Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 1330

Prayers for the Greydanus Family

Steve's son Nathan is in the hospital with pneumonia.

Father, hear our prayer than Nathan make a full recovery and that his family find peace, strength and consolation from your Holy Spirit through our Lord Jesus. Grant skill to his caregivers too. Mother Mary, pray for them. Amen.

Divine Irony

In which we discuss the subtlety with which the authors of Scripture sometimes communicate their message.

Imminent Film Suckage Alert

I'm Not Jesus, Mommy is coming, and it looks like major suckage will ensue from the latest "They cloned Jesus and the kid is evil!" tale of edgy blasphemy. I'll let Steve Greydanus bear the brunt of having to watch this.

Heh!

Fr. Rob Johansen could use your prayers right now

He writes:

Happy Easter! I'm sorry to have been out of touch for so long, but I've been pretty well submerged in school work. I hope your Triduum was a fairly good one. Mine was satisfactory. I was at the Cathedral for Easter Sunday with the bishop, which was quite nice.

I'll be in touch soon at greater length, but I want to let you know for right now that I'm taking my STL comps today (Wednesday) at 1:00 PM. I'd be grateful for your prayers. I'd be grateful for prayers from any and all, for that matter! The exam covers 11 ecumenical councils and 6 major theologians (of our own choosing) across the whole of church history, in 3 areas: Theology of God/Trinity; Christology; and Anthropology. And, us liturgy students also have an additional liturgical theologian, in my case, Papa Ratzinger.

Anyway, I'll be grateful for your prayers.

I'll let you know how it goes.

Father, hear our prayer that he does outstanding work on his exam, through Christ our Lord. Amen! Mary, Seat of Wisdom, pray for him. St. Thomas Aquinas, pray for him!

A reader writes:

A friend of mine went to Mt. St. Mary's with this kind woman. She has a very compelling conversion/vocation story. Unfortunately, like many of us who have completed college in the past decade, she is buried under student debt that is preventing her from answering the call. I was wondering if you could rattle your tin cup for her?

Consider it rattled. Gentle reader, if you can help this woman out by going to her site and plinking a few shekels into her tin cup, you will be doing one of those works of mercy to the least of these that Jesus thinks so highly of. Doing it during Easter week demonstrates extra class and coolness, which is a hallmark of my fine readers.

Invest in eternal life

Frank Weathers actually uses imagery that is quite in line with the New Testament.  Jesus frequently draws on imagery from the world of money to speak of the kingdom (as, for instance, in the parable of the talents, the parable of the unjust servant, the pearl of great price, etc).

Poor Christopher Hitchens

Still doing the atheist thing as he approaches death.

On the bright side, he has a charitable relationship with Christians such as Francis Collins, so one can hope that grace will find ways to work in nooks and crannies of the heart where deformed reason has not shored up the artillery against God.

The Almighty is unscrupulous and has, I suspect, made inroads into harder hearts than Hitchens by virtue of a love or a friendship that could penetrate into areas where no mere argument could go.  I think of the Communist friend of Monsignor Quixote.  At any rate, I continue to hope that the guy will find mercy in the Great Assizes and that the bluster and braggadocio will fall away in the presence of the Light.  I can't help but like the guy, even when I think him a blaspheming lunatic.  Human love is funny that way.

Pro-Choicer: Ignorance is bliss!

Don't show sonograms!  People will see it's a baby you are killing!

Remember: Secular folk are people who follow the evidence whereever it leads and aren't afraid to look facts in the face.  Religious folk are obscurantists who hate and fear technology and can't deal with reality.

SETI Faces Budget Cuts

We've been listening for ET for a long time at great expense.  In the words of Enrico Fermi, "Where is everybody?"  I think there are better  things to spend money on.  We're better employed preparing for the real Eschaton than for the pretend alien eschaton of the secular dream.  We're never getting off this rock and the only non-human created intelligences we will ever encounter will be angels and devils.

What drives the interest in ET is, in large measure, a debased eschatology. Secular culture, deprived of faith in the actual eschaton (namely, the return of Christ in glory and the triumph of his kingdom) inevitably seeks substitutes to fill the hole. That's because humans are made for... oh, what's the word I'm looking for?...



Yeah. That's it. And when we fool ourselves into denying it where it may be found--namely in the communion of saints, angels, archangels and all the company of heaven in Christ Jesus--we tell ourselves stories as substitutes for the Revelation and gin ourselves into believing them. And so, The Day the Earth Stood Still features an alien named "Mr. Carpenter" who dies and rises from the dead while warning Earth "Don't make me come down there!" and Close Encounters of the Third Kind concludes with a vision of something that looks very like a sort of secular New Jerusalem coming down out of heaven. Meanwhile, in secular quasi-religious culture, enthusiasts deploy words like "believe" and invest unexplained phenomena with quite obvious eschatological significance:



For all I know, such phenomena as these videos record could be anything from meteorites, to Photoshop, atmospheric anomalies, to angelic warnings to demonic deceptions. The one thing I doubt they are is coy aliens. Doesn't mean there isn't anybody out there. It just means that, if there are, we will only meet them, if at all, in the new heaven and the new earth. I think Lewis is probably right: the size of the universe is a quarantine guaranteeing the plague of fallen man doesn't spread.

Meanwhile, what interests me is not the phenomena themselves, but what a post-Christian culture makes of them: namely, signs pointing us not to Christ, but to some magical naturalistic apotheosis when we will find fulfillment, not in Christ, but in some alien who descends either to deliver us from evil or to exact vengeful retribution like Wells' Martians. Both are caricatures of Christian eschatology and tell us much more about the hole in the human soul than about alien beings for which we still have zero evidence.