Tag Archives: Religion

On Conversion

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This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.

The Catholic Church in 2025 stands at a crossroads in the shadow of our late Pope Francis when the world at large has fallen into so many new wars, conflicts, and when fearmongers are the loudest voices in so many countries and governments. It was striking then when Pope Leo XIV began his Urbi et Orbi address, his first public address as pontiff, last Thursday with the words “peace be with you.” To achieve that peace, one needs to allow one’s heart and soul to open to the possibility of peace and of dialogue with both our innermost selves and the world around us. Faith gives an avenue for this dialogue which has provided a moral foundation for generations. Biblical scholar Richard Elliott Friedman made the case in his book The Exodus: How It Happened and Why It Matters that the faith of Moses and the Hebrews evoked in Exodus was the first faith recorded which preached love for neighbor and love for oneself. It was the first time in human history that a religion sought to elevate humanity and dignify us as children of God made in the Image of God.

I’ve long considered this topic of conversion; in fact, I’ve often noticed how different the perceptions of our shared religion are between cradle Catholics like myself and converts to the Church. My own Catholicism is built on fifteen centuries of believers in my family going back to my distant early medieval Irish ancestors who in the fifth century surely noticed when St. Patrick made his pilgrimages up the holy mountain on the southern shore of Clew Bay, a mountain that towers over the townlands where my ancestors lived for thousands of years that now bears the saint’s name as Croagh Patrick. I asked my friend, Dr. Kim Meyer, if she could tell me more about her perceptions of her faith and our shared religion. A convert to Catholicism who grew up in a secular suburban Kansas City family with Lutheran and Methodist roots, Kim told me about how she found her faith through the most horrific experience of her life as a journalism student at Kansas State University reporting on the activities of a cult in Abeline, Kansas in 1977. Kim described it as “a really dark, dark time and my editors had people in the room with me when I was editing it because I was terrified. It was several months of terror.” After one particularly intense night of terror during her investigations in Abeline when she felt she “was terrified for my soul and I started praying to God, and my Mom had given me a penny of the 23^rd Psalm on it, but I was so scared that I couldn’t remember the Lord’s Prayer so I kept rubbing this penny saying, ‘God, if you exist, save me until morning.’ It was really a horrible, horrible, terrifying experience. The next morning, I was still praying and the sun came up, and I realized that the sense of evil was no longer present.” Kim described how she went to several local religious leaders to tell them her story, including the cult leaders, but the only one who listened was the local Catholic priest at St. Andrew’s Parish in Abeline, Monsignor Alfred Wasinger.

This speaks to something that I’ve known, and that has led to little conversions of my own often from one plan or ambition to another. We are drawn to people who appreciate our humanity and who listen to us as this priest listened to Kim at the darkest moment in her life. That’s something that Pope Leo was famous for before his papacy; in all the reports of his life he’s often referred to as a good listener. This draw to a faith that listens to its people is what drew Kim to the Jesuits. More than just thinking of herself as a convert, Kim said she doesn’t “think of myself as a Catholic first. There’s still so much tradition and so much politicking around Catholicism that I find deeply offensive, but the Jesuits’ critical thinking, open spirit, missionary focus, all of that, and it’s the same theology for both, and it’s all about how we practice, and I’m not into the way how some sects of Catholicism practice.” For her, the Jesuits are “really trying to walk the Way of Jesus. It’s literally the Way of Jesus. Some people want to walk the way of Paul or the way of the most recent Pope, but they forget it’s really all about Jesus.”

Converts like Kim have more of an opportunity to find “the beauty of questioning and the opportunity to discover their faith.” This questioning has marked my faith for most of my life, yet even more so in my adult years as I moved on from my Jesuit undergraduate university and onto graduate and doctoral programs outside of the Church. Whereas my faith is so deeply rooted in millennia old traditions and inheritances embodied in the last century by the various neighborhood parishes that my family called home in Chicago and Kansas City, Kim’s faith seems to fly above that tradition, seeking a closer connection with God through the mysteries of Catholicism and our belief that God opens us to a wider world of possibilities. In Kim’s words, “once I came to believe that God loves me and God is in every person, and I really believed in it that the world wasn’t really the same.” It is notable that of those old neighborhood parish churches, Kim and my parish, St. Francis Xavier in Kansas City is the only one left open. Unlike the others it has adapted with the changing demographics of its home neighborhood, which a few generations ago was largely Irish American, and now caters to Kansas City Catholics seeking Ignatian spirituality. St. Francis was one of the fastest growing parishes in Kansas City during the pandemic, in large part because of its Jesuit affiliation. However, due to a variety of factors the Jesuits left the parish at the end of July 2024 and transferred its leadership to the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, leading to an uncertain moment for a parish that stands out in this city for its openness and Ignatian spirituality. Kim noted that “Last year we didn’t know what the transition away from being Jesuit would look like, and our community is just as Ignatian as it has ever been.”

Because of this, Kim said she feels more closely connected to the Jesuits than to the Church as a whole. I’ve been struck in the two years since I met Kim how much her outward approach to others reflects this deep well of her faith. I felt in our conversation that we could relate in that depth, though I do not outwardly project my own beliefs in the same way she does, preferring to take a rational approach to life. Yet that rationality has its limits, as I’ve written here in the Wednesday Blog before. Faith and a conversion to accepting the possibility of the improbable is necessary to be open to new and unknown things both in the furthest fringes of our knowledge and at home in our understandings of ourselves. Like anything, there is a blind spot closest to home and that self-reflection and introspection is necessary to live a full and enriching life.

With the election of Pope Leo, the Cardinals embraced this period of self-reflection for the Church in full. They chose a pope who embraced synodality in his Urbi et Orbi address and who said he would continue the efforts of Pope Francis all while seeking to build bridges between the increasingly disparate factions and camps in the Church. The Pope’s humanity shows in his imperfections, in his poor history of dealing with the sex abuse scandals, something familiar to many of us in our own bishops and local leadership. Kim’s approach to life, her mentality born from her Catholic faith has led her to think “’what would Jesus do?’ and that means looking at each person and trying to see God inside of them, and that’s each person.” This stands in contrast to “‘what is the right thing,’ which has less clarity and less consistency in the secular world. Because if you think right vs. not right, where you draw that line is a lot more subjective in the secular world.” The greatest way toward conversion, she said, is prayer. “Pray with others, go find somebody you trust as a spiritual mentor. Stretch yourself and pray. Find ways that you praise that you never imagined.” Both of us pray the Ignatian Examen in our own ways, as Kim said “Prayer changes over time. What I do in my prayer time changes from one season to the next.”Just as May brought us a new Pope and each passing day new things to worry about in politics, the economy, and in ordinary life, so too this conversation told me that the place where one’s spirit is resting will change with time. It may float along in the river of our life, following the currents where they take it, yet it will be there for an opportunity to pray to announce itself. In the wider world we hear messages of people seeking connection with something greater than themselves; it’s a part of our social nature. We do these things to find connection with other people and to grow in those connections as we were born to do. These are all conversions, all transformations of ourselves which can reawaken something dormant that will lead to us living fuller and richer lives. A conversion can reawaken the self to their spirit and spiritual need for connection to something greater than themselves through God as love.

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On Servant Leadership

On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.—Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkanePhoto: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

Photo Credit: By Korea.net / Korean Culture and Information Service (Photographer name), CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=34828249

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This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

Over the past weekend as we marked the 250^th anniversary of Paul Revere’s Ride, the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the Siege of Boston, and the beginning of the American Revolution, I started to think about writing this week about that anniversary. I partook in the Veterans’ Rally on the Plaza here in Kansas City, which was part of the National Day of Action against Kings. During the hour walk to and from the event in Mill Creek Park I thought long and hard about what I would say, of my fascination with Paul Revere as a child, or about my first visit to Boston in 2002 when my parents & I walked the Freedom Trail with a family friend who I reconnected with on this most recent trip. Normally, at this point in April I’m more focused on the more recent revolutionary anniversary of the Easter Rising which began with the reading of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in front of the General Post Office in Dublin. Perhaps I could blend the two revolutionary touchstones into something profound for our own moment; of the unrealized dreams and aspirations of both sets of revolutionaries.

Yet events of the following days have changed all that. I’m writing this now close to two hours after I heard the sad news of the death of Pope Francis. After a half an hour replying to messages from my parents and various friends who texted me the news over the night, I wrote my own brief message which appeared on my social media accounts:

This one feels different to me. Papa Frank was our pope: from the Americas, a Jesuit, and more open minded to the world. His Universal Synod will remain a testament to the man and his twelve years of service to our Church.

Francis’s pontificate marked my early adult years. He was elected at the height of my time as a student at Rockhurst University, when I was surrounded by Jesuit philosophy and spirituality, at a moment when his election seemed to match the optimism I felt in our world. Pope Francis remained a rock amid the tempestuousness of the years that have followed. His humility and humanity shone beyond either of the other two popes of my lifetime. Last summer, my European tour originally included nearly a month in Italy on the way to a dear friend’s wedding party. I’d planned to be in Rome for one Wednesday in the hopes of going into the Paul VI Audience Hall to see Pope Francis in person, even if I was way in the back of the room and wouldn’t be able to meet him. The Swiss & Italian portions of that trip didn’t end up happening, and I regret not getting to see the man in person.

Despite this, I felt that I knew Pope Francis on a personal level. He always struck me as another guy trying to make the best out of life. I’ve heard many people refer to him as the grandfather of the Church away in the Vatican keeping us in mind and in good humor. I like this image; it matches what I saw when he was interviewed by the American television networks. Like Voltaire, my mental image of Pope Francis is him with a smile on his face, an earnest and caring smile and perhaps with a joke in mind. Pope Francis was a leader I was willing to follow because he did so with intense humility. I was standing in the lobby of the Campus Ministry, Counseling, and Career Counseling offices at Rockhurst that afternoon of 13 March 2013 when Cardinal Tauran delivered the Habemus papam announcement from the balcony of St. Peter’s Basilica and announced that Cardinal Jorge Mario Bergoglio of Buenos Aires was our new Pope, Francis, a name chosen to commemorate the humblest of saints. That he asked us to pray for him, to help him in his pontificate was for me the first sign that this man was different.

The Catholic Church exists in a very different world today than it did a century ago. Then when only 150 years had passed since the eruption of the American Revolution and even less since the anticlerical outbursts of the French Revolution the relationship of the Church to democracy was more fraught. A century ago, fascists in Italy claimed they were acting in defense of tradition and of the Church to attacks from communism. We saw where that road led in the Second World War. A century ago, the Church emerged from the ashes of the Irish Civil War in a dominant position in the new Free State, a position it would hold through the founding of the Republic in 1949 and into my own lifetime. Here in America, Catholic voices led the chorus of the most extreme and anti-democratic factions in this country railing against anyone who opposed them, even their fellow Catholics.

I worried twelve years ago as we neared the end of the first decade of Pope Benedict XVI’s reign that the disconnect between the Church and our world would only continue, and that locally the voices of we liberals and progressives in the Church would remain a hushed minority. We received two new bishops in Greater Kansas City that were appointed by St. John Paul II in 2004; in January Archbishop Fred Naumann was appointed to lead the Archdiocese of Kansas City in Kansas where I grew up, and in May Bishop Robert Finn was appointed to lead the Diocese of Kansas City-St. Joseph, which covers the Missouri half of this metropolis. Both were far more conservative than their predecessors, and far more dogmatic. Bishop Finn closed a great many of the social justice ministries of the Diocese and alienated at least a quarter of the local Catholics. My own parish, St. Francis Xavier, often stood in sharp opposition to his leadership as the Jesuit parish remained welcoming and open to all. By the time Pope Francis was elected Finn’s leadership was crumbling under the weight of his inaction and obstruction with the abuse scandals, though Archbishop Naumann was only replaced in the last two weeks with the far more synodal and open Bishop W. Shawn McKnight, who previously led the Diocese of Jefferson City in central Missouri. I for one am hopeful that Archbishop elect McKnight will prove to be a better listener to the Catholics of his new archdiocese.

I remember the sun shining on the day when Pope Francis was elected. It was actually very similar to today, Monday, 21 April 2025, and my sense of a new dawn for our Church. The Sun was shining overhead, and the Spring birdsong was resounding around campus. I experienced many of the same things today. It’s profound to me how similar those two days are.

It did feel revolutionary in many ways when he was elected. He was the first Pope from the Americas, an Argentinian by birth. He was the first Jesuit pontiff, the first pope in a long time to be the child of immigrants. Pope Francis felt like he was one of us. Over the weekend I thought a great deal about what it takes to enact change and restore optimism and hope to a society such as ours which is so bereft of it. Pope Francis brought hope because he was one of us. The minutemen who stood up for their communities and their rights as citizens of a democracy 250 years ago at Concord were like us. The Irish Volunteers like so many of my great-grandparents’ siblings who stood up to British colonial rule a century ago and for better or worse kept fighting even after some liberty had been attained were like us. The people I saw on Saturday were mere ordinary people standing up not just for themselves but for all of us.

The true merits of a servant leader lie in their willingness to help everyone, not only their friends or fellows. Pope Francis was the Papa for all Catholics, especially those who disagreed with him and so loudly denounced his efforts at reform. He was the Pope who listened to us even when the bishops receiving his messages didn’t always heed them. I participated in the Synod on Synodality in the initial parochial stage when I was still in Binghamton; I spent an evening writing my own lengthy and heartfelt answers to the questionnaire, and when my parish’s report was published, I was excited to see some of my comments appear amid the harmonious chorus of like-minded people at my parish. Yet when the diocesan report was published, I was saddened to see how little of that chorus was heard, and at the one listening session I was able to attend several years into the Synod process I felt that as much as we in the laity heard each other that our local clerical leadership kept their ears closed.A servant leader listens to the people. They are approachable, open, and honest about their decisions. I’ve known many leaders who fit this bill: from the late Pope to many of my pastors down the years, to our Mayor Quinton Lucas, a man who I consider to be a friend. Servant leaders do great things as ordinary people. During my walk home from the rally, I remembered a scene from the second episode of the 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams, one of the touchstones of all millennial history buffs in this country. That scene showed a team of men and oxen pulling the cannons from Fort Ticonderoga past the Adams farm to the Dorchester Heights to the south of Boston. I rewatched this episode that afternoon and felt a upswelling of emotion at seeing something akin to what I saw on the Plaza that afternoon: ordinary people working together for a common cause to make life better for all of us. These are the extraordinary acts of ordinary people. That, dear reader, is servant leadership.

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The Divine Essence

Art: Studio of El Greco, “Agony in the Garden,” (1590) oil on canvas, 102 x 131 cm, Toledo Art Museum, Toledo, Ohio, USA, ⁠National Gallery, London⁠.

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This week, a meditation on the Name of God.

At the start of Advent last November, I picked up a little blue book after Mass as an Advent lectio divina guide for the coming weeks. I’d done this several times before in Advent and Lent, the two holy seasons of preparation in Christianity, yet this time I actually read that little blue book and kept up with it each day through Christmas. By the end of it I was looking forward to being done with this one part of my nightly routine before bed, the time when I was able to sit and read the daily reflection. I wasn’t sure then if I would pick up the little black book when it appeared at my parish the weekend before Ash Wednesday, and yet when it was there, I took a copy home.

This year’s little black book offers reflections on St. John’s Gospel, the most spiritual in focus of the evangelists. Several aspects of the readings have caught my attention, usually out of a curiosity concerning the grammar or translation of the biblical text. On one early day, the reflection was on John’s recounting of the arrest of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. This recounting contradicts the three other Gospels in that Jesus asks the soldiers to let his disciples go, rather than the disciples taking flight in fear of the soldiers. It is more self-sacrificial, following the prophetic undertones of the Gospel overall. Not only does this vital moment of arrest in the Passion narrative take place in a Garden, akin to the Garden of Eden where humanity’s fall into sin occurred, but it is also here where Jesus revealed Himself as God the Son. Quoting here from the New American Bible:

[4] Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?”[5] They said to him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also there with them. [6] When he said to them, “I AM,” they turned away and fell to the ground. [7] So he again asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” [8] Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”
(John 18: 4–8)

In this passage the omniscience of God is first revealed, followed by the humility of God the Son as merely one among them, “the Nazorean.” Here though the omnipotence of God as the Divine Essence, existence in its purest form as “I AM,”^[1] before showing such mercy toward the soldiers at making it clear he was in their power and would surrender to them yet asking for mercy from them for his friends, his disciples who not being omniscient were very much afraid as any of us would be. It is the third part of this passage, the identification of God that I wish to focus on here.

The Name of God is known as the Tetragrammaton after the four Hebrew letters which comprise that Name. These are the four holiest letter combinations out there. The Name of God is too sacred to write in Judaism, and considering Hebrew is an abjad lacking written vowels it’s not entirely certain how this Name was originally pronounced before that prohibition.^[2] This prohibition extends in some traditions to not even writing the word God, as it is capitalized as the common Name of God in regular parlance. I grew up capitalizing this word in reference to the Abrahamic God, who I do believe is the Creator and One True God, I don’t just recite the Nicene Creed every week at Mass to do it; and yes, this capitalization is in line with the tradition of capitalizing proper nouns in all of the languages I speak and write. Yet I’ve never really thought of God as a name, rather it’s a title in the same way that Christ is a title and Jesus the name. I’ve had some students over the years who won’t write God out, instead writing “G-d” out of respect for this title, which I think is fair. For the sake of my readers, I won’t include the Hebrew Tetragrammaton here, you can look it up on your own.

What I’m more interested in is how the Tetragrammaton was translated from Biblical Hebrew into the other languages in which I’ve read the Bible. There are really four such languages: English, Latin, Koine Greek, and Irish.

I was first introduced to the Bible and to my Catholic faith through English, I was born in the second generation after the vernacular Mass was allowed largely replacing the older Tridentine Mass said in Latin. The New American Bible (NAB) which I read from a few paragraphs back is the translation that I grew up with, and the one which I use in all aspects of my life. It was also developed during Vatican II as the approved English biblical translation for the United States. In Ireland, Australia, and New Zealand the Jerusalem Bible (JB) is the translation used, while in Great Britain the English Standard Version – Catholic Edition (ESV-CE) is used.

I was introduced to the Latin Vulgate and Greek New Testament and Septuagint in high school and college and today I own a copy of the Greek New Testament published by the German Bible Society (Deutsche Bibelgesellschaft). Both are key sources for the English translations that I grew up with, alongside the Hebrew Tanakh itself. I chose St. James Academy for my high school years largely because they offered Latin, and while the fact that Latin remains the official language of the Roman Catholic Church, I was more interested in reading classical Roman literature. Likewise, the first of the two Ancient Greek classes I’ve taken was at St. James under the direction of our Latin teacher Bob Weinstein. That class was focused on Classical Attic Greek from democratic Athens of the 5^th century BCE. In college at Rockhurst I made the 5 century leap forward to the Koine Greek of the 1^st century CE when I studied Biblical Greek under Professor Daniel Stramara. I wasn’t the best student, yet I was fascinated by that class and would love someday to study Latin and Greek more fully. It would certainly be a benefit to my research.

Finally, while I’ve known of the Bíobla Naofa, the approved Irish translation of the Bible, for a long while, I only bought one in the last year. Irish is an odd language for me that feels untouched by the embrace of vernacular piety for me as by the time the Vatican II Council occurred between 1962 and 1965 my family largely spoke English, though the last generation of native Irish speakers were still around. For me then the Bíobla Naofa is as much a study tool as it is an aspiration of piety. I keep mine on my desk the easier to reference when I’m curious how a particular word or phrase is translated into Irish. The Bible is a good source if you want to see how common biblical names are translated from one language to another. It’s how I know that the Irish biblical tradition predates the Anglo-Norman invasion of 1169 because St. John is called Naomh Eoin, not Naomh Seán. My name is an Irish rendering of the French name Jean, while Eoin is an older rendering of the Latin and Greek name Ioannes, which is also the parent of the French Jean. The Evangelist is thus known by the same name today as the Celtic monks knew him in the early medieval period when the Irish cultural influence on Europe was at its peak.

Returning then to the Tetragrammaton, when I read this passage from St. John’s Gospel that evening, I was curious to see how it was translated from the original Koine Greek into Latin and Irish. Translation is a funny business, it’s not ever as simple as going word-by-word and replacing the original language’s text with the target language’s equivalent. There’s far more nuance to each language and its dialects to allow for this. I’ve learned this in my efforts to translate André Thevet’s 1557 book Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique from Middle French into Modern English. The last English translation was written in 1568 and is thus in Early Modern English from the generation just before William Shakespeare. Thanks to the bard Early Modern English is still fairly familiar to many of us, myself included, yet it is still different from how this language sounds and is written today. To make the first draft of my translation I brought together a composite of the 1558 Antwerp French edition, the 1568 London translation, the 1878 Paris French edition, and the 1944 and 1978 Brazilian Portuguese translations to create an accurate and modern English translation fitting for the 21^stcentury.^[3] All this is to say that translation is far more complicated than just taking the original text and interpreting each word on its own. The words work together within the ecosystem of the phrase.

I was curious then to see if the English “I AM THAT AM” was perhaps clunkier than the Greek. This full phrase is familiar to me especially from the Burning Bush story in the Book of Exodus (Ch. 3), in which Moses meets God in a burning bush. This scene is beautifully retold in the 1998 animated film The Prince of Egypt which is a classic from my childhood. The four words we have mirror the four letters of the Tetragrammaton in the original Hebrew, yet these four words are reduced to two in Greek. In John’s telling Jesus’s response “I AM,” is written in the original Koine Greek as “ἐγώ εἰμι,” (John 18:5) with the full phrase in the Septuagint’s retelling of the burning bush story written as “ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν,” (Exodus 3:14) or I am the Being. I feel this final word ὤν is essential here. It is the present active participle of the Greek copular verb εἰμι. In a sense, it is saying that God is existence itself, the essence behind the Cosmos and all Reality itself. One translation of ὤν in the Liddell, Scott, Jones Ancient Greek Lexicon (LSJ) is the English word fact.

This is adopted into Latin somewhat, as the Vulgate is drawn so much from the Greek Bible, where the Name of God is rendered as “Ego sum qui sum,” whence we received the English “I AM THAT AM.” Yet because Latin doesn’t have a similar present active participle for the copular verb sum, the reuse of the indicative present active form sum is necessary. The English present participle of be is being, yet replacing the second am in the name with being doesn’t work grammatically in this language.

I was pleasantly surprised to see the Irish translation of this phrase for how simple it is. The Greek ἐγώ εἰμιwas translated as “Is mise é,” a phrase which I’d usually translate back into English as “I am he.” On an immediate level this is profound in its everyday character. This is something I’d say when someone asks “An bhfuil tú Seán?” Yet on a deeper level it speaks to Irish’s ability to express emphasis in a manner unfamiliar to English. The first person pronoun in Irish is mé, this is the translation of both the English I and me. Yet the -seending tacked onto it expresses extra emphasis on the pronoun. The closest we can get in English, or at least in my American English, to this is saying “me too,” or perhaps capitalizing ME and adding an exclamation mark behind it (or several if you’re one of those people who are overly fond of exclamatory sentences). So, God’s existence is expressed in Irish in the emphatic, as something to be shouted from the rooftops in wonder all while reflecting the priority Irish gives to all of us to be worthy of emphasizing no matter how mighty or small we may be. The Irish translation of the full Name from Exodus is “Is mé an te atá ann,” which is closer in meaning to the Greek ἐγώ εἰμι ὁ ὤν, translating into English as “I am the one who is.” Again, this speaks to the ability of Irish to interpret the existence of God as the essence of reality.

In my undergraduate years when I started to think deeply about the Tetragrammaton & the Name of God, I settled on the idea that the best way to describe God without limiting God in human terms was to focus on God as the essence of life. In this way, I began to refer to God in my theological studies as the Divine Essence, in an attempt to better reflect this truth that God is omniscient, omnipotent, and omnipresent. The Divine Essence rises above any limitations of human terminology or senses of gender that weigh down even the word God, which is traditionally masculine in English and its fellow Indo-European languages. I’d rather see God in God’s fullness existing beyond gender, the better “to see the Face of God,” to quote Jean Valjean’s last words in the musical adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables.I’ve had trouble with this thinking in the last few years, because how should I begin to approach God in these terms in prayer? How can I seek any sort of personal connection to God when I’ve devoted such effort to seek to understand God in such abstract terms by stretching language as far as it will go without breaking? This Lent that is where I stand, and where I am uncertain. Looking at the story of the Garden of Gethsemane told in John’s Gospel in this year’s little black book, I noticed that while Jesus revealed His true Nature, he also identified himself as mere “Jesus the Nazorean,” a human and God all the same. That human nature is approachable, personable. I remember how in the Ignatian Examen one is called to think of one sitting with Jesus while one reflects on their day. This is a starting point, and a good point of departure for reflection this Lent.

^[1] In my Catholic tradition we capitalize this phrase as the name of God.

^[2] See Richard Elliott Friedman, The Exodus: How it Happened and Why it Matters, (New York: HarperOne, 2017) for more on this. I really enjoyed reading this book a year ago.

^[3] NB: I used a 2018 reprint of the 1944 Brazilian Portuguese translation.

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Three Ologies

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This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

A major turning point in my life came at the end of 2014 when I decided to drop my philosophy major to a minor and not take the final class that I needed to complete that major. The class in question was Continental Philosophy, and it remains one of those decisions that I regret because it closed some doors for me in the long run even while it seemed like a reasonable decision in the short term. A year later, now working on my master’s degree in International Relations and Democratic Politics at the University of Westminster, I was reminded daily that I really should’ve just taken that last class because so much of what we were studying was based in continental philosophy.

I initially pursued a triple major in History, Philosophy, and Theology and a double minor in French and Music at Rockhurst University. I was quite proud of the fact that up to that point in my seven completed semesters at Rockhurst that I’d been able to juggle those three majors and the two minors while still having an active and fulfilling social life on campus. I went into Rockhurst with several vague ideas of what I might want to do with these degrees when I was finished; notably I remember both considering doing a Ph.D., likely in History, and possibly going from Rockhurst either into the Jesuit novitiate or into a diocesan Catholic seminary to become a priest. The first four years of Catholic seminary is comprised of that philosophy bachelor’s degree, so it felt like a good idea to undertake that at Rockhurst and keep the door open.

Now ten years after I would’ve finished my undergraduate with that philosophy degree, I realize that even as I continued to consider holy orders that I may well have properly begun to close that door in my early twenties, not feeling that the priesthood was the right fit for me in spite of what many people have said. Even then, most of the other professions that I’ve considered have been shrinking in one way or another in my lifetime. It feels here as in so many other aspects of my life that I was born at a high point in our society’s capacity to consider the arts, humanities, and even the sciences and that as I’ve gotten older that capacity has diminished time and again. Even while I continue to be frustrated to remain in these wilderness years, I nevertheless continue to learn and to grow in my understanding of what is possible for me to do in my career.

In the last seven years I’ve reasserted myself as a historian first and foremost, settling into the Renaissance as my period of study in late 2017 and gradually shifting from considering the history of Englishwomen’s education to the history of translation to now the history of natural history. Yet all of these disciplines lie under the common umbrella of intellectual history. My manner of writing the history I craft tends to speak toward French notions of mentality and perception, while the economics I still occasionally encounter in my work speak to Max Weber’s notions of capitalism as a broader Cross-Channel enterprise including Brittany and Normandy alongside England, Picardy, Flanders, and the Dutch Republic. I’m beginning to try out a new method of writing history that draws on the natural sciences to better understand the animals and other natural things described by my Renaissance cosmographers and natural historians.

Amid all of this, three words continue to appear, three words which I have often had trouble remembering their meaning. These three are epistemology, ontology, and teleology. In spite of my training in Ancient Greek, I still have trouble keeping these three apart. They represent three central tenants of philosophy which help make sense of how we understand things. It may not sound like the strongest topic for a riveting podcast episode, but for those of you listening bear with me.

Epistemology is the theory of knowledge. It distinguishes things which are justified from mere opinions. This theory of knowledge considers propositions about facts, practices which form knowledge, and familiarity with an object thus allowing the subject to know it. This word episteme in Greek (ἐπιστήμη) translates into English as both knowledge and science. Science itself is a word which at its core refers to knowledge, for the root Latin verb sciō means “to know.” We know for instance that we exist because we can recognize our existence, in Descartes’s famous words “I think, therefore I am.” I made a point of visiting Descartes’s tomb in the Abbey Church of St. Germain-des-Prés when I was in Paris in October 2023 because so much of my own philosophy is Cartesian in its origins. I reject the principle that we could be living in a simulation on the grounds that based on what we can know and perceive we are not inclined to accept such a suggestion.

The second of these words is ontology, a branch of metaphysics dealing with the nature of being. This word derives from the present participle of the Greek to-be verb εἰμί. I stand by my assertion that the life we are living is real because we can recognize it in large part because the best explanation that I’ve found for the course our history has taken is reliant on us having the freedom to decide the courses of our own lives. This free will explains how a society can seem to take steps backward even while the chaos those retreats cause is to the society’s detriment. The method which I am developing in my research to understand the nature of historical animals using modern scientific research is ontological in character. I can test if this method will work by applying it to particular individual animals who appear in the historical record and determining their true character by a process of eliminating candidate species until the animal’s own species is determined. In this search for the nature of these animals I hope to prove that the historical past, before the development of the scientific method in the seventeenth century, is valuable to the natural sciences as a means of understanding the longer-term nature of other animals during the period in which human influence upon nature was growing toward the Anthropocene which we find ourselves in today.

I like to think of ontology in the linguistic context of how the copular to be verb appears in our literature. Think, for instance, of how God is identified in the Bible. In the story of the burning bush, the Divine is referred to as “I Am that I Am,” or rather the purest expression of existence. For this reason, when I was an undergraduate in my theology major, I began to refer to God as the Divine Essence owing to the root of essence in the Latin copular verb. English recognizes a far wider set of states of being than does Irish. Where in English I might say “I am sad,” in Irish I would say “sadness is upon me,” or “Tá brón orm.”

The third of these words is teleology. This is the explanation of phenomena in terms of their purpose rather than the manner of their invention. Τέλος (telos) is the Greek word for an end, an aim, or a goal. The purpose of something’s existence then is at focus here. I do question this idea that we have a specific purpose in life, perhaps because mine has not gone quite how I expected. In my Catholicism, the most teleological concept we retain is the idea of a vocation either to holy orders, marriage, or to the single life. The teleology at play here speaks to some sense of destiny which I feel stands in opposition to our free will. Perhaps there is some purpose to life, at its initial conception in the first moments that matter began to form in the void that became our Universe, yet I do not believe that I can perceive any intended influence beyond the flick of the first domino at the Big Bang. We may not even be sure that the Big Bang was the beginning of everything, after all there had to be energy to build up to cause such a tremendous explosion in the first place. In a theological view I would point to the Incarnation of Jesus as an example of telos in our history, I am a Catholic after all. My lingering question is where should that theological teleology interact with the other ways of knowing?

I’ve written here before about my view that belief and knowledge are two distinct yet interrelated things. One must believe in one’s senses to know, yet there are things in which one can believe without knowing which one cannot know without believing. The prime example of this is God; “I believe in One God,” it’s something I say every week at Mass in the Creed, “Credo in unum Deum,” in the Latin original of our Roman Missal. Yet God alone is a tremendous challenge to know because God is both paradoxical and far greater than the extent of my knowledge. For this reason, we had the Incarnation, as we recite in the Creed:

“I believe in one Lord Jesus Christ,

The Only Begotten Son of God,

Born of the Father before all ages.”

For God to be knowable God needed to come down to our human level in the person of Jesus, God the Son. This was Jesus’s telos, to be known, to be heard, and as we believe restore faith in God and cleanse humanity of original sin. Here there is a collision of belief and knowledge, where something clearly happened about 2,000 years ago because a new profusion of faith occurred, beginning in Judaea and spreading around the Mediterranean World in the Roman Empire and beyond to become Christianity. That new religion adapted to fit the cultures it encountered, so as to be more acceptable to its new converts. Today that collision continues in the Eucharist, the most sacred of all seven sacraments, in which we Catholics alongside our Orthodox brothers and sisters believe that God becomes flesh again in the sacramental bread and wine. Can we know that it happens? Not by any scientific measure, yet something does happen. That something is perceptible through belief, and it is the Great Mystery of the Faith that has kept me in the Catholic Church in spite of the ecclesiastical politics and divisions of our time.

My Irish Gaelic ancestors understood Christianity in their own way, aspects of which survive into the present day. That collision of belief and knowledge looks to some lingering folk belief, or superstition if you will, that I’ve inherited of particular days in the calendar when the worlds of the living and the dead could collide. We see this most pronounced in the old Gaelic calendar on Samhain, which developed through Catholicism into Halloween, the Day of the Dead, and All Souls’ Day around the beginning of November. I see All Saints’ Day fitting into this as well, after all the Saints are our honored dead all the same. Likewise, Bealtaine, the celebration of the coming of Summer at the beginning of May is also the Catholic celebration of the Crowning of Mary, something I attended at Rockhurst on several occasions.

What in all of this can I actually know? I know the stories that have survived from before St. Patrick and the coming of Christianity to my ancestors 15 centuries ago, even if those stories are Christianized in some way or another. I know this just as much as I know that Jesus existed in the first century CE because there are effects of these stories in the lives and histories that are remembered down the generations. If these stories have any teleology, it’s to teach us lessons about life that our ancestors learned so that we might not have to face the same trouble all over again. The folly of humanity is that we are resistant to having a clear purpose or end to our aims. Through our free will we know that there are always many options to choose between.I don’t know if I made the right choice in dropping that philosophy major at the last moment. In many respects, it was a poor decision. I learned from that experience and many others in my early life to stick with things until their conclusion. This learning is something that has been tested to grow beyond mere opinion through belief into something that is verifiable. When I look at my prospects in my doctoral program, I always decide to stick with it because I don’t yet know what my prospects will be like once I’ve earned it, something that I do know having 2 master’s degrees and a bachelor’s degree to my name. I have gained a great deal of epistemic experience through all these memories that have informed the nature of my character. Yet where they lead I cannot say, for the purpose of my life is something I continue to decide day by day.

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Paradiso

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This week’s edition of the Wednesday Blog is dedicated to Micah Holmes.

This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.

I’ve long wondered about the nature of the heavens, both scientifically through my passion for astronomy, and theologically drawing from my Catholic education and faith. In the Spring of 2011, I staged a one-act play of my own writing called The Swansong of the King which I wrote in the spirit of the scene in John Boorman’s 1981 film Excalibur where Merlin’s ghost appears to Arthur in a circle of standing stones to reassure him before his great final battle at which he would surely die. I wrote Merlin lines that told the story I’d imagined of the soul’s voyage to Paradise, an island amid a deep blue sea where in a valley in the middle surrounded by lush forests, there stands a city of white stone houses and public edifices. Each house is a garden in its own right, looking like an ancient Roman atrium more than anything else, and when the soul arrives, they find the people they always loved waiting for them there for one last great party.

My vision of Heaven draws from other sources than Dante’s; his is the child of a medieval Italian world with deep and still living Roman roots, while mine has in equal amounts classical and Celtic antecedents, the island in essence being the Irish Tír na nÓg, the Land of Eternal Youth. There’s also a bit of Tolkien in there, with the speech that Gandalf gives to Pippin during the Battle of Minis Tirith in The Return of the King that was so wonderfully acted out by Sir Ian McKellen in the film adaptation. Yet upon reading Dante’s cantica of his travels from the summit of Mount Purgatory to the ultimate light at the apex of all Creation, I can understand where he was coming from even if I found my understanding of his verse fading in and out at times.

Early in the Paradiso, Dante writes in Canto 5 about acknowledging one’s mistakes, in Beatrice’s words “Better for him if he had said: ‘I’m wrong,’ / than to do worse doing it.”^[1] So, the vision I’ve held onto since childhood of Paradise may well be lacking, while it makes sense in my understanding I could still very well be wrong in my assessments, and in that I would be joyous to be proven wrong so for that would mean that this affirms one of the greatest truths that I believe in: that there is always more out there for us to learn.

All things that we know exist within creation, Beatrice describes in Canto 7 how all things “come to decay and last no time at all,” on Earth, yet in them something greater can be seen. In Paradise, Dante meets many saints and holy men and women. There too, he lives out the genealogist’s dream by speaking to one of his ancestors, Cacciaguida (c. 1098 – c. 1148), a knight who left Florence to join the Second Crusade during which he was knighted by Emperor Conrad III (r. 1138–1152). When asked who he was, the knight responds to Dante, “My branch and leaf (in whom I was well pleased, / waiting until you came) I was your root.”^[2] Yet when Dante asks the question I’ve long wished I could ask my own ancestors from whom I inherited my family name, “Tell me my earliest, my dearest growth / who were your own progenitors? Also, / what years were marked for you as boy and youth?”^[3] Cacciaguida replies that his ancestors lived in Florence as did he and Dante, concluding “that’s all you need to hear of my great sires.”^[4] Among my own Kane ancestors––the name is variably spelled Keane, Kane and Caine in English but consistently as Ó Catháin in our native Irish––the unbroken recorded link only reaches as far back as my great-grandfather’s great-grandfather who is identified in Griffith’s Land Evaluation in the 1840s as Thady Caine. I’ve surmised that he was likely born at the earliest in the 1790s. The memories of these people who in worldly affairs had little impact yet still existed as a part of our history deserve to be remembered as we still exist as a part of their legacy.

As Beatrice leads Dante higher and higher through the celestial spheres, he notices how her laughter and joy evokes the spirit of their surroundings. In Canto 18, Dante writes that upon turning to Beatrice he:

            “saw the light within her eye so clear,

            so full of laughter that her look and air

            defeated all that these, before, had been.”^[5]

One passage, in Canto 19 that struck me as needing particular note concerned the salvation of those who are born outside of Christendom and live good and worthy lives. In Dante’s verse:

            “’A man is born,’ you’ve said repeatedly,

            ‘beside the Indus. And there’s no one there

            Who speaks of Christ, or reads or write of Him.

            And all he does and all he means to do ––

            As far as human minds can tell –– is good,

            sinless alike in living and in word.

            Then, unbaptized, beyond the faith, he dies.

            Where is the justice that condemns him thus?

            Where is his guilt, if he does not believe?”^[6]

Here, I feel that Dante is asking about the salvation of his first guide through these three realms, Virgil, who is condemned to eternity in the First Circle of Hell for the fact that he was born and died just too early to have encountered Christianity. It’s a question that I certainly have, having known many people who do not practice this faith yet have lived good and true lives. I don’t have an answer here, like many questions of faith this is something that remains a mystery to me, for I can see both sides of this question. What I can do is hope in love, which Dante writes is the purest and truest emotion evoked from God’s Essence:

            “Love, which in laughter sweetly clothes itself,

            how ardent in those piercing pipes you burned,

            voiced by the breath of holy thoughts alone.”^[7]

In that essence of love, Dante sees Beatrice slowly immerse herself into the orbit of God, beginning in Canto 21 and continuing through to the end of the Paradiso in Canto 33. In the first of these two canti, Beatrice warns Dante that he is not ready to see her in her full beauty enhanced by the presence of God:

            “’If I were to smile,’

            so she began, ‘you would become what once

            Semele was, when she was turned to ash.

            For if my beauty (which, as you have seen,

            burns yet more brightly as it climbs the stair

            that carries us through this eternal hall)

            were not now tempered, it would shine so clear

            that all within your mortal power would be

           a sprig, as this flash struck, shaken by thunder.”^[8]

Here Dante drew from the classical inheritance, evoking the story of Semele, daughter of Cadmus of Thebes, the founder of Tyre, who was one of Jupiter’s lovers and was tricked by the jealous Juno to ask to see Jupiter in his full majesty only to be reduced to ash by seeing him.^[9] I’m reminded as well of the Irish legend of the return of Oisín to Ireland after spending 200 years in Tír na nÓg with his wife Niamh only to turn to ash when he fell onto mortal soil again, but not before having a long discussion of faith with a certain Christian missionary named Patrick. In both Dante’s use of the myth of Semele and this clear Christianization of the death of Oisín, the one ancient hero who by all druidic accounts still lived in the Irish Paradiso of Tír na nÓg, the new faith could incorporate the old worlds into which its light flooded over the last two millennia.

At long last though, Dante is able to see the “sacred light” in its purest form, and to look again at the face of Beatrice illuminated by this light as one of the righteous. Later again in Canto 21, he proclaims with the exuberance of the Magnificat:

            “O sacred light,

            how love – the freedom of this holy court –

            is all one needs to trace God’s providence.”^[10]

Dante can see the truth of Paradise because of the caritas, the charity, “on high that makes us serve / so readily the wisdom of the spheres.”^[11] This light overwhelms Dante, even then. This is something that I fully can relate to, having felt much the same throughout my life yet magnified in recent months. In the first lines of Canto 22, the poet writes:

            “Astounded, overwhelmed, I turned to her

            my constant guide, like any little boy

            who’ll run to where his greatest trust is found.

            And rushing there, as mothers always do,

            her shocked, pale, sobbing son, she said to me:

            ‘Do you not know that you’re in Heaven now?

            Or know the heavens are holy everywhere,

            and all here is done is done from zeal?”^[12]

Even in this moment when Dante ought not to be afraid, he still felt that most human of instinct at beholding something otherworldly and so beyond what he had seen before then. The immensity of Paradise alone would make anyone of us cower in fear. These verses more than any other spoke to me directly, as something that I could see myself doing in Dante’s place. It reminds me of Moses’s first reaction to realizing whose voice spoke to him from the burning bush:

“I am the God of your father, he continued, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.”^[13]

This, dear Reader, is a human experience of the Divine, of something greater than ourselves. I’ve long pondered how best to express my own beliefs concerning these questions, how best to refer to God. Dante sees God as a light emanating from the core of all things, and in my best effort at understanding the inherent paradox of God, for nearly a decade now I’ve come to think of a Divine Essence, as the best metaphysical expression of the Tetragrammaton which in its best English translation is rendered I am that Am. The Latin infinitive of the copula verb is essere, and this is the root of the noun essentia, so it seems prudent to me to write then of this Divine Essence, even if that Essence may seem impersonal. That’s where the three persons in one of the Trinity comes into my own faith.

At the end of Canto 22, Beatrice offers one of her last encouragements to Dante, the man who had loved her since first he saw her when they were children:

            “’You are so close,’ Beatrice said,

            ‘to your salvation here that you must keep

            the light within your eye acute and clear.

            And so, before you further ‘in’ yourself,

            look down and wonder at how great a world

            already you have set beneath your feet,

            so that your heart may show itself, as full

            as it may be, to this triumphant throng

            that rings in happiness the ethereal round.’”^[14]

Dante here has a moment to look down on the Earth, on his home, what the great humanist astrophysicist Carl Sagan called the Pale Blue Dot and admire just “how small and cheap it seemed.”^[15] I admire how Dante is able to imagine the Earth in one view, to see our entire planet as one common body made up of many separate parts.

Dante’s Paradiso concludes the three cantiche of his Divine Comedy, one of the great works of epic poetry in the western canon. It offers many things to many people; to my medievalist friends it is a window into the cosmology and theology of an Italian at the dawn of the fourteenth century. I would add here my own question of how different this Commedià would be had it been written just a few decades later when the Black Death swept across Europe in the 1340s? To the believer today, it evokes a vision of the afterlife in all its nuance and promises what might become of us once our lives have ended and our souls are weighed for their actions and deeds while living. I see both of these visions in the Commedià and also a poet, someone with whom I share the vocation to craft stories and enrich the human experience with our words, trying to make sense of his own life in exile far from his beloved Florence.

Reading this work has enriched my experience of Dante and reawakened some of that spirit of imagination and faith which I’ve long sheltered from the harsh winds and tempests of these recent verses that I’ve written in the last few years of my life. As much as I look forward to that great garden party in my vision of Tír na nÓg, Dante’s celestial spheres leave me with a warm sense of hope for something better to come.

^[1] Dante, Paradiso 5.66–67.

^[2] Dante, Paradiso 15.88–89.

^[3] Dante, Paradiso 16.22–24.

^[4] Dante, Paradiso 16.43.

^[5] Dante, Paradiso 18.55–57.

^[6] Dante, Paradiso 19.70–78.

^[7] Dante, Paradiso 20.13–15.

^[8] Dante, Paradiso 21.4–12.

^[9] Ovid, Metamorphoses 3.253–86.

^[10] Dante, Paradiso 21.73–75.

^[11] Dante, Paradiso 21.70–71.

^[12] Dante, Paradiso 22.1–9.

^[13] Exodus 3:6.

^[14] Dante, Paradiso 22.124–132.

^[15] Dante, Paradiso 22.135.

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Inferno

Inferno – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

A while ago, I began reading Dante's Divine Comedy. So, over the next three weeks I will be writing my own reflections on each of its three parts. This week then, I begin with the Inferno. — Click here to support the Wednesday Blog: https://www.patreon.com/sthosdkane — Dante: Inferno to Paradise, https://dantedocumentary.com The Blues Brothers, "Everybody Needs Somebody to Love and Sweet Home Chicago," https://youtu.be/FrLZoQUl2mQ?si=g9rLDM6ZPM7tXJ97 Molly Fischer, "The Tyranny of Terrazzo: Will the millennial aesthetic ever end?", The Cut: New York Magazine, (3 March 2020), https://www.thecut.com/2020/03/will-the-millennial-aesthetic-ever-end.html Ian McKellen's performance in Macbeth "Tomorrow, tomorrow, and tomorrow" speech (5.5.17–28): https://youtu.be/4LDdyafsR7g?si=3qgAmsaKW6oKJKXq

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A while ago, I began reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. So, over the next three weeks I will be writing my own reflections on each of its three parts. This week then, I begin with the Inferno.

Three years ago marked the 700th anniversary of the death of the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri, the author of the Divine Comedy, whose Tuscan dialect is widely regarded as foundational for the modern standardized Italian language taught today. I will write at length about language standardization in the future, if I haven’t already, yet today, dear Reader, I wish to address his Commedià itself. Around the time of his great anniversary, the Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies (CEMERS) at my university held a variety of lectures concerning Dante. In one such instance, I became critically self-aware of the fact that I was likely one of the few people in the room who had not read the work.

I finally got around to reading the Commedià in the last month when a new two-part documentary on the life of Dante aired on PBS. I realized then that even though I hadn’t read his magnum opus, I still knew a great deal about it because of how closely tied it is to my Catholic culture. The concepts of Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven as I grew up understanding them have clear support from Dante’s vision of these three realms. Yet like Dante, my own vision of these three is just as drawn from far older classical and biblical sources. He recognized the importance of connecting the beliefs of his own age with those that they replaced.

This is a point I made in conversation with a friend and fellow historian: Dante was a man of his own time. In his moment, it is fitting to see the great classical heroes, philosophers, and poets resting on the outer most layers of the Inferno because they had no introduction to God during their lives. Even more unsettling is his placement of the Prophet Muhammad within the eighth circle’s ninth bolgia as one of the “Sowers of discord.” Again, this fits in Dante’s own time and place, living at the same time as the Crusaders lost Acre in 1291, nine years before when the Commedià is set.

The Inferno is proof of four great truths which I wish to discuss in the remainder of this week’s post. The first of these is that faith often requires trust in more tangible things that one can see and touch and most importantly imagine. This past weekend on Trinity Sunday, I was moved by how my pastor––Fr. Jim Caime, SJ––described his relationship with the Trinity in his own prayer life. I believe in the Trinity, though what draws me towards that belief at this moment in my life is an appreciation for the mystery of the Trinity. It’s funny there, I appreciate the mystery of the most important doctrines of the faith yet when it comes to things that are more tradition than anything else, my faith is still built on a foundation that is strikingly tangible in its nature. At times I’ve thought that superstition might stick with me more because it’s something that is more tangible and everyday than some of the more metaphysical elements of my Catholic faith. Faith needs to be lived in “to live, thrive, and survive” in the words of the great Elwood Blues.

Second, I’m not a fan of iconoclasm. Culture is built by individuals yet adopted by communities. We live in a present moment which is layered upon the past. In those layers we can see bygone moments, years, decades, generations, centuries, millennia, and ages when our past thought something they made was worth cherishing even for a moment. Everything from the eternal grace of the great monuments of human endeavor, and our striving for greater truths is just as central to these ringed layers that form our culture as are the passing fads that come and go year by year. An article I read over the weekend in New York Magazine‘s style outlet The Cut about the millennial aesthetic that has defined the tastes of my generation in the last decade asked if “the tyranny of terrazzo” will ever end. The article concludes with a foreboding of the dominance of bright yellow among the style choices of our successors, Generation Z. I for one felt a similar sense of dread the last time I went clothes shopping at Target only to discover everything in the menswear section was geared to younger generations than my own. I continue to shop at Macy’s when I’ve gotten a nice paycheck and Costco when my parents are around with their membership.

If you’ll pardon that digression, the iconoclastic spirit would burn down the terrazzo of my generation’s invention and inspiration and would replace the soft hues with new and reactive bright colors. It would respond to decades of slow burning negotiation and working within the status quo with a fierce clamor to fight and resist even if the odds aren’t in your favor that your resistance will do you any good in the long run. I’ve been there and found that sort of thinking didn’t accomplish much and so settled for Dr. Franklin’s approach to change, make friends with as many people as possible and nudge them to do things you think important. In this light, my vote tends to be cast for more moderate candidates than my own views, and I’ll freely admit my own views on issues have changed with my own changing sense of frustration and irritation towards others whose voices are perhaps projected louder than necessary through social media.

So, I appreciate how Dante kept the voices and spirit of the pre-Christian past alive in his Inferno, that he was guided by the great poet Virgil, whose Aeneid I became quite familiar with in my senior year Latin IV class (Grātiās tibi agō, Bob Weinstein). It never seemed strange to my faith that the old faiths of Europe or any other religions could also exist within our understanding of Heaven, Hell, and all the rest. Again, Dante was a man of his time and his place, so to fit in the great heroes of Ancient Greece and Rome into his vision of the afterlife is only natural. Iconoclasm only harms us and our posterity by robbing all of us of the riches of our past and the finest parts of the great human inheritance. The iconoclast’s tradition to destroy what came before will only lead to their own destruction in turn by their posterity. Third, as powerful some may be in life it is the writers who will preserve their memories for eternity. Chaucer and Dante both preserved the memories of their enemies in a way that has led to the survival of those men’s names. Yet their names are not spoken kindly, so the world would do well to heed the power of the pen. They can live long beyond their memory ought to have otherwise. While more ancient stories began and lived for generations told orally and remembered from that recitation, we now in our learned state require things be written if they are to be remembered. In Shakespeare’s words, written for the Scottish King to utter upon news of his wife’s death:

She should have died hereafter;

There would have been a time for such a word.

— To-morrow, and to-morrow, and to-morrow,

Creeps in this petty pace from day to day,

To the last syllable of recorded time;

And all our yesterdays have lighted fools

The way to dusty death. Out, out, brief candle!

Life’s but a walking shadow, a poor player

That struts and frets his hour upon the stage

And then is heard no more. It is a tale

Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury

Signifying nothing. (Macbeth 5.5.17–28)

The writer helps human memory survive long after each generation is gone. Before our carbon dating or genetic coding of the remains of beings now dead, writing remains the original technology by which we recorded our nature and taught our learning, and dare I say our wisdom, to those who come after us.

Fourth, I admired how Dante cast himself as both observer and listener to the plight of the damned. In every circle he chose to stop and ask the souls he encountered their names and to tell him about their lives and why they were where they ended up. This more than anything else is a model we ought to emulate, as I’ve written before here, we ought to listen to each other more. I believe this would solve a fair number of the problems we face in our lives. Pope Francis’s message from the balcony after his election eleven years ago echoed this sentiment when he simply asked that we pray for him as he began this new ministry in his life. This is something that I want to get better at; I am so used to my own solitary company that I often have to consciously remind myself to make smaller gestures of gratitude toward the people around me.

Dante often offered to speak to the loved ones of those who he recognized on his journey through Hell or to pray for their souls. Yet where I saw the greatest pity was at the bottom circle when he beheld the three great traitors of his world being devoured by the heads of the Devil: Judas Iscariot, Brutus, and Cassius. After reading this Canto, I wondered if the Inferno were to be written by an American who might be our three great traitors? Yet here my own beliefs divert from Dante’s, as I find it distasteful to say with any authority what the spirituality of anyone else might be.

I recently finished listening to the most recent Star Was anthology book From a Certain Point of View: Return of the Jedi which is a collection of stories told from the perspectives of minor characters who appear in the film in question. One of the last stories was the main one I was looking forward to the most. It was from the eyes of Anakin Skywalker after his redemption from 23 years living under his evil alter ego as Darth Vader. What struck me here was that despite everything Anakin did in his life, the Force and his best friend Obi-Wan Kenobi, whose force ghost beckoned him into the next life, forgave him. I don’t claim to have any authority over whether one person or another ended their life in one state or another because of the power of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a deep expression of love that we ought to express and inhabit more. Forgiveness it isn’t something that necessarily came naturally. Most of the bullies I faced in my childhood got a silent response from me later in life. I’m not proud of how I’ve reacted to certain people and situations in a way that echoes my own fear and anger, because I know I can do better. Fear isolates us from love, after all.

As I continue reading, I’m eager to see how Dante grapples with forgiveness and with the love that fuels it. I for one am eager to climb from the depths of Hell alongside Dante and Virgil onto the slopes of Mount Purgatory, a cantica which I expect I might allow myself to read in my usual pre-bedtime hour. I chose to spare my dreams of the Inferno, figuring I give myself enough nightmares of my own invention as it is.

Next week then, I will write to you about the Purgatorio and Dante’s climb towards the climax of his literary life.

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Doubt

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As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith.

One might say that doubt is the opposite of faith, the absence of faith in fact. I thought this in my teenage years and believed with an abandon that grew from both invention and tradition. I grew up with an expectation of faith, that my belief would always permeate my life and that there would always be wonders unseen which I could aspire to know through faith. In high school we were often told that our faith would diminish as adults and that our worldview would shift as we moved further away from the secure halls of our younger years where belief was fostered through frequent prayers and service.

For much of my adult life I’ve taken that warning as a challenge and maintained my belief just as I’ve maintained my optimism. The faith that I developed became thus far less performative and far more innate. It was a faith drawn to seeking the goodness in people and ideas more so than proclaiming my beliefs out loud for all to hear. In fact, I tend to view less serious if equally personal devotions as more worthy of public adulation, my passion for the Chicago Cubs being chief among these causes. While not hiding the light of my faith I have still let it retreat more into private spaces where it could continue to grow.

In the last decade I’ve also come to doubt a great many things. The commanding voice of faith which we hear in public, trumpeted as it often is from a position of great authority, often feels hollow to me. I hear the words spoken and think of the actions that same voice takes, and of the limits they place on our society to accept the goodness of all, and I am left feeling evermore jaded and unwilling to play along. I am certainly not the same person I was a decade ago, like all things I have changed with the passing of time. Both faith and doubt have their place in this decade, both gave me their shared wisdom to find my place in their midst, and I feel affirmed in my beliefs because of it.

I have long believed in my own ability to do anything I set my mind to; there’s a part of me deep down that still hasn’t quite given up on my childhood dream to pitch for the Cubs even though I’ve hardly ever shown any athletic talent whatsoever (except for one day in 6th Grade.) This part of me is what convinced me to pursue a left field idea of broadening the teaching section of my C.V., yet in that effort I found my limits to be resolute. I sit here now, at the end of 2023 looking back on that storm which overtook my life in August exhausted by my efforts and feeling drained of all the passion I poured into that project.

Do I now doubt my abilities to broaden my horizons? I’m not sure. I’ve wondered for many years now what people meant when they described how promising youths grew into adults stuck in a current of nostalgia incapable of achieving that promise which with maturity they ought to have grown into. I see what they meant now, it’s a pool like the ones in the Ozarks that I canoed past as a Boy Scout in the first decade of this century. I could well lean in and let that pool consume me, right now I’d rather rest than carry on, yet as always, I have far too much to look forward to in the coming year to give up now. I promised myself many years ago that I would not give up, that I would not let myself fail at making something of my life, and if anything, my doubt has made that resolve only strengthen and grow.

I don’t like to brag, it’s one of those central parts of my upbringing that I’ve hung onto all these years in spite of everything the world has thrown at me. Still, I have accomplished a good deal over these past three-plus decades. In my four high school years alone, the years when I discovered my writer’s voice, I wrote fourteen plays and even dabbled with choral and orchestral composition. In my adult years I’ve branched out and written constantly. Perhaps my greatest accomplishment to date is that I’ve learned to pace myself, to write bits at a time and trust that I will find the energy to finish what I’ve started, even if isn’t in the same day, week, month, or year. The sequel to my novel Erasmus Plumwood is one such project that I started in 2019 and still have tucked away in my computer’s files and in the back of my mind. I know how Plum in the Sun is going to go, and how it will end, I’ve just been waiting now for four years for the right mood to write the next chapter which is so joyous in its tone that it needs an exuberant mind filled with childlike joy to write it.

When I started writing the Wednesday Blog, I didn’t figure it’d run for very long. Either through embarrassment or frustration or boredom I figured it’d be something I write for a few months, maybe a year, and that would be that. I’ve been keeping a running tally of these posts in a document called “Wednesday Blog Full Text” since I started it, with the pre-podcast posts and each season of the podcast as an individual book within the whole collection. What you are reading, or listening to, now is Chapter 30 of Book 4. The greatest trial of endurance for the Wednesday Blog came in these last few months when I barely had the time to write it or record it amid a constant, pulsating, Shostakovichian work schedule. Like the 4th movement of that Russian composer’s 5th Symphony, I came to feel as though the life within my body was holding on rather than directing the machinery of my days. Seeing my place to exit that brief phase of my life, and finally creating the time to rest during this Christmas season is something I am more convinced is the right thing than most other things I’ve yet done.Do I still doubt that I’m making the right decision today? Absolutely, I embrace the ever present doubts of my mind, for they will right my path amid all the bucolic and proud visions which will come to pass. Yet at least for this moment, writing now at the end of December at the end of 2023 and at the beginning of this next year in my life, I know I made a choice that was right for me.

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Church and State

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The foundation of good government is good ethics, which I fully acknowledge can and are taught by many faiths and learned through religious teaching. The Golden Rule after all is in various forms the foundation of most major religions after the various commandments to love and honor God above all else. Those ethics –– treat others the way you would want to be treated, contribute to society in a positive way, build a better future for your children and their children to come, among others –– aren’t inherently tied to religion; they feature in many religious teachings but they themselves are not inherently religious.

A good society unbound by religion can also teach these morals. Some of the great humanists of the last century have proven that; great minds like Carl Sagan whose call to reflect on how we’re all residents of this one Pale Blue Dot in the vastness of Space. Like it or not, we all have to live together, and so our laws which govern our societies in a way that makes life better for all themselves ought to be built upon those same codes of ethics. It is possible for a society to legislate based on religion, to derive their laws from a common bond of faith. This has happened time and again in societies around the globe. Even in my own references to God exist in an otherwise secular republic.

Yet if laws are going to be written to dictate in a manner grounded in religious doctrine or the interpretation of everyday questions through one interpretation of religious doctrine then those laws must reflect the will of the whole society, not only one part of it. Show me a council of any type of scholars whether theologians, philosophers, economists, or historians where everyone has willingly and freely agreed on every issue of their own accord. I doubt there has ever been one in the long memory of humanity.

With that in mind any state which governs over a society made of a plurality of faiths should never legislate based on the teachings of one faith, lest they elevate that faith above all others. I left a religious social club in 2014 because they violated the core principle that in our country the church and the state should remain separate through their continued political fundraising and campaigning. A state cannot govern without the support and trust of the public in the blind justice of its institutions to craft, execute, and interpret the law in such a manner that is beneficial to the society as a whole.

A transgression of that trust would damage the reputation, the honor of the very institutions that form the foundations of this society. The wanton abandon of obligations and duties that come with high office is a great symptom for the corruption in our society today. Elected officials who have coopted their offices to support a narrow set of highly partisan campaigns at the detriment of their constituents who expect those they elected to be responsive to them and be their voice in the halls of power. A branch of government designed to be above the partisan fray that has dominated our legislatures since the Early Republic has too fallen into the mire, making decisions its members promised they would not make to overturn “the law of the land” as one such member said before the legislature in his confirmation hearings. Still, a profound conviction grounded in religion rather than civics has influenced two key rulings by that august body in the last week. Two rulings that prove how poorly the separation of Church and State is faring today in this country.

The support of these causes which drove the twin arguments forward to on the one hand expand the rights of the individual at the fatal expense of the society at large and on the other to deny the rights of the individual at the will of a few who after generations of single-minded clamoring like Cato the Elder before the Roman Senate that “Carthage must be destroyed” those particular rights are now revoked. Better options exist in other societies with other governments and other relationships between the Church and their states, yet here in a country so engorged by its own reflection that any action less than overt and aggressive nationalism is unpatriotic the power of the pulpit cannot be denied.

Carthāgō dēlenda est! | Carthage must be destroyed!
Cato the Elder (234–149 BCE)

Those other options, opportunities to improve our own quality of life in such a manner that the great debate at the heart of this affair would be resolved without any sweeping action to legislate prohibition as was done with alcohol a century ago. Still in our current state our bloated yet fragile national ego won’t allow for ideas to enter the narrative from beyond our borders lest we lower our guard and allow those distantly related bogeymen of Communism and Socialism to invade just as prior generations of proud Americans feared the influence of Papism and foreign interlopers.

Of all the songs from Handel’s Messiah the one that has always stuck with me the most is the aria sung by a female voice “If God be for us, who can be against us?” The chief issue at the heart of this stalemate in public discourse is that one side of the argument claims the blessings of Heaven behind their words, their actions, and their beliefs. To them anyone who opposes them opposes God, and the opponents of God are inherently wrong. Thus, there is no need for debate at all. I do believe that we humans have been fortunate from time to time to be able to interpret the Will of God, look no further than the Beatitudes or the Greatest Commandment uttered by the scholar of the law in answering his own question to Jesus in Luke’s Gospel,

“He said in reply, ‘You shall love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, with all your being, with all your strength, and with all your mind, and your neighbor as yourself.”
(Luke 10:27, NAB)

Are those public servants honored by the duty and responsibility to fulfill the obligations of their offices who legislate based on a very particular interpretation of the law of the land directed by their own personal religious beliefs truly doing service to the country in their actions? Are they truly acting out of love for their neighbor? This is a time when the durability of the institutions that form the bedrock of this society are being challenged in every direction both by those who see less need for democracy in their own self-interest and by those who seek to reform and revitalize those institutions to flourish for generations to come.

We must always act with an eye to the past that we build our generation on the precedents that have come before us, but with our mind turned toward the future that we today now build, that it will be a just and kind world for our descendants.

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Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

New Posts on Wednesdays

Tag Archives: Religion

On Conversion

On Conversion – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.

On Servant Leadership

On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

The Divine Essence

The Divine Essence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a meditation on the Name of God.

Three Ologies

Three Ologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

Paradiso

Paradiso – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.

Inferno

Inferno – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

A while ago, I began reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. So, over the next three weeks I will be writing my own reflections on each of its three parts. This week then, I begin with the Inferno.

Doubt

Doubt – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith.

Church and State

Church and State – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

On Conversion – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I spoke with a friend who converted to Catholicism as an adult about her conversion and how she relates to the Catholic Church as a whole.

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On Servant Leadership – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, in memory of His Holiness Pope Francis and of the revolutionary anniversaries in America and Ireland this week, some words on the humility necessary for the best sorts of leaders.

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The Divine Essence – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, a meditation on the Name of God.

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Three Ologies – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, talking through three terms I’ve historically had trouble understanding.

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Paradiso – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

This week, I conclude my three-part reflection on Dante’s Divine Comedy with the Paradiso.

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Inferno – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

A while ago, I began reading Dante’s Divine Comedy. So, over the next three weeks I will be writing my own reflections on each of its three parts. This week then, I begin with the Inferno.

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Doubt – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

As we end 2023, I want to discuss doubt, one of the great drivers of my faith.

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Church and State – Wednesday Blog by Seán Thomas Kane

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