Blog of the Archdiocese of Washington
I have been doing a project for the St. Michael Center for Spiritual Renewal. In this case it was to make two videos on Angels and Demons. The videos needed to be close to thirty minutes, and thus I had to leave a lot of material out. However, five years ago I presented three lectures …
As we begin the ordinary time of the Church year, we follow the Lord’s public ministry. The curtain lifts and we are in the synagogue at Capernaum: Jesus entered the synagogue and taught. The people were astonished at his teaching, for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes. In their …
Continue reading “If Demons Believe and Tremble, What about Us?”
In our culture, many battles are fought on the question of nature. The word “nature” comes from the Latin natus, which means “birth.” Thus, nature is what we are intrinsically born with, what we are born to be. Church teaching and traditional philosophy insist that things have a nature. That is, they are endowed with …
The commercial below from 1949 seems astonishing to us today. We often look back on the days when just about everyone smoked and wonder how we could have been so foolish as to fill our lungs with smoke. That a commercial should actually feature doctors smoking and report that they prefer a particular brand of …
Continue reading “Dreaming of the Day, as Demonstrated by an Old Commercial”
There is a tendency for us to simplistically dismiss the gods of the ancient world as mere figments of human imagination, but the biblical approach is a bit more complex than that. To be clear, at no time in the Scriptures were these gods ever acknowledged to be gods in any true sense of the …
Continue reading “Were the Pagan Gods Actually Demons? The Scriptural View and Why It Matters”
In the video below there is a fascinating demonstration of what is known as the McGurk Effect, wherein what we hear is strongly influenced by what we see. Though the sounds heard in the experiment are exactly the same, when the visual cues change we hear another sound. Even knowing the “trick” does not change …
A couple of years ago I wrote of an unusual experience I had at Mass wherein a person who was troubled by a demon had those demons manifest themselves at the consecration, causing the person to run out of the Church. More on that in a moment. I thought of that long-ago incident in relation to the current …
There is wide interest today in the topic of exorcism. The publication a couple of years of the The Rite: The Making of a Modern Exorcist by Matt Baglio, and the subsequent movie and interviews with Fr. Gary Thomas have sparked some of this interest. Prior to this other books such as An Exorcist Tells …