coming trial and time of apostasy before the Second Coming.

While some of the Apostolic Fathers of the early church, including Papias, Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Tertullian, Hippolytus, Methodius, Commodianus and Lactanitus – were premillennialists who believed that Christ’s Second Coming would lead to a visible, earthly reign – the pretribulational Rapture espoused by the Protestant premillennial dispensationalist end times writers is premised on the notion that Christ sought to establish a material and earthly kingdom, but the Jews rejected him, so the Church by necessity is a parenthetical insert into history, created as a result of Jews rejecting Christ, resulting in the existence of two people of God: the Jews, the “earthly” people, and the Christians, the “heavenly” people. This is all alien to both Catholic theology and even the premillennialist views of some of the early Apostolic Fathers.

The premillennial dispensationalism on display in recent years is of a much more recent vintage and is for the most part the creation of John Nelson Darby, an Anglo-Irish curate with of the Anglican Church of Ireland, who would eventually leave that church and in the early 1830s with a small group of men form what would come to be known as the Plymouth Brethren. It was Darby who postulated the secret Rapture and much of what premillennial dispensationalism today teaches about 190 years ago.

Elijah in Jerusalem, published earlier this month, is the continuing story of Father Elijah, formerly David Schäfer, a convert from Judaism and survivor of the Holocaust, who has for nearly two decades been a Carmelite friar at a monastery on Mount Carmel, the mountain of the prophet Elijah, overlooking the Bay of Haifa in Israel.

In the earlier novel, Father Elijah: An Apocalypse, Father (later Bishop) Elijah Schäfer confronted the president of the European Union, a man rising toward global control as president of a soon-to- be-realized world government – a man who displays certain anti-Christ-like qualities – and calls him to repentance as he attempts to sow the seeds to transform the heart of this “Man of Sin” on a secret papal mission that will take him from Israel to Vatican City and Rome, and to other cities in Italy, Poland and Turkey.

In Elijah in Jerusalem, Bishop Elijah Schäfer, appointed by the Pope in pectore as the titular bishop of the ancient Titular Episcopal See of Panaya Kapulu near Selçuk, in Central Aegean Turkey, about 200 miles from Constantinople in western Asia Minor, near Ephesus, and travelling incognito, accompanied by his fellow friar, Brother Enoch, enter Jerusalem just as the president arrives in the city to inaugurate a new stage of his rise to power. They hope to unmask him as the Antichrist prophesied by scripture and to warn the world of the imminent spiritual danger to mankind.

As the story unfolds in Jerusalem, people meet the secretly episcopally-ordained Bishop Elijah Schäfer, and in the process their souls are revealed and tested, bringing about change for good or for evil.

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Bear witness: The faith journey of electronic warfare experimental nuclear physicist Jim Mason to born-again Christian and young earth creationist

Jim Mason, a Lakefield, Ont. area retired nuclear physicist, who lectures on the evangelical church circuit as a young earth creationist with Creation Ministries International (CMI)-Canada, will be in Thompson again the weekend of May 2-3.

Mason, who has a PhD in experimental nuclear physics from McMaster University, will speak at several church venues, including at a brunch at Pastor Ted Goossen’s Christian Centre Fellowship at 10 a.m. Saturday, May 2, asking the question, “Does the Bible Conflict with Science?” Mason spoke on the same topic when he was there last April 14, 2012.

Mason grew up in a mainline Protestant church but left Christianity behind after taking Geology 101 in the first year of his bachelor of science engineering physics undergraduate program at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ont. He resumed his faith journey in mainstream Protestantism in his late 30s  mainly because he and his wife, Rosemary, thought it would be good for their two young girls.

He was almost 40 when he attended an evangelical church in response to the invitation of a friend and neighbour and subsequently became a born-again Christian.

Interestingly, even as an an evangelical at first, Mason continued to believe in the theory of evolution,including the evolutionary account of origins and the Big Bang theory, the prevailing cosmological model for the universe from the earliest known periods through its subsequent large-scale evolution, which posits that the universe was in a very high density state and then expanded. If the known laws of physics are extrapolated beyond where they are valid there is a singularity, the theory’s proponents argue, with modern measurements placing this moment at approximately 13.8 billion years ago, which they thus consider the age of the universe.

