The rosary is probably the most well-known of all Catholic prayer practices. Many Catholics grew up praying it as part of their family or community devotions. And the physical rosary itself, a string of beads or knots with a crucifix attached and sometimes a medal, is immediately recognizable as a Catholic object. Catholics might carry rosaries, wear them, drape them over statues, or dangle them on their rearview mirrors. In films and television, a rosary immediately signals “Catholic,” and popu...
May 17, 2024•20 min•Season 4Ep. 7
There are certain core beliefs that every Christian denomination shares: the Trinity. The divinity of Jesus. Jesus’ death and resurrection. Some Protestants have little in common with Catholics beyond these and a few other core beliefs, but other denominations seem closely related to Catholicism. The Episcopal Church, for instance, has a lot in common with the Catholic Church, in terms of belief and liturgical practice. Both denominations have priests and bishops, and both recognize the sacramen...
May 10, 2024•26 min•Season 4Ep. 6
Some of the most popular and well-known Catholic pilgrimage sites are places where Mary the Mother of Jesus is believed to have appeared to people. Every year, millions travel to Fatima in Portugal and Lourdes in France. The Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe near Mexico City sees around 20 million pilgrims a year. And the site of the claimed apparitions at Medjugorje, though controversial, still attracts huge numbers of visitors. These, however, are only a few out of hundreds of cases of claimed...
May 03, 2024•27 min•Season 4Ep. 5
Most people who are even a little familiar with church history will recognize the image of Martin Luther nailing his 95 Theses to a church door in Wittenberg. While there’s no conclusive evidence that he actually did this, we do know that the Augustinian friar succeeded in kicking off the Protestant Reformation by promulgating his then-controversial treatise and that his primary objection was to the practice of selling indulgences. Basically, Luther thought the institutional church was in the bu...
Apr 26, 2024•29 min•Season 4Ep. 4
What do we know about the life of the early Christians in the first few generations after the death of Jesus? While there’s a lot of debate about such topics as leadership roles and gender equality, Acts is pretty explicit about a few details: The very first Christians held all things in common. When people joined the community of believers, they would sell their possessions and distribute the proceeds. They made sure everyone’s needs were met. Some people reading these passages have concluded t...
Apr 19, 2024•18 min•Season 4Ep. 3
From Hebrew scriptures to contemporary television, from Medieval manuscripts to Victorian greeting cards, angels loom large in the collective imagination of Western culture, and not only for Christians. But the word angel seems to cover a multitude of possible beings. To judge from their many and varied representations, a vision of an angel might involve a giant three-headed winged monster, a chubby winged baby, or maybe an elegant androgynous figure. Given the diverse ways angels have been repr...
Apr 12, 2024•30 min•Season 4Ep. 2
Mary Magdalene is probably one of the most recognized saints in the Catholic Church. She’s also one of those saints whose true history is obscured behind various stories and legends, from the early church to the modern era. Who was Mary Magdalene? Was she the woman who washed Jesus’ feet? Was she the same person as Mary of Bethany? According to multiple popular accounts, Mary Magdalene was a sex worker who converted and followed Jesus. According to a few arcane theories, she even married Jesus. ...
Apr 05, 2024•22 min•Season 4Ep. 1
Some Catholic apologists talk about the church as though it were a kind of data repository, filled with answers to any possible question a person might have. But in reality, Catholic thought is filled with gray areas and open-ended questions. Even when it comes to questions pertaining to faith and morals, the jury—or the magisterium—is still out, on many of them. So what does it mean to understand a topic from a Catholic perspective, if there’s no official teaching on it, or if the teaching has ...
Mar 25, 2024•2 min
When Mary gave birth to Jesus, what was it like? Did she experience the same anxiety, fear, mess, and pain that any woman can expect when preparing for childbirth? Many people might find this question strange. Of course Mary, being fully human, and not God, would share in all the usual feelings and emotions—both pleasant and unpleasant—associated with bringing a baby into the world. Wouldn’t she? For centuries of church history, many Catholics would have answered this question with a resounding ...
Dec 22, 2023•29 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Different Christian denominations hold varying views on multiple topics. Over the past two thousand years, these doctrinal differences have often generated conflict, even to the point of religious wars. Despite huge variations in belief on some topics, however, one thing all Christian denominations agree on is that Jesus is the Son of God and the third person of the Trinity. They also believe that Jesus is the Christ—from the Greek chrīstós, a translation from the Hebrew Mašíaḥ, (messiah), meani...
