エピソード

  • Guidance about the Transgender Question

    Guidance about the Transgender Question
    2025/08/10
    The authors and editors of a new edited volume, Gender Ideology and Pastoral Practice: A Handbook for Catholic Clergy, Counselors, and Ministerial Leaders, represent a tremendous knowledge and experience in theology, philosophy, history, and social politics, and apply it to help us sort how to think about and talk about the recent wave of transgenderism in society and especially among young people. Often clothed in terms of compassion and acceptance, transgender advocates encourage young people to make permanent surgical changes to their bodies, bodies that many will soon regret. So, how do we counsel them? Christianity is fundamentally committed to compassion and love (caritas, agape) and opposed to judgement (Mt. 7:1) yet also committed to truth. And true love does not mean letting young people make permanent mistakes that they do not fully understand—so it’s a real pickle! We talk it over on Almost Good Catholics. This episode was recorded in the sede vacante moment between the death of Pope Francis and the election of Pope Leo XIV. Also, this episode is intended to be the first of two, with a second one following up in the near future with an interview with a transgender advocate in the coming weeks. Here is the book available from En Route Media, and of course from Amazon as well. Here is the Person and Identity website, an invaluable resource for those sorting through the issue. Theresa Farnan’s website. Robert Fastiggi’s website. Susan Selner-Wright’s website. And here’s the website of the International Catholic Jurists Forum that we discussed. Here are some earlier episodes of AGC with Robert Fastiggi, the second one also about the transgender questions (and the first about Mariology): Robert Fastiggi on Almost Good Catholics, episode 7: Mother of All Nations: Immaculate Conception, Virgin Birth, Assumption, and Coronation of Mary Robert Fastiggi and Deborah Savage on Almost Good Catholics, episode 100: Lived Experience and the Search for Truth: Revisiting Catholic Sexual Morality Here is are earlier AGC episodes about the related themes of same-sex attraction from two perspectives, including the discussion with Fr. Jim Martin SJ we discussed in today’s episode: Father James Martin, SJ, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 30: What if You’re Gay? Starting Conversations with and about LGBT Catholics. Garrett Johnson on Almost Good Catholics, episode 42: Who Do You Think You Are? Thorny Questions about Sex, Identity, and Catholic Doctrine. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 時間 5 分
  • Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West" (Cambridge UP, 2018)

    Christopher Ocker, "Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West" (Cambridge UP, 2018)
    2025/07/27
    Martin Luther - monk, priest, intellectual, or revolutionary - has been a controversial figure since the sixteenth century. Most studies of Luther stress his personality, his ideas, and his ambitions as a church reformer. In Luther, Conflict, and Christendom: Reformation Europe and Christianity in the West (Cambridge UP, 2018), Christopher Ocker brings a new perspective to this topic, arguing that the different ways people thought about Luther mattered far more than who he really was. Providing an accessible, highly contextual, and non-partisan introduction, Ocker says that religious conflict itself served as the engine of religious change. He shows that the Luther affair had a complex political anatomy which extended far beyond the borders of Germany, making the debate an international one from the very start. His study links the Reformation to pluralism within western religion and to the coexistence of religions and secularism in today's world. Zach McCulley (@zamccull) is a historian of religion and literary cultures in early modern England and PhD candidate in History at Queen's University Belfast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    38 分
  • Allan Doig, "A History of the Church through its Buildings" (Oxford UP, 2021)

