Pints With Aquinas - The Early Church was Catholic w/ Joe Heschmeyer

Episode Date: March 24, 2022

Joe's New Book: https://shop.catholic.com/the-early-church-was-the-catholic-church/ Hallow: https://hallow.com/mattfradd Exodus90: https://exodus90.com/matt/ Support the Channel: https://pintswithaquinas.com/support/  

Hey, welcome to Pints with Aquinas. Thank you so much for listening. If you like Pints with Aquinas and want to support us, you can do that in one of two ways by supporting us on Locals or Patreon. If you go to pintswithaquinas.com slash give it'll let you know there what you get in return. Thanks. We are live with Joe Hashmeyer. Welcome to Pints with Aquinas.

We are going to have a rip rolling roaring chat today about all things period. Before we do, I want to say thank you to Exodus 90, which is an ascetical program for men that will make you more awesome than you currently are. So if you're a bloke who wants to begin taking your spiritual life really seriously, click the link in the description, exodus90.com slash Matt, I think. Yeah, Matt,. Yeah, Matt Fred, that's it. They even have an Exodus for Lent. So if you're two weeks deep into Lent and you're aware that you're just failing,

you don't have to keep failing. You could do Exodus Lent. You don't have to do the cold showers or the no alcohol, but it's still quite rigorous. So check it out, Exodus90. Slash Matt. Dot com slash Matt, Exodus zero dot com slash Matt. They're really amazing.

Their app is sensational. So, yeah, Joe Heschmeyer. Hi. This is so fun. Thanks. I'm happy to be here. Yeah, it's it's great to have you. Thank you. Can I tell people what we did in the airport today or no? Is that it's going to get you in?

Yeah, we don't needless. Not that you ever get controversy. But I do that instead. What if I make you a drink here? Perfect. Have you ever had a white Ukrainian? What's it? What is it made of a white? Ukrainian is one part vodka one part Kahlua and then milk sounds delicious Anyway, while I make that how are you doing? What's going on with you? I'm doing very well since the last time we spoke I joined Catholic answers and Had one or two kids.

I don't remember. I know how many kids I have. It was one or two. Exactly. Some number of children have since started showing up in the house. Jason Everett made this joke because they just kept having kids. I know actually that was Jim Gaffigan. That's how funny Jason Everett is.

I got him confused. He said something about like leaving peanut butter jars open. They just keep showing up. Exactly. But congratulations on joining Catholic Answers. I'm so glad for them. You'll be such a good asset. Oh, thank you. How did that come about? Well, I was doing everything in my free time with Catholic Answers. That's only a slight exaggeration. I had written a book for them. I was working on a second book I think okay the guys had just written

one book for them at the time and I was writing articles for the website and I was sometimes appearing on the Cali guessers live show and at some point they offered to pay me for the stuff of us doing for free which as discernment goes is about as easy as it gets. Do you want free money? You didn't have to offer to Rez for a rose from heaven for that one. Do you want to be able to do this as your job instead of like moonlighting

as a free Catholic Dancers volunteer? And it was great. It's been a real godsend. And the shout out to Trent Horn moving to Texas. It meant that they were ready to handle someone working remotely. Yeah. So I've been able to work from Kansas City. So that's been a joy. You know, that's good. I imagine it's hard for big companies like Catholic Answers,

who have done things a certain way for so long to make that kind of pivot. Yeah. I mean, there's something to be said for being in studio. There's certain kinds of things that, you know, like this, you know, this works better. This is so good. If we were doing this by Skype. If what I'm just drinking alone at my house, it doesn't feel very different. Yes, exactly. That's drinking on the screen.

Like apparently I'm not a guest. I'm just watching. And my wife's like, get out of the closet. You have a problem. Exactly. However, if you were drinking in a closet, this is what I. If I was a standup comedian, this is a joke. I think I would totally milk. That was good timing. Thank you.

Yes. The milk, you know, ice fishing, ice fishing is sitting in a closet drinking, but you're an athlete. Yes. I got a problem. I just learned how I fishing where I was just up in Wisconsin. I do it at home and I got a problem. I just learned how ice fishing. I was just up in Wisconsin. I did a parish mission. You're going to have to come and get it if you want it because and you might have to stir it with your

fingers. All right. I got a pen. I got a pen. We can do that. You'll find something. One of the guys talked about catching a sturgeon. I was like, how often does that happen? He's like, I've been doing it for years. First time. And it was just like, so you just go out there for hours and just sit in a shed with a heater and drink beer.

And he's like, yeah. I think I see the appeal of the sport now. Yeah. If you like cold weather and beer. Glory to Jesus Christ. Now and forever. Amen. Yeah, I don't care what they say.