Dec 15, 2023•16 min•Season 3Ep. 12
Christian history is full of stories about relics, from the quest of the holy grail to tales about unscrupulous medieval merchants hawking fake relics. Today, the practice of collecting and venerating relics of dead saints or artifacts from the life of Jesus might seem backwards and superstitious to some, disturbing or macabre to others. But the tradition of venerating relics is not simply an oddity on the margins of Catholic faith practice. For centuries, many have derived spiritual enrichment ...
Dec 08, 2023•13 min•Season 3Ep. 11
Do Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25 because that was the day when the Romans celebrated the feast of Sol Invictus, the “unconquered sun,” as the winter days began to get longer again? Or perhaps because that date aligns with the festival of Yule in Scandinavian cultures? Are Christmas trees a part of seasonal festivities because some pre-Christian cultures worshiped trees as deities? Every December, it seems, people commemorate the holiday season with heated debates on thes...
Dec 01, 2023•29 min•Season 3Ep. 10
Catholics have a veritable treasury of beliefs and traditions about Jesus’ family life, but some of these are only tenuously connected with the information we have from the Bible. While the gospels are full of stories about Jesus’ ministry, death, and resurrection, we are left to piece together details about his early life and his familial connections on the basis of a few tantalizing passages. One tenet of Catholic belief is that Jesus was Mary’s only child. Since this is connected with the dog...
Nov 24, 2023•18 min•Season 3Ep. 9
Any Christian who has ever loved a family pet or worked closely with animals has probably, at some point, asked whether non-human animals go to heaven. For parents of small children who have lost an animal friend to age, accident, or illness, this question becomes especially fraught with worries about how to help a child through their grieving processes without inculcating inaccurate beliefs about the soul or the afterlife. Some religious leaders seem to think that answering the question “Do dog...
Nov 17, 2023•22 min•Season 3Ep. 7
Suppose a person were able to time-travel back 800 years and visit Catholic Europe. Despite the common notion that Catholicism remained fixed and unchanging prior to the Second Vatican Council, a theoretical time traveler would find many Catholic beliefs and practices that would seem strange. Some traditions Catholics imagine were deeply rooted in history are relatively recent and weren’t around during the golden age of Christendom. Whereas other traditions that once were common have been repudi...
Nov 10, 2023•20 min•Season 3Ep. 6
Over the two thousand years of its existence, the Catholic Church has developed complicated and elaborate leadership structures, with strict rules about who can take which roles and why. These structures can be confusing even for cradle Catholics, who may not be sure about the exact differences between a bishop and an archbishop, or what the different colored robes for different ranks in the church are meant to symbolize. Some of the highest-ranking church leaders are easily recognizable for the...
Nov 03, 2023•20 min•Season 3Ep. 5
Belief in the spirit world is central to the Christian faith, but Catholicism takes communion with supernatural realities to a whole new level. Catholics pray not only to God but also to Mary and the saints. Catholics even talk to their dead, say prayers for them, and ask them, in turn, for intercession. The lives of the saints are filled with stories about miraculous healings, levitation, bilocation, visions of the afterlife, and mystical conversations with Jesus, the angels, and the saints. Bu...
Oct 27, 2023•20 min•Season 3Ep. 4
Because the Bible is a conglomeration of diverse texts written in varied historical contexts to meet the needs of diverse audiences, its symbols and motifs might seem strange to contemporary readers. Often, readers may be tempted to impose their own interpretations on some of the more arcane details from Hebrew or Christian scripture. One such esoteric biblical motif is the number 666. While the original significance of 666 in biblical passages may be difficult to ascertain at a glance, that has...
Oct 20, 2023•19 min•Season 3Ep. 3
Thanks to horror movies, many people are aware that the Catholic church has rituals, called exorcisms, which are practiced by Catholic priests. In the horror genre, exorcisms are intended to cast evil spirits out of possessed people. They are dramatic events, potentially traumatizing to witness, often attended by screaming, violence, bodily contortions, and supernatural occurrences. But are these portrayals of exorcisms accurate? What is an exorcism, really? Do Catholics believe in demonic posse...
Oct 13, 2023•25 min•Season 3Ep. 2
Anyone who has been following Catholic news within the U.S. or globally has probably gotten used to hearing updates about synods. Thanks to the leadership of Pope Francis, terms like “synod” and “synodality” have entered the ordinary vernacular of Catholics. At the time of this recording, the three-year-long Synod on Synodality, running from 2021 to 2024, is still ongoing, but many Catholics may still be uncertain about the purpose of this event, or what a synod even is. Today’s guest on the fir...
