Monthly Archives: November 2017

Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#51: How to Defend Marriage—Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse

Video

#51: How to Defend Marriage—Dr. Jennifer Roback-Morse


“Dr. J” to her tribe, this influencer as a PhD and teaching experience at Yale, and George Brown University. An economist by training, she has invaluable insights into the wreckage we see around us caused by the failed Sexual Revolution. The organization she founded, The Ruth Institute, exists to help survivors of this very public shipwreck.
With the Obergefel v Hodges (2015) decision redefining marriage at the federal level, we have reached a legal tipping point. Most Americans support marriage as it’s been defined for millennia, as the lifelong union of one man and one woman with openness to children. Culture is one thing, laws are another.
If you want practical insights into how to talk about this and other challenges such as our collective no-fault divorce attitude (yes, it has infected “good Catholic” circles), and the forgotten players known as children, this is the interview for you.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Proven strategies for framing the arguments
  • How to avoid taking the bait offered by anti-marriage activists
  • The importance of keeping the conversation where it needs to be: on the linking of children to their parents.
  • How to articulate reasons for supporting marriage without reference to either homosexual behavior on the one hand, or religious tenets on the other.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Additional Resources:

Join the Conversation:

Question of the week (for the married): When people look at your marriage, how likely are they to say, “I want a marriage like that”?
(For the unmarried): What is a good question to ask your boyfriend or girlfriend that would either qualify or disqualify them as a good candidate for marriage?

Comment below.

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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

50: The Secret Key to Narnia—Michael Ward

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50: The Secret Key to Narnia—Michael Ward


Get your C.S. Lewis on! Lovers of the works of Clive Staples Lewis (+1963), especially The Chronicles of Narnia septet will not want to miss this interview with Lewis scholar and Catholic convert, Dr. Michael Ward of Oxford and Houston Baptist University.
The Narnia series has been one of the most critically analyzed book series in history since it was penned over 60 years ago. My guest in this episode has discovered a interpretative framework to the seven books that eluded the Lewisphere for decades and now has them abuzz.
It’s all about the seven planets of the medieval cosmos. Even if you’ve re-read the books many times, Dr. Ward’s insights will bring you a whole new depth and wonder to C.S. Lewis’s best known work.
And because he is English (I say, the inventors of the language you’re now reading) his prose will expand your vocabulary as well!
I should note one thing. At the end of the interview, I jokingly asked him about his work for Q under Her Majesty the Queen. This is because he had a walk-on part in the James Bond film The World Is Never Enough. (He’s the bespectacled, white lab-coated assistant to Q in this funny scene, handing 007 his X-ray glasses at 1:20: )

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • What subtle, overarching symbolic framework governs the seven-fold story of the Narnia books (hint: think planets, not sacraments)
  • That John Williams’s Star Wars theme, shall we say, borrowed promiscuously from Gustav Holst’s “Mars: Bringer of War”
  • The meaning of the words etiolated, valitudinarian, and aestival—handy for use at cocktail parties…
  • Some important background on what inspired Lewis
  • The importance of atmosphere or “tone” in great works of literature and why it resembles the mystery in music.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Join the Conversation

Question of the week: Can stories more effectively evangelize than arguments?

Comment below.

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Culture, Spirituality

The HollyChurch Double Standard

Here’s a little thought experiment. Imagine the industry known in shorthand as Hollywood as a kind of parallel Catholic Church. Call it the First HollyChurch of Bel Air. (Remember, this is an analogy, not a simile.)

In HollyChurch, the studio heads and producers are the bishops; the directors are the priests; and the celebrity actors are the deacons. The HollyChurch bishops have the power to hire or fire the priests and deacons. The trouble is, firing rarely happens, only more hiring—unless there’s a huge PR nightmare.

Enter Harvey Cardinal Weinstein, whose bishopric comes with special honors.

His Infamous has led a double life—a public life (“public” as in the outsider perception of him and his accomplishments) and a private one, the one in which he sexually harassed, and—if allegations are true—raped at least one of his deacons.

In the wake of Weinstein’s fall, a spate of HollyChurch priests have also been accused of similar behavior, both homosexual and heterosexual. For example, there’s the Reverend Fathers Roman Polanski, Bryan Singer, Brett Ratner, and James Toback.

A growing list of deacons of HollyChurch have also been credibly accused, including Deacons Kevin Spacey, Ben Affleck, Bill Cosby, Dustin Hoffman, Charlie Sheen, and Louis C.K. There are plenty more in the wings.