It wasn’t until he attended a weekend seminar conducted by young earth creation scientists that  Mason came to believe that science and scripture were completely coherent and soon became concerned about how evolution is used as a means to avoid confronting the claims of Jesus, he said.

Evolution is the theory that generations of animal and plant species alter and transform over time in response to changes in their environment and circumstances, a process known as natural selection. Intelligent design is the proposition that scientific evidence exists to show that life in its multitudinous forms was caused by the direction of a higher intelligence.

Mason’s field of expertise, according to a July 2011 interview he did for Creation Ministries International with Jonathan Sarfati, an Australian physical chemist and spectroscopist, who is a fellow CMI scientist and co-editor of the quarterly Creation magazine, which can be found online at http://creation.com/jim-mason-nuclear-physicist, includes radiometric dating techniques, which measure the ratio of the radioactive parent element to the stable daughter element in, say, a sample of rock today, inferring the age through calculations that typically give wildly erroneous ages, Mason argues, saying carbon dating, properly understood, supports young earth creationism.

After completing his PhD studies at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ont., Mason spent a year teaching in the faculty of the physics department at the University of Windsor in southwestern Ontario.

He then spent the next 37 years working for one of Canada’s major defence electronics system integration companies, including working on developing anti-submarine warfare (ASW) systems and land tactical computerized command, control, communications (C4) systems. The first 20 years he spent developing passive and active sonar systems for shipborne, airborne and fixed applications that are in use with the Canadian, Portuguese, Belgian, Swedish and United States navies. The last 17 years he spent developing integrated, secure, digital voice and data ground mobile tactical communications systems that are used by the Canadian and British armies.

Mason argues for a literal interpretation of the 50-chapter Book of Genesis, saying the first 11 chapters are “foundational.” According to Mason, the so-called “long ages” and Big Bang theory, which explains the origin and evolution of the universe using the Lambda-Cold Dark Matter cosmological concordance model, estimating the age of the universe as being 12 to 14 billion years old, cannot be reconciled with the Bible as “Adam and Eve disappear, original sin disappears, death through sin disappears, the need for a Saviour disappears and indeed, in the end, salvation and eternal life disappear.”

While the debate over competing theories of Darwinian evolution and biblical creationism was famously showcased during the so-called Scopes Monkey Trial in Tennessee in 1925, the resolution of the matter – much to the surprise of secularists who had thought it settled for 50 years – is no closer today than it was in 1925, or when it reignited around 1975. If anything, the issue is more contested in more venues in more ways than ever, with “intelligent design” now added to the mix in recent years, much to the dismay of secular scientists, other academics and many public school science teachers.

In 1925, prosecutors charged John Thomas Scopes, a high school science teacher in Dayton, Tenn., with teaching evolution, which had just been outlawed. Represented by the famed defence lawyer, Clarence Darrow, Scopes was found guilty and fined after a high-profile trial, but the conviction was later overturned on a technicality, although the statute prohibiting the teaching of evolution remained on Tennessee’s law books until its repeal in 1967.

William Jennings Bryan, a well-known Populist, former Nebraska congressman and three-time candidate for the United States presidency, who delivered one of the most famous and fiery orations in American history almost 30 years earlier in 1896 with his “Cross of Gold” speech at the Democratic national convention in Chicago, denouncing a gold standard monetary policy, argued the prosecution’s case for the State of Tennessee.

Creation Ministries International (CMI) is a non-profit young earth creationist organization of autonomous Christian apologetics ministries that promote a literal interpretation of the Book of Genesis, the first book of the Old Testament in the Bible. It got its start in 1977 when the Creation Science Association (CSA) was organized in Adelaide, Australia by Dr. Carl Wieland, a medical doctor.

Wieland, an atheist in university, graduated from Adelaide University in South Australia with qualifications in medicine and surgery, but stopped practicing medicine in 1986 after he was involved in a serious traffic accident, which resulted in him spending 5½ months in hospital. He has been managing director of Creation Ministries International (Australia) since 1987, when it was called Creation Science Foundation and then Answers in Genesis. He was the founding editor of Creation magazine in 1978.

The autonomous ministries are now located in Australia, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States.

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