This is a great drink. It really is. But I learned because I know I would have some of these white Ukrainians and then I couldn't sleep. And then I realized, of course, it's coffee. Look, you are like, there's definitely caffeine. So after this one, I was just going to be straight book for health reasons. Exactly.

For my heart. But yeah, last time we had you on the show, we were discussing your book on Pope, Pope Peter. Yeah, up there on the shelf. And I'm not saying this to flatter you. I read that over the course of a weekend and was so impressed by the book. You're such a clear writer. And it was such a, yeah, I think I said this at the time, it was a very courageous move on the part of Catholic answers to admit as a big Catholic Apostolate that not everything is peachy in the church and coming out of Rome, but you did it in a very balanced and Catholic way, I thought. Oh, thank you very much. And yeah, I think it's some one of those things, you know, we

talked about this earlier this afternoon, where it's like, well, someone's going to talk about it. And you might as well have people who are level headed and charitable. And hopefully, you know, we certainly are striving. We're not trying to just get clicks, we're trying to give a fair and charitable presentation that takes the warts and all seriously. But I think that's the Christian way. You know, when someone's getting ready for marriage, you don't just say, oh, here's a Disney book that ends with happily ever after, and you're going to love it. You have to find a way to both present all of the obstacles and the dangers and the troubles that they're gonna have, and still end with that, but it's worth it, because the joys are beyond what you would ever know. My wife, this may tell you everything you need to know about our marriage, refers to marriage as martyrdom on an installment plan.

That's lovely. Yeah, or a sandpaper ministry. But it is that like it's going to be harder and better than you would ever have expected. True. And that's what it is to be Catholic. Well, that's I mean, to that point, the Ukraine, the not Ukraine, the Eastern marriage ceremony, where the groom and the bride are given crowns. We tend to look at that and think this means that the king and the queen and this that is true, but the deeper meaning is these are the crowns of martyrdom. Yes. CS Lewis has a beautiful bit about that. And I think mere Christianity, where he talks

about how the crown in marriage is the crown of thorns. And for some reason, when the thorns show themselves, I act as if this is completely unfair. Yeah. You know what I mean? It's like intellectually I get it But when it actually happens, I'm kicking and screaming What there's a downside there's obstacles. There's difficulties. Yeah And it really is like well, what did you expect? I guess that's true with pain in all forms of life It's easy to sit in your armchair and drink your white Ukrainian and think different things, you know? But then life happens and it's bloody hard. And, you know, I think that's kind of the appeal of Jordan Peterson to a lot of people is just like the recognition

and the articulation that life is brutal. Yeah, I think we get kind of two common voices. One, just kind of pretend you can have it all. You can do everything. And the other, which is sort of the polar opposite that just is this voice of nihilism and despair. And it's like, neither of those are the truth. It's like, yeah, this is difficult. But you know, that it is a beautiful Benedict the 16th line, something to the effect of you weren't made for comfort, you were made for greatness. And that resonates with people because I think within everyone knows on some level, like, yeah, I may be very, like, drawn to comfort and complacency and sloth,

but at some point I know, like vocationally, spiritually, I just sit on the basic vocation to be a saint. Of course it's going to be hard. St. John Chrysostom, while I've got your ear, St. John Chrysostom has a great homily on St. Peter and his denial of Christ. And he points out that he is denying Christ while warming himself by the fire. That here, he's just said, I'm willing to go and be tortured and killed for you, Christ. And then he watches his Lord get arrested and imprisoned, and he goes and warms himself up because his little hands are getting too cold. And he's not able to do the small penances, the small sacrifices, the small self-denials. So, of course, he's

going to deny Christ. Mason- Was that Christ's point that he couldn't do the small penances? Chris- I think so. Mason- I mean, it's spot on for sure. Chris- Yeah, yeah. That here he is like, when he should be like charging after him, or at least girding himself for the fight, because he's already like fought and failed once. He's already denied Jesus once by this time. Instead, he goes and just like warms himself up because he's feeling a slight bit of discomfort.

And that goes right back to our blessed Lord's words, you know, if you're faithful in small things, you'll be put in charge of larger things. And it's why the Exodus 90 thing has cold showers. Because all of those things that are really miserable, if you don't do those, it doesn't have to be that specifically. Josemaria has a great thing on good interior mortification, and it's like smiling at the person you don't want to smile at, holding back on the joke you want to tell. I'm really bad at these things.