One deacon, Corey Feldman, says he was a victim of serial abuse by unnamed HollyChurch prelates years ago, and recently opined that “pedophilia has been, is, and always will be the biggest problem” there. Feldman has further vowed to take a wrecking ball to the pedophile ring he says infests the place to this day.

As convenient as it is to scapegoat the Cardinal, the fact remains that molesting moguls are nothing new in the fame factory, which has a very poor track record when it comes to respecting minors.

Start that list with Judy Garland’s own account of indignities suffered at the wandering hands of Louis B. Mayer, and the fact that she her teen co-star Mickey Rooney were given uppers, then downers, to make the Dickensian shooting schedules. Thus was born the phenomenon of the millionaire child slave. (There’s even an implied casting couch scene involving the fictional Bishop Max Fabian in the 1950 Academy Ward-winning movie All About Eve—pay attention to the scene involving the deaconess Marilyn Monroe.)

With the lid blown off the story, we get the spectacle of dozens of high-level HollyChurch clergy who stayed mute for years about Weinstein now enthused about joining the scapegoating posse. If they don’t drive him into the desert to expiate their own sins of omission, who will?

A more potent mix of schadenfreude, chutzpah, and cowardice is hard to find.

Some, like former Los Angeles County D.A. Steve Cooley, have pointed out some similarities between HollyChurch and the Catholic Church. Both are viewed as powerful organizations with secrets to hide, reputations to protect, and victims to shame or frighten (usually both) or otherwise silence through plea bargains, payouts, and non-disparagement clauses.

These similarities don’t make most practicing Catholics wince because of anti-Catholic bigotry, but because they hew uncomfortably close to the truth.

But this is not the point of the HollyChurch analogy. Which is: where is the MSM presupposition that Hollywood itself—the whole showbiz industry—is corrupt based on the actions of some of its leaders? When Catholics behave badly, they’re invariably cast as part of an institution that’s evil in itself, while showbiz perpetrators are depicted as philandering rogues independent from the system that gave them both positions of power and cover from consequences.

Could it be, just maybe, that the difference here is that the mainstream media oligarchs and the prelates of HollyChurch are fellow travelers who sing off the same sheet music, and work for the same cultural ends?

Read the rest at The Catholic World Report HERE.

 

Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#49: What Is Catholicism?—Father Thomas Joseph White, OP

Video

#49: What Is Catholicism?—Father Thomas Joseph White, OP


The last couple of shows have been on the intellectual-nerd side. Here’s another one! Father Thomas J. White, OP, of the Dominican House of Studies in Washington, DC, has distilled the essentials of Catholicism into a single volume, The Light of Christ: An Introduction to Catholicism. I devoured the book (insofar as you can devour a work that relies on Thomas Aquinas’s methods and language) in a few days despite being a slow reader. His style is accessible and his prose elegant with a whiff of humor here and there.
All of that comes through in this interview, as Father White gets down to basics of foundations of Catholicism.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • What the gospel really is
  • The philosophical and biblical basis for the Catholic Church’s main claim to be founded by Christ
  • What Scripture is and why we can trust the New Testament as an historical document
  • A simple way to explain the Trinity

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Join the Conversation

Question of the week: How would you finish the sentence, “I”m Catholic because…..” Or, “I’m not Catholic because….”

Comment below.

Don’t forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Check the podcast in iTunes and other podcast directories, please leave an honest review.
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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#48: The Immortal In You—Michael Augros

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#48: The Immortal In You—Michael Augros


Arguments for God’s existence are all the rage, as Ed Feser exemplified well in the last two episodes. But what about us? What’s our nature as humans? Do we have a soul? How can we know that the soul is immortal and not just a few pounds of electric meat between our ears that produces cool experiences like a mythical God?
Very few modern thinkers are devoting a lot of time to the question of the soul and whether it’s immortal. Plato thought so, as it most Greek philosophers. Certainly the Bible affirms it. Dr. Michael Augros has written a new book called The Immortal In You. How Human Nature Is More Than Science Can Say. We talked about the finer points in my interview with him. You’ll learn a ton, as I did, about:

In this episode, you’ll learn:

  • Your own body-soul nature, made by God, destined for heaven, in peril of hell.
  • How to distinguish between what God reveals about the soul and what reason does
  • The difference between the body and the soul
  • How to argue with someone who thinks science is a magical truth-dispensing religion

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Other recommended resources:

Join the Conversation

How would you differentiate between the material souls of animals and your own immortal soul?
Comment below.

Don’t forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Check the podcast in iTunes and other podcast directories, please leave an honest review.
Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

            

If you enjoyed this episode, please share it using the social media buttons below.