Oct 06, 2023•25 min•Season 3Ep. 1
People who are curious about basic Catholic teachings and traditions have a wealth of resources to turn to, from the Catechism of the Catholic Church to various official documents, going back centuries. But when it comes to some questions about morality or belief, the church does not have an official position. Understanding some topics from a Catholic perspective sometimes means getting familiar with the ongoing discussions that scholars, theologians, and church leaders have had, over the ages—a...
Oct 02, 2023•3 min
Most Christians are aware of the basic theology about the first two persons of the Trinity: the Father and the Son. Both the Father and the Son are widely represented in scripture and alluded to in tradition and liturgy. Although we know, according to strict theology, that the Father is not an embodied person, let alone an enfleshed male, we have grown comfortable with thinking of the first person of the Trinity in human terms, often as an older man––maybe a kindly father figure, maybe a stern a...
May 26, 2023•28 min•Season 2Ep. 13
Can women preach in churches? People may answer this question in different ways, depending on their denomination or faith tradition. Some Christian churches allow for women to be ordained. In others, women are barred from any kind of teaching or leadership position at all. Many women working in faith-based ministries have likely heard such statements as “it’s unBiblical for women to preach,” “women should be silent in the churches,” or “women are to be subservient to men, as the church is to Chr...
May 19, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 12
Whenever Christians discuss questions about human sexuality and sexual orientation, it is only a matter of time before someone references the Bible to defend an anti-LGBTQ ideology. Whole faith communities may even be divided over the question of whether the Bible contains prescriptions against LGBTQ people. For many Catholics and Christians of other denominations, this question is not merely theoretical or academic. It has to do with their own acceptance and belonging, with their core identity ...
May 12, 2023•19 min•Season 2Ep. 11
Radical equality, regardless of gender, ethnicity, or social class, was at the heart of the faith and practice of the early church. And throughout history the institutional church, as well as individual Catholics, sometimes defended and advanced women’s rights. However, from the very beginning, the church has also been dominated by male voices. And institutional Catholicism has a rigidly patriarchal structure today, with women barred from positions of influence and leadership. Some contemporary ...
May 05, 2023•24 min•Season 2Ep. 10
Human beings have grappled with the question of why God allows suffering since before the origins of Christianity. It is a perennial conundrum for anyone who believes in a deity or deities. In many ancient cultures, including those of the Greeks and the Egyptians, belief in a multitude of gods may have made it a little easier for humans to find an answer to this question. But passages from these cultures’ sacred and mythological texts suggest that people still were not satisfied—and still cried ...
Apr 28, 2023•16 min•Season 2Ep. 9
Many Catholics, as well as Christians from other denominations, have a habit of talking about God as though God were masculine or even male. Some Catholics will even affirm that they believe God is masculine, and that referring to God as anything other than masculine is theologically questionable or even sinful. After all, two of the three divine persons of the Trinity are specifically designated with male names: the Father and the Son. Jesus called God “Father” and taught his disciples to pray ...
Apr 21, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 8
While the phrase “biblical morality” is popular among many Christians, it is not especially meaningful, since Jesus is ambiguous on a lot of topics, in his teachings, and other topics he doesn’t address at all. But there’s one theme on which the teachings in the gospels, as well as the rest of the Christian and Hebrew scriptures, are straightforward: Those who have wealth are obliged to help the poor, and woe to them if they do not. Some scriptures even indicate that being wealthy at all is mora...
Apr 14, 2023•20 min•Season 2Ep. 7
Today, many Catholics as well as Christians of other denominations admire and enjoy Jewish traditions and rituals. But it hasn’t always been that way. For centuries, Christians in different times, places, and cultures persecuted Jewish people, even to the point of forbidding the practice of Judaism. In the Middle Ages, hateful rhetoric about Jewish people and the Jewish faith sometimes prompted pogroms––organized mob attacks––especially during the Christian Holy Week. In Catholic Spain, in the 1...
Apr 06, 2023•21 min•Season 2Ep. 6
In the early days of the church, death by crucifixion was still seen as something scandalous and shameful. It is generally believed that the cross was not widely used as an image of the Christian faith until the fourth century. Today, however, we have grown quite comfortable with using different representations of this torture device as a sign of our religious identity. We have grown comfortable, too, with the idea that Jesus’ death on the cross was good, necessary, and willed by God. But what i...
Mar 31, 2023•23 min•Season 2Ep. 5
