The Arrow's Path

Lent finally dropped today, as it is Ash Wednesday in the West. (Eastern Orthodoxy and many Eastern Catholic churches do Lent but do not really do Ash Wednesday.) For those of us in the West, Ash Wednesday kicks off what I humorously refer to as the "Season of Church Music in a Minor Key" as it seems like we transition to a season of penitence and fasting, where even the liturgy is fasting from anything other than funeral dirges in discordant minor musical notation. Lots of flats and ending verses on something that sounds like a major motion picture film soundtrack when the villain appears.  I exaggerate. A bit. Not all music in liturgical churches for the next several weeks are all in B minor. Some churches still throw in some normal hymnology, at least in part. Of course, the liturgy of our Protestant brethren who don't do Lent at all is pretty much "all systems normal"-whatever that means in Megachurch Protestant worship these days. They may well have already...

 I got a question about the Immaculate Conception of Jesus (edited for brevity): I am strongly considering converting from Baptist to Catholic. However, the only thing really stopping me is my inability to grasp the concept of intercession from the Saints & Mary... I also just am really really struggling with the idea of Mary being sinless. I have been stuck on this completely. I have read Luke 1:28 multiple times, and just am not understanding how Mary being favored by God translates to her being sinless. I just really need some clarification Thank you in advance! My response:  Now, the second part of your question is a much broader topic that is very easy to get off into the theological weeds. If you are only looking to the Bible for an easy explanation from the Biblical text, you are not going to get really far. The Bible in itself is exhaustive as to every theological issue. While uniquely Divinely inspired revelation, it is not an end all be all encyclopedia t...

As something of a freelance investigator of contemporary culture, I decided to do a minor dive into the Epstein files that finally got dumped. I have largely ignored this whole saga because Epstein is dead and pretty much anyone involved outside his inner circle of toadies is likely to never see any jail time.  I mean, let's be honest. Reality is our friend.  The one thing that finally flagged my attention was the fact that this latest and presumably last dump of information from the US Department of Justice was literally documents in the millions. I was just assuming it was his personal redacted e-mails and whatever...but millions of documents? What was that about? So, I decided to take a look.  What can I say, other than Kyrie Eleison ? I knew Epstein was a sick man, but the level of depravity (and I don't use that term lightly) I saw in the documents that I examined online was shocking. I won't go into detail because I generally try to keep this blog 'G' rated. B...

Like many Americans (apparently 135+ million of us), I watched the NFL's championship Superbowl on Sunday night. Let me be clear from the outset that I like American football in general. I played football (not on the professional level of course). It has become the one sport that I follow closely on a regular basis, both on the collegiate and professional levels.  I used to follow baseball like that when I was younger, as it was the first sports love of my youth, but Major League Baseball has done everything in its power to alienate old school baseball fans like myself. I watched the Cubbies and a bit of the Braves last season for the first time in years, but baseball is just not a joy to watch anymore. It's largely just run by computers and sabermetrics now with the added nonsense of incoherent rules changes to try and speed up the games. There are ways to speed up baseball naturally without dumbing it down or becoming dependent on computers, but that's a discu...

Continuing my thoughts on board gaming, I used to do short term crisis counseling, and I found board games to be amazing tools in certain instances. This was years ago, and there was virtually no academic studies or any empirical data on this subject as far as I could tell at the time. I think there is more now. I was largely shooting in the dark with this method. Most of my fellow counselors and therapists thought I was nuts (as they themselves clung to their weird Schools of Psychology like neo-Freudianism and whatever but that's a discussion for another day). I found though that games that were not high stress/high stakes games could do wonders at getting people out of a crisis mode. Games that had some strategy with rules that could easily be explained, particularly if it was spatial in some way. The earlier versions of games like Sagrada or Lanterns or Azul...that kind of thing. There was an old print and play game that I think became Patchwork that I could use, w...

Continuing my series on lesser known religious orders in the Catholic Church, I thought I would do one closer to my heart: the Glenmary Home Missioners . If you have never lived in either the American South or in rural areas in the US in general, you have probably never heard of this group. To be honest, I had never heard of them until they started a mission in the county seat of my home county in rural East Tennessee many years ago.  By the time the Glenmarians, as they are called, started a little Catholic mission near my home town, I had already moved away from home. In fact, I may have been out in Nebraska and in the Episcopal church by the time this particular mission started. But, after becoming Catholic, when I would go down to visit my parents in Tennessee, I would need somewhere to go to church on Sunday. Turns out the nearest one to my parents' home was in Maynardville, Tennessee. Maynardville was on the other side of the mountain from the home I grew up in. Imagine my su...