And so these are like the things where I'm like, oh yeah, like I can't pretend I'm ready to be martyred for Christ until I'm ready to like hold back on a cutting remark that is very funny. Yeah. Or even just not always inserting your point in a group of people having a conversation. Which by the way, no, I'm just kidding. And it's true, like I'll be sitting around with folks and I'll just become aware.

Wow, isn't it interesting, Matt, how much you want to interject, how much you want to say, how much you want to be heard. Yeah. And just, yeah, I love that because it's such a humble mortification. Like no one's seeing it, you know. It's just between you and the Lord.

It's beautiful. So let's have a long period with the two of us talk now. And everyone judges us. We'll just have silence. Just silence. For two hours. We'll both live by this the two of us talk now and everyone Yeah Neither of us want to talk I was gonna say one of my friends gave up telling jokes for Lent But right when you said you're really inserting yourself into conversations. No, did you really go telling jokes? Yeah, and I was like Everyone around him now has to suffer with this more

Kind of like you don't always have to give up things that are necessarily like negative You can just give up things that are kind of neutral. Yeah. That's really interesting to me. Yeah. I gave up swearing for that. Oh, wonderful. And you probably think you should go up swearing anyway. And you might be right.

I've known a lot of Australians, including very faithful Catholic Australians. And I can say this is a different thing in terms of, uh, yeah, it's very, very culturally accepted. I mean, when my, uh, when my wife visited my parents for the first time when we were dating, like she was shocked at how many F bombs my mom dropped. But it's not in a mean-spirited, harsh, angry sort of way. It's in like a, yeah, jokey kind of Australian F in this kind of way. So I actually kind of find it charming.

And when people speak like that to me, I see it as a way, like an authenticity shines through, which I appreciate. But I don't think it's the height of Christian virtue. And so for that reason, I've given up swearing. And again, nothing to brag about, right? I should be doing that anyway. So now when I swear, I cross myself. So if you've noticed me just randomly crossing myself, that's because I just dropped something.

Yeah. Excellent. Well, yeah, baby steps. Yeah. I mean, well, look, in the 1920s, I think it was the British still outlawed the word bloody as an adjective because there was a belief that it was associated with a blasphemy. There's some dispute about whether that etymology is true or not. Meanwhile, in Australia, there was a performer who went by that name as like his nickname, yeah, bloody so and so. And so even back then, like a, in Australia, there was a performer who went by that name as like his nickname, yeah, bloody so and so. And so even back then, like a hundred years ago, there was a massive cultural difference between what was acceptable linguistically in the UK versus in Australia. That's really interesting.

You got a country formed by, you know, former prisoners and you're going to get a slightly different language. I know. But now we're all just a bunch of losers who follow tyrannical COVID mandates. You've gone back to prison. Yeah, exactly. Um, etymology, you're a, you're a fan of etymology. I am a fan of etymology. Yeah. I was going to ask you that.

Well, you can ask. I'll ask you. So we were talking today about how saying that something's gay is something that's unacceptable because it sounds like you're making fun of somebody with symptoms of extraction and making light of that and you brought that up. Yeah, I was telling a story from when I was, I think I was a teenager, maybe young 20s, and I saw PSA, like a public service announcement on TV, and it was something to the effect of don't call things gay when you want to criticize them, call them bad. Same sex attracts.

I called them bad. Which, you know, fair, good advice, but as an etymology nerd, it was hilarious to me just because bad comes from badal, which was the old English way of referring to a man who was a hermaphrodite or effeminate or gay. So it was just our ancestors, our English ancestors so to speak, Called things bad because they were calling them gay and they did it so much that the word they used stop actually meaning Homosexual or whatever just became a term for a thing. I don't like and then thus bad funny and this was happening with the word gay I mean when my kids read like old stuff and the word gay comes up

It's like you gotta kind of explain what that means now. Because. Oh yeah. I mean, we, the great irony is instead of bad, it meant happy. I mean, you know, like glad it was, I mean, gay was originally a propaganda term in terms of its appropriation by the same sex movement. Like, this is a gay lifestyle. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. They've taken refracted light now. Yeah. Yeah. Cool, man. Awesome. So this book of yours, here's what I think it's about. It's called The Early Church was the Catholic Church. Could we put a link in the description for Joe for his new book? I'm thinking what you do without having read this book at all.

