A Guy in the Pew

One of this blogs readers is John D'Anna of the Arizona Republic , who has a very moving and truthful story of a mother's loss in yesterday's paper. It is well worth a read, but here are some highlights: Her name is Monica and Isaiah was her baby boy. She named him for the prophet who foretold the gift of the Savior's birth. . . . When he was 9, Monica began to notice that he would sometimes zone out. She'd ask what was wrong and he'd say, "Mom, I've got a bad taste in my mouth." She didn't think much of it. About two weeks later, Isaiah was riding in the back seat of the car with his older brother, Gino. Monica heard him gasping and thrashing, the nylon of his winter coat swishing against the seat and car door. She couldn't see him in the mirror so she asked Gino what was going on. He nonchalantly replied that Isaiah did that all the time in his sleep. Monica pulled over, and her training as a nurse told her Isaiah was having a seizure....

Martin Marty has a very interesting commentary on the Economist cover story on religion: The Economist, our favorite weekly (still-)news magazine, published a keeper on November 3rd in the form of a sixteen-page "special report on religion and public life." As many of you know, our Center's early "public religion" efforts presumed that we would have to squint when searching for tiny, fine-print media references to religion. This week again, however, we are nearly blinded by the coverage. The editors drew on substantial figures, from old-pro sociologist Peter Berger, who provided the liveliest lines, to younger-pro Philip Jenkins, currently the most notable interpreter of what global Christianity means for the U.S. A key Berger line: "We made a category mistake. We thought that the relationship was between modernisation and secularisation. In fact it was between modernisation and pluralism." Because pluralism implies "choice," it becomes a ma...

Busted Halo is one of the more interesting religious websites--it is geared toward religious seekers in their 20s and 30s. Mike Hayes, the managing editor of Busted Halo has just published a new book, Googling God , that focuses on the issue of the religious life of those in their 20s and 30s. Here are some highlights frtom Hayes' description of what the book is all about: When Paulist Father Brett Hoover and I founded BustedHalo.com in 2000, our mission was to minister to the “spiritual but not religious crowd” in their 20s and 30s. Much of our early research led us to think differently about young adults and how technology was influencing their lives. Of the more than 600 young adults we interviewed from across the country 89% stated that the number one thing they wanted in a spiritual website was information that they could find quickly and then get out. The validity of that early research has been borne out in my experience ministering to young adults over the last seven yea...

the Washington Post/Newsweek "On Faith" Blog is focused this week on the reports of Mother Teresa's crisis of faith. Not unexpectedly, the atheist and religious members of the panel have quite different perspectives. Susan Brooks, President of the Chicago Theological Seminary, is critical of Mother Teresa--not for the crisis of faith, but for her decision to hide that crisis.: What a tragedy it would have been for Mother Teresa’s letters to be destroyed. The publication of her piercing confessions of doubt and spiritual loneliness will be of immeasurable help to the millions of people of faith, like myself, for whom God’s silence is a constant companion and who live with piercing doubt every day. What is truly tragic, however, is that Mother Teresa never expressed these doubts in public while she was alive. The contrast between the real spiritual life of Mother Teresa as documented in these letters and her public statements is astonishing. What is even worse is that she ...

Rod Dreher has two comments on Mother Teresa's crisis of faith. Fortunately, bot can be found in one easy to find location . First, in his capacity as an editorial writer for the Dallas Morning News , he writes the following: When we think of the saints, it's common to imagine them as serene figures, going about the world doing good works, floating above the temptations and doubts of ordinary people. The truth is more complicated. Holiness is not the same thing as goodness. In fact, it's spiritual heroism. Now come stunning revelations that Mother Teresa of Calcutta was tormented by doubt that God existed. In private letters to her confessors now being published on the 10th anniversary of her death, she referred to Jesus as "the Absent One." In 1946, Mother Teresa had a mystical vision in which she believed she heard Jesus calling to her to "come be my light" to the poor. She did. And then he withdrew, leaving the Catholic to dwell in the abyss of doubt ...

Jaron Lanier, a founding father of virtual reality research (with a guy named Chuck Blanchard, but not the author of this blog), has an interesting essay on the conflict and compatibility of faith and reason. Here are some highlights: Why not approach the idea of God in the expansive way that democratic capitalism harnesses clannishness? Einstein did something like that when he spoke about God not playing dice with the universe and when he pledged allegiance to the God of Spinoza. It isn’t disrespectful to embrace God in a confusing way; to do otherwise could be seen as showing a lack of humility. A complex God is less likely to rally violent mobs. That’s why I felt comfortable mentioning God in these pages, pissing off more than a few atheist readers (see Jaron’s World: Raft to the Future ), and why I think the advent of binary worship is potentially a healthy thing. When scientists absolutely reject God, we leave behind only a simpler and more dangerous God. This optimistic assessme...

Theo Hobson has a very interesting comment on Mother Teresa's doubts and the reality of faith. Here are some highlights: The publication of Mother Teresa's letters reveals that she was not quite the model of total faith that she seemed. The late nun of Calcutta, whose canonisation is thought likely to begin this year, had an ongoing crisis of faith in which she struggled to believe in God. This is not a case of occasional moments of doubt - her periods of doubt lasted for decades, and they tormented her. Shortly before receiving the Nobel peace prize, in 1979, she told her spiritual confidant of the painful barrenness of her religious life: "The spiritual emptiness is so great that I look and do not see, that I listen and do not hear. The tongue moves [in prayer] but does not speak," she said. She also speaks of wrestling with a deep sense of "darkness", and of doubting the existence of God and heaven. In a particularly interesting passage, she almost accus...

Time Magazine has a fascinating report about the spiritual life of Mother Teresa. Based on a series of letters from Mother Teresa to her confessor and superiors that is about to be published by a supporter of her sainthood, Time reports that Mother Teresa had a long crisis of faith that began almost as soon as she began her ministry to the poor of Calcutta: On Dec. 11, 1979, Mother Teresa, the "Saint of the Gutters," went to Oslo. Dressed in her signature blue-bordered sari and shod in sandals despite below-zero temperatures, the former Agnes Bojaxhiu received that ultimate worldly accolade, the Nobel Peace Prize. In her acceptance lecture, Teresa, whose Missionaries of Charity had grown from a one-woman folly in Calcutta in 1948 into a global beacon of self-abnegating care, delivered the kind of message the world had come to expect from her. "It is not enough for us to say, 'I love God, but I do not love my neighbor,'" she said, since in dying on the Cro...