Monthly Archives: April 2018

Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#73: Does the Church Hate Gays? Father Mike Schmitz

Video

#73: Does the Church Hate Gays? Father Mike Schmitz

You may have seen Father Mike in one of his popular Ascension Presents video commentaries. His topics—delivered in his energetic and telegenic style—tend toward what’s currently trending but he always anchors his subject (living together, chastity, celebrity culture, movie and TV examples, etc.) in the timeless teachings of the Church. From what I can see, there is no topic territory that is off limits, including the teaching on homosexuality—the forbidden topic par excellence in today’s climate of political correctness and confusion.

Which brings me to this week’s episode, in which Father Mike and I talk about his new book, Made For Love: Same-Sex Attractions and the Catholic Church . It’s all about balance, understanding, and having the courage to put the focus where it belongs: on compassion that is yet unafraid to speak the truth.

The issue of homosexuality has been massively co-opted by the secular media and by so-called pro-gay factions with Christianity. The result is widespread confusion: what exactly is the Catholic teaching? Where is it in the Bible? How to respond to family members and friends who “come out”? Is it possible to be biblically faithful and pastorally attuned to peoples’ real needs?

 

In this interview, you will learn:

  • Why the Church makes the careful distinction between inclination and behavior, or between unbidden temptation and chosen sin.
  • How best to respond to a loved one who a loved one who “comes out” to you
  • How our culture of relativism makes it doubly hard to have a conversation about objective morality, especially when it comes to something this emotion-charged
  • The way in which Father Mike’s relationship with his same-sex attracted brother provides a model for imitation
  • Why identifying as “gay” represents a terrible reduction of the dignity of the human person
  • Why the legal reality of “gay marriage” is best understood as a matter of redefinition and has nothing to do with sexual behavior, per se.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

 

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Question of the week:

How can I be a real Christian to a family member or friend who discloses homosexual inclinations?

 

Comment below.

 

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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

72: Does Fatherlessness Cause Atheism? Dr. Paul Vitz

Video

72: Does Fatherlessness Cause Atheism? Dr. Paul Vitz

Are atheists uniformly dedicated to truth and evidence, to rational thought and logic? Might there be a hidden causal factor at play in more cases than one would imagine? Psychologist and researcher Dr. Paul Vitz thinks so. It’s fatherlessness.

His latest book, Faith of the Fatherless: The Psychology of Atheism, sets forth the case that abusive, absent, or weak fathers very often provide the psychological soil from which atheist weeds are more likely to fester. Using example after example of leading atheists (start the list with Nietzsche, Hume, Sartre, Russell, Camus, Freud, and the so-called New Atheists Dennett, Dawkins, and Hitchens), Vitz reviews the basic life biography and finds a “father wound” in one degree or another.

He doesn’t reduce atheism to a pop psych theory (not all atheists share the same experience of an abusive father, and, besides, human beings are complex) but he carefully traces the atheists own words and the ways in which their respective intellectual journies led them to reject God—the Father.

It’s a fascinating read. And, as you’ll soon find out, Dr. Vitz is a fascinating guest.

 

In this interview, you will learn:

  • Why Sigmund Freud was right in asserting that God is “an exalted father,” but not in the way Freud believed
  • How the memories of even a long deceased father can influence your faith perspective
  • Why Jesus called God Father and not Mother
  • The reasons why Vitz did a control group comparison of philosophers and other writers of the same era and social backgrounds who had warm, close relationships with their father—and how their spiritual outlook differed from the atheist group
  • Why “public atheists” (those devoted to writing and debating their atheism) is overwhelmingly a male phenomenon
  • Why, when women leave a relationship with God they usually don’t become atheists, but they form a new relationship: yogi, guru, New Age community, goddess worship, etc.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

 

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Question of the week:

Why should Christian dads in particular pay close attention to the faith development of their kids?

 

Comment below.

 

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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#71: What Is a Real Man? Gordon Dalbey

Video

#71: What Is a Real Man? Gordon Dalbey

I have been reading Rev. Dalbey’s books with great profit since the mid-90s. One of the first Christian leaders to address the crisis of masculinity, Dalbey has laid his hand on an urgent and increasingly obvious problem: men don’t know how to be men.

The source of the problem is multiform: the throwaway divorce culture, the failed Sexual Revolution, the epidemic of pornography, bad or non-existent modeling from one’s own father, and a sense of shame that gets covered over by excessive pride.

What is your relationship like with your father? How has it contributed to the man you are, for better or worse? Did your dad teach you how to pray? Talk to you about sex in a healthy way?

Do you struggle to be real—in all that that implies? How has a rules-based approach to religion insinuated itself into your relationship with Christ our Savior?

Gordon Dalbey has your back, and most probably understands your heart.