I haven't even cracked the front page, to be honest, is that you probably go through what, is it kind of like Jimmy Akin's thing, but kind of different? Like you go through what the early church said about prayers of the saints, Eucharist, this sort of thing. Yeah, very, very similar in a lot of ways, except that I, well, I think there's a couple things that make it a little different from other books on the topic. I don't know why I just handed that to you. I don't know. I went and take a read. Yeah. Yes. Yes. There we go. I'm looking specifically at the first 200 years. And so there's a soft cut off of about the year 200 AD. And I'm also looking specifically at doctrines on which there was unanimity

among the church fathers. Now you'll find issues on which they disagree with each other. You know, does the book of Revelation belong in the Bible? You're gonna find a difference of opinion. What are some others? Oh, that there are differences of opinion on? Yeah. Even the nature of Mary's sinlessness, there's some question about that because at the time, embryology is in its embryonic state, we'll say. It really doesn't exist yet. So there's a lot of confusion about, you know, if we say Mary is all pure, all holy, well, did she ever sin? What was the state

of her body before her soul entered her body, which we now know is a nonsensical question. You know, those kind of things you'll find even later on. You'll find differences of opinion in terms of the way predestination works, not in the first 200 years, but by Augustine, you definitely have saints who have differences of opinions on those kind of topics. So I wanted to avoid anything there was doctrinal development on where maybe things had to get clearer when there was, you know, a process where some people got it and some didn't. I want to avoid all of that stuff and just say, okay,

let's take topics that are A, really big, and B, ones that there really is like a Christian position for the first 200 years, and much longer than that, but I'm looking at the first 200 years. And so, the four that I'm looking at are what does baptism do? Is it symbolic or does it actually regenerate you? Are you actually born again in baptism or are you born again by making a personal commitment to Christ? Second, the nature of Christian worship. And one of the reasons I'm looking at that is because so often we can have these like dueling quotes where it's like, oh, look, here's this quotation. But I want to be like, okay, but yeah, but when they went to worship, is there worship something a Catholic could attend?

Is there worship something a Protestant could attend? And specifically looking at real presence, but also looking at the notion of the mass as sacrifice. You know, the idea that the Eucharistic sacrifice is like the real thing. Luther refers to the idea of the mass as sacrifice as the belief most widely held in Christianity, and he rejects it. In other words, it's not just like Catholic patristic scholars saying this. It's like, at the time of the Reformation, both Luther and Calvin admit, like everybody,

theologians, laity, the text of the Mass itself, for 1500 years. Yeah. Zwingli's the same. Yeah, totally. In his work, Dei Baptismo, he says, when it comes to the question of baptismal regeneration, I can only conclude that all of the fathers and doctors have been in error. Yes.

That's what he says. Yeah, exactly. So, I'm looking at those kind of issues. Luther, towards the end of his life, looked back and remembered a crisis of conscience he'd had, where he was nagged by a doubt. And the doubt was, are you alone wise? And any Christian should say, hey, if I've concluded X from the Bible and literally everyone else for all time has concluded Y, humility should tell me it's Y. I may not see why it's Y.

I didn't think of that sentence before I got there. I don't know the why of the why, but I have to conclude that the odds that I'm right and all of the doctors and all the theologians and all of the ordinary saints throughout history have gotten this one wrong are so vanishingly rare as chances go. That just doesn't seem likely. Like, just play the odds. Do a little Pascal's wager if you want. Like, how likely is it God's revealed this to you and you alone? Or how likely is it He's revealed it to literally everyone else? And if you can't answer that and say, it's always going to be the second one, I think you need to work on pride. You know, like, I think it's always going to be the second one. I think you need to work on a pride, you know,

like I think it's only pride that could convince you that you alone have it right and everyone else has it wrong. But yeah, you, you get those kinds of lines from Zwingli, you get them from Luther, you certainly get that attitude from Calvin. He says, Satan has duped almost the whole world into the Catholic belief on the sacrificial nature of the mass. And so he just writes off everyone who isn't him basically as a dupe of Satan. But then he goes on and like quotes Augustine favorably a hundred times in the institutes after accusing him of being a pawn of the devil basically. And you just think it's incoherent as well as arrogant. Like if you're going to think that everyone before you is just misled by the devil and everyone before you is a heretic, you don't then get a turnaround

and quote from them whenever you happen to like a beautiful thing they say. You have to at least have the intellectual coherence to say, those aren't my people. I don't have that religion. I've got a different religion. But I think most Protestants today reflecting upon that would say, if it doesn't line up with scripture, the scripture is my litmus test. So I can take from Augustine when he's in line with scripture, but I can reject him when he's not. So they would have a more humble, balanced approach. Yeah. Which I like that you call it a humble and balanced approach because that it is. But

the first thing to recognize is that these guys are doing scriptural work. Meaning none of them are saying, hey, I believe these things about baptism because I've ignored scripture. I don't care what scripture has to say. I see. They're unpacking scripture. They're saying, hey, Ezekiel, when God promises to take your heart of stone and make it a heart of flesh by the sprinkling of water upon you, what's that about? And they're saying it's about baptism. Or in 1 Peter 321, when it says baptism now saves you, does that mean baptism saves you, or does it mean some other thing?

