Mark P. Shea's Blog, page 74

Every Chilean Bishop Submits His Resignation

This truly astonishing turn of events is due, 100%, to the leadership of Pope Francis, who learned from his massive blunder of blaming victims for speaking out, repented his Good Old Boys Club thinking that so infects clerical culture, and called his brother bishops to account. Thanks be to God through our Lord Jesus for […]

Why Creeds?: The Conclusion

In which I finish up my little series for The Catholic Weekly on the necessity of the Creed to a faith rooted in remembering actual events. One of the ways in which I moved from partial to fully biblical (that is, Catholic) faith was by discovering that my little dorm group was wrong about baptism.  […]

C.S. Lewis and the Recent Massacres in Israel

C.S. Lewis writes in “The World’s Last Night”: I can imagine no man who will look with more horror on the End than a conscientious revolutionary who has, in a sense sincerely, been justifying cruelties and injustices inflicted on millions of his contemporaries by the benefits which he hopes to confer on future generations: generations […]

Reader Delali Adadzie writes from Africa….

Hi uncle Mark, I need a favour/favor from you. I have just started a website for Catholic prayers called POWERFUL CATHOLIC PRAYERS. I will be happy if you can give a shout out of that site at your blog for me. Thanks a million. Check thou it out! Some of the most heartening signs of […]

Why Creeds?: Do This in Remembrance of Me

The next chapter in our discussion of the Creed is here: It was only when something had happened, not Once Upon a Time, but to a specific group of people living in a real place during the reign of a Roman bureaucrat that creeds became necessary, because real memories, not dreams and legends, were involved. For […]

The Interesting Structure of the Noah Narrative

Pete Vere pointed this out to me.  It’s the interesting structure of the Noah narrative: The reason it interests me is that the sacred author uses a similar technique in Exodus.  It has the effect of placing what the author want you to see (in this case, the core lesson that God did not forget […]

The Return of Torture

In 2009, Pew did a study of support for torture among Americans and found that the two most zealous supporters of this mortal sin are white conservative Catholics and Evangelicals. They *love* this thing the Church calls “gravely and intrinsically immoral”. Love it! And they fought tooth and nail to defend it and to make […]

A reader asks for my take on a passage by Calvin

He writes: Hi Mr. Shea! I read your book By What Authority? awhile back and enjoyed it. Along with some other religious works I’ve read, It’s been a big inspiration for my Phd dissertation that I’m putting the finishing touches on, “Schism, Sects and Shakespeare” in which I’m examining how several of Shakespeare’s plays represent the problem […]

Interesting Observation about the Consecration Narratives in the Synoptic Gospels

Sometime back, I gave a talk based on my little book This is My Body: An Evangelical Discovers the Real Presence here in Seattle. One of the things I noted is that there are only two moments in the gospels where Jesus says something that baffles his disciples and he does not take them aside […]

Adventures in Teaching Non-Christians

I had a couple of fun conversations with some kindly and curious non-believers recently and I thought it might be useful to others to see them. The first was with a teacher writing to a Lutheran friend (Elaine) and me and trying to decode our quotation (referring to Christianist apologists for Trump’s outrages) “God’s Name […]