    Allan Doig, "A History of the Church through its Buildings" (Oxford UP, 2021)
    2025/07/19
    A History of the Church through its Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2021) by Allan Doig takes the reader to meet people who lived through momentous religious changes in the very spaces where the story of the Church took shape. Buildings are about people, the people who conceived, designed, financed, and used them. Their stories become embedded in the very fabric itself, and as the fabric is changed through time in response to changing use, relationships, and beliefs, the architecture becomes the standing history of passing waves of humanity. This process takes on special significance in churches, where the arrangement of the space places members of the community in relationship with one another for the performance of the church's rites and ceremonies. Moreover, architectural forms and building materials can be used to establish relationships with other buildings in other places and other times. Coordinated systems of signs, symbols, and images proclaim beliefs and doctrine, and in a wider sense carry extended narratives of the people and their faith. Looking at the history of the church through its buildings allows us to establish a tangible connection to the lives of the people involved in some of the key moments and movements that shaped that history, and perhaps even a degree of intimacy with them. Standing in the same place where the worshippers of the past preached and taught, or in a space they built as a memorial, touching the stone they placed, or marking their final resting-place, holding a keepsake they treasured or seeing a relic they venerated, probably comes as close to a shared experience with these people as it is possible to come. Perhaps for a fleeting moment at such times their faces may come more clearly into focus. Bryan Toepfer, AIA, NCARB, CAPM is the Principal Architect for TOEPFER Architecture, PLLC, an Architecture firm specializing in Residential Architecture and Virtual Reality. He has authored two books, “Contractors CANNOT Build Your House,” and “Six Months Now, ARCHITECT for Life.” He is an Adjunct Professor at Alfred State College and the Director of Education for the AIA Rochester Board of Directors. Always eager to help anyone understand the world of Architecture, he can be reached by sending an email to btoepfer@toepferarchitecture. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    37 分
  • Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics" (Texas Tech UP, 2025)

    Gary Kulik, "Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics" (Texas Tech UP, 2025)
    2025/07/19
    During the war in Vietnam, thousands of young men served as conscientious objector medics. They had been certified by their local draft boards as noncombatants, but many would know intense combat nonetheless. Without weapons training, they ran through the infantry lines, answering the desperate call, "Medic!" Many displayed exemplary heroism even at the cost of their lives. With the end of the draft, we will never see their like again. Conscientious Objectors at War: The Vietnam War's Forgotten Medics (Texas Tech University Press, 2025) tells their stories within the background context of pacifist churches in America. It is the first book exclusively devoted to such men, who emerged initially from the historic peace churches--Quakers, Brethren, Mennonites--and from Seventh-day Adventists, who would comprise roughly half of all conscientious objector medics serving in the Vietnam War. From World War II on, growing numbers of men from mainstream churches made the same choices, and after a Supreme Court decision in 1965, so too would men who claimed humanist and secular justification. The pages contain the stories of pantheists and Catholics, among others from the peace traditions. Gary Kulik, who also served as a conscientious-objector medic, interweaves his own story into those he recounts, stories of fierce combat, stumbling accidents, moments of fleeting honor and ever-present death. Gary Kulik served as a deputy director of the Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, near Wilmington, Delaware. Previously, he was a department head and assistant director of the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History and the editor of American Quarterly. Caleb Zakarin is editor of the New Books Network. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    55 分
  • Pope Leo XIV (with Christopher White)

    Pope Leo XIV (with Christopher White)
    2025/07/15
    Vatican Reporter Christopher White has just written book about Pope Leo XIV, our new Holy Father, an American, an Augustinian, from Chicago, from Perú; it’s a biography, but it also places Pope Leo in the Context of the Second Vatican Council, the legacy of Leo XIII and especially his predecessor Pope Francis and the synodal church of the last few years, and that was a show to which Chris White had court side front row season tickets and plenty of good stories about, some of which he shares today on Almost Good Catholics. Chris’s book Pope Leo XIV, Inside the Conclave and the Dawn of a New Papacy (Loyola Press, 2025). Chris’s talk about the Synod in San Francisco, 2024. Here are some earlier episodes of AGC we referred to in this discussion: Sr. Nathalie Becquart, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 36: Quo Vademus? The Pilgrim Church on the Road of Synodality Bp. Athanasius Schneider, on Almost Good Catholics, episode 101: Salve Regina: The Power of the Rosary Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    54 分
  • Jürgen Buchenau and David S. Dalton, "Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913-1940" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)