They're like, no, no, it means baptism saves you. Like they're unpacking scripture. So the difference isn't, oh, the Protestant is just following scripture and we're following the Church Fathers. The difference is the Protestant is following their reading of scripture, and we're following the reading of scripture from those who learned the scriptural message from apostles. And so, the reason I'm looking so early on and really putting that rough stop at about 200 is because you are at that point dealing with people who got Christianity either from the apostles or from

those who got it from the apostles. So, really concretely, the Apostle John dies about the year 100. He's got two disciples we know of, St. Ignatius of Antioch and St. Pauli Carp of Smyrna. Pauli Carp, we know he was born in the year 69. We know he died in the year 155 because before a year has passed from his martyrdom, there's an account of his martyrdom written up by those who witnessed it. It's one of the best attested second century Christian texts, because to commemorate a thing that happened in 155, they write about it in 156. We're not looking back on it 20, 50, 100 years later. Under a year later, they're talking about his witness as he's going to be martyred. And in that witness, he mentions

having followed Christ for 86 years. And so scholars witness, he mentions having followed Christ for 86 years. And so, scholars say, well, he was either born 86 years before that, or he was born even longer than that and is, you know, but converted as a young kid or something. So, taking the more conservative of those two, that's a birth in the year 69, death year 155. He is the one who teaches St. Irenaeus of Lyon, who writes the biggest, like, text of the second century against heresies. And so, when we, for instance, when the Protestant says, I'm just going to follow the Bible, it's like, well, how do you know which books are in that Bible? How do we even know, like, which Gospels are in that Bible?

Well, the first person to attest to that is St. Irenaeus, this student of Polycarp, this student of John's. And he's the first one to give us Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John. And we trust it because he's so close that we know error hasn't crept in. But it's on that same ground that we also trust that he's not getting baptism wrong because he also learned about that. And we trust that he's not getting the Eucharist wrong. Because presumably, the apostles and the saints who followed them didn't just say, here's the Bible, you know, see ya. Pete Yeah.

Jared They were there to actually answer those kind of questions. So, specifically, when we have these issues that everyone believes, and believes that they got from the apostles, where they're not just doing their own private exegesis, but are actually saying, the apostles, where they're not just doing their own private exegesis, but are actually saying, we've received this. That's a strong indication that it's not just my interpretation versus yours, or, you know, a Protestant versus a Catholic interpretation. It really is, what did the apostles teach about what scripture meant, compared to what might I just get if I was doing it in an uneducated kind of blind sort of way. Yeah, that's great. So baptism, Eucharist, sacrifice of the mass in particular, what

else? It sounds like you had four that you came up with. Yeah, the fourth one is the four gospels. So I already alluded to that one. The third one is the structure of the church. What do the churches look like in the early church? Because you'll often hear this idea that early Christianity was really chaotic and that sometime in the second century, the so-called mono-episcopacy arises. Mono-episcopacy just means one bishop per diocese, one bishop per church. And when you go back and read the earliest writings, they're actually really clear, like, no, no, you have to have a bishop, presbyter as we now say, priests and deacons. If you don't, you just don't have the church. You can have believers. We don't have the church. You can have

believers. We don't have the church in the sense the earliest Christians understood that term. So, the presuppositions, like Catholics and Protestants usually think of something very different when we use words like church. I'm saying, okay, let's check those. What do the earliest Christians mean by church? How did they understand it? And you go back and read people like Ignatius of Antioch. And there's no doubt, there's no question. And so much so that John Calvin actually suggested that Ignatius' writings were forgery. So he thought Catholics had just invented them. And it was the work of Protestant scholars in the 19th century that really-

Is there this letter to the Smyrnans where he said, where the bishop is, there is the church- He says that over and over again. But yes, he says that. A lot of Desmerian's in chapter seven, he also talks about the Gnostics denying the real presence of Christ and therefore incurring damnation and that we can have nothing to do with them. He's not trying to argue, hey, you guys should really start taking that John 6 stuff literally. He's saying, here are these people who deny the incarnation and we can't have communion with them because since they deny the incarnation,

they also deny the real presence. He's using it as a litmus test, and he's assuming his readers get all of that. And you get that later. I believe it's Irenaeus who says, our opinion is in accord with the Eucharist, and the Eucharist is in accord with our opinion. That this notion of using the Eucharist as a proof that the incarnation was real, which

is totally backwards from a modern way of thinking. Because now we've got a lot of Christians who believe in the incarnation