 

In this interview, you will learn:

  • How the enemy likes to foment confusion about manhood and masculine identity.
  • Why so many men fall for the false substitutes of portfolio size, power, and pornography, and how to find a way out
  • What the Bible says about the meaning of “male and female He made them” (Gen 5:2)
  • The ways in which the father, not the mother, instills and imparts male identity in young boys
  • The source of the war over “gender” and how to recognize the error at the heart of it
  • A way of renewing your faith in God as Father and Christ as divine Brother

Resources mentioned in this episode:

 

The Patrick Coffin Show is 100% listener supported. Help us keep our show independent and unfiltered.
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Join the Conversation

Question of the week:

How has the relationship with my dad affected how I experience God?

 

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, while you are there, please leave an honest review.

Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

 

            

 

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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#70: Why Does Music Move Us So?—Morten Lauridsen

Video

#70: Why Does Music Move Us So?—Morten Lauridsen

The emotional, some say spiritual, effect music has on us is notoriously difficult to put into words. It’s sort of like analyzing why something is funny. The reality ever exceeds our verbal grasp.

Why are minor chords sad and majors happy? Why, when you hear a song from your childhood is there a superglue of emotion attached, bringing you instantly to those moments long ago?

This week’s guest is one of the greats in the choral music world. If you enjoy music with a lush, cinematic sound created for multiple voices on the exquisite side, Morten Lauridsen is your man.

The most frequently performed American composer of choral music, Lauridsen is a National Medal of Arts recipient (2007), he was composer-in-residence of the Los Angeles Master Chorale (1994–2001), and has been a professor of composition at the University of Southern California Thornton School of Music for more than 50 years. His work has been recorded on over 200 CDs including five with Grammy nominations.

We’re talking serious musical gravitas here.

On November 11, 2018, a massive concert for international television is being held at the Brandenburg Gate in Germany to mark the centenary of the end of World War One. In addition to Welsh composer Karl Jenkins’ Mass for Peace, the other piece selected is Lauridsen’s beautiful Lux Aeterna. I predict not a dry eye on that night.

You can imagine my surprise when, during the interview, the great man spontaneously began playing a portion of his classic O Magnum Mysterium to explain why the notes for the word “Virgo” ground the piece in a special way!

 

In this interview, you will learn:

  • Why every artist has to risk failure; as not trying guarantees failure
  • How Lauridsen became a late bloomer as a composer, at age 50, and maybe how you can, too
  • Why poetry deserves a massive revival
  • The importance of stillness and quiet for human serenity and creativity
  • The mysterious way in which music connects us to the divine

Resources mentioned in this episode:

 

The Patrick Coffin Show is 100% listener supported. Help us keep our show independent and unfiltered.
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Question of the week:

With only one life to live, if you feel like you have something to create, musically or otherwise, what is stopping you?

 

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, while you are there, please leave an honest review.

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Patrick Coffin Show, Videos

#69: We Are Hardwired for Beauty—Christopher West

Video

#69: We Are Hardwired for Beauty—Christopher West

Christopher West has devoted his adult life to communicating the beauty of the Catholic Faith, particularly through the insights of what’s known everywhere as the Theology of the Body.

First in archdiocesan religious education, then with the Theology of the Body Institute, and now with The Cor Project, West has been out in front, pointing out the Source of Beauty, making connections between superficially disperate dots, and, of course, being the world’s most famous expositor of the thought of St. John Paul the Great’s Theology of the Body.

His life work of explaining and interpreting the five years’ worth of the great Pope’s General Audiences (1979-1984) has launched a whole cottage industry of books, DVDs, and seminars.

I have interviewed Christopher West more than once, but this conversation with him is my favorite. We talked films that fairly vibrate with low-density gospel ideas, pop music lyrics that point Upward, the sad misalignment that leads to giving into the siren song of porn (he calls it “aiming too low”), and why he thinks the Sexual Revolution is on its last lap.

You’ll find this conversation bracing, and maybe challenging, if I had to guess. West pulls insights whole cloth from unexpected places. I’m grateful for his endorsement of the upcoming revised and expanded edition of my first book, Sex Au Naturel.  (More about that exciting development down the road.)

In this interview, you will learn:

  • The factors that led to the Sexual Revolution and why it is collapsing under its own weight
  • Examples of pop music, from Bono to Bruce Springsteen, that reflect a deep yearning for the mystery, ultimately, of the divine
  • How the insights of the Theology of the Body are not merely abstract ideas but concrete ways of personal transformation
  • The hidden providential timing of the founding of Playboy magazine by Hugh Hefner, and the radical approach to sex promulgated by a young Polish priest around the same time named Father Karol Wojtyla (later John Paul II).
  • The phenomenon of what West calls “twisted mystics,” otherwise secular artists who tap into universal longings and point in some dim but real way to the reality of the incarnation.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

 

The Patrick Coffin Show is 100% listener supported. Help us keep our show independent and unfiltered.
Consider supporting our work with a one-time or recurring donation HERE.

 

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Join the Conversation

Question of the week:

Do I believe I have a human (body and soul) and not just a spiritual, nature?

 

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, while you are there, please leave an honest review.

Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

 

            

 

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