    Jürgen Buchenau and David S. Dalton, "Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913-1940" (Simon and Schuster, 2024)
    2025/07/11
    Anti-Catholicism in the Mexican Revolution, 1913–1940 examines anti-Catholic leaders and movements during the Mexican Revolution, an era that resulted in a constitution denying the Church political rights. Anti-Catholic Mexicans recognized a common enemy in a politically active Church in a predominantly Catholic nation. Many books have elucidated the popular roots and diversity of Roman Catholicism in Mexico, but the perspective of the Church’s adversaries has remained much less understood.This volume provides a fresh perspective on the violent conflict between Catholics and the revolutionary state, which was led by anti-Catholics such as Plutarco Elías Calles, who were bent on eradicating the influence of the Catholic Church in politics, in the nation’s educational system, and in the national consciousness. The zeal with which anti-Catholics pursued their goals—and the equal vigor with which Catholics defended their Church and their faith—explains why the conflict between Catholics and anti-Catholics turned violent, culminating in the devastating Cristero Rebellion (1926–1929).Collecting essays by a team of senior scholars in history and cultural studies, the book includes chapters on anti-Catholic leaders and intellectuals, movements promoting scientific education and anti-alcohol campaigns, muralism, feminist activists, and Mormons and Mennonites. A concluding afterword by Matthew Butler, a global authority on twentieth-century Mexican religion, provides a larger perspective on the themes of the book. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 時間 3 分
  • Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025)

    Michael Amoruso, "Moved by the Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil" (UNC Press, 2025)
    2025/07/06
    In the sprawling city of São Paulo, a weekly practice known as devotion to souls (devoção às almas) draws devotees to Catholic churches, cemeteries, and other sites associated with tragic or unjust deaths. The living pray and light candles for the souls of the dead, remembering events and circumstances in a rite of collective suffering. Yet contemporary devotion to souls is not confined to Catholic adherents or fixed to specific locations. The practice is also linked to popular tours of haunted sites in the city, and it moves within an urban environment routinely marked by violence and death. While based in Catholic traditions, devotion to souls is as complex and multifaceted as religion itself in Brazil, where African, Portuguese, and other cultural forms have blended and evolved over centuries. Michael Amoruso's insightful work, Moved By The Dead: Haunting and Devotion in São Paulo, Brazil (University of North Carolina Press, 2025) uses the methods of ethnography, religious studies, and urban studies to consider how devotion to souls embodies, adapts, and challenges conventional ideas of religion as tethered to specific sites and practices. Examining devotees' varied ways of ascribing meaning to their actions, Amoruso argues that devotion to souls acts as a form of what he calls "mnemonic repair," tying the living to the dead in a struggle against the forces of forgetting. Michael Amoruso is assistant professor of religious studies at Occidental College. Reighan Gillam is Associate Professor in the Department of Latin American, Latino, and Caribbean Studies at Dartmouth College. Her research examines the ways in which Afro-Brazilian media producers foment anti-racist visual politics through their image creation. She is the author of Visualizing Black Lives: Ownership and Control in Afro-Brazilian Media (University of Illinois Press). Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    1 時間 9 分
  • John Eldevik, "Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and Its Manuscript Contexts" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)

    John Eldevik, "Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and Its Manuscript Contexts" (Arc Humanities Press, 2024)
    2025/07/06
    Reading Prester John: Cultural Fantasy and its Manuscript Contexts by John Eldevik During the Middle Ages, many Europeans imagined that there existed a powerful and marvel-filled Christian realm beyond the lands of Islam ruled by a devout emperor they called “Priest John,” or “Prester John.” Spurred by a forged letter that mysteriously appeared around 1165 and quickly “went viral” in hundreds of manuscripts across Western Europe, the legend of Prester John and his exotic kingdom was not just a utopian fantasy, but a way to bring contemporary political and theological questions into sharper focus. In this new study, John Eldevik shows how the manuscripts that transmitted the story of Prester John reflect the ways contemporary audiences processed ideas about religious conflict and helped them imagine a new, global dimension of Christianity. It includes an appendix with a new translation of the B recension of The Letter of Prester John. John Eldevik is Professor of History at Hamilton College in Clinton (New York State), and has previously published on medieval social and religious history. Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature. YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/user/a48266/videos Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
    続きを読む 一部表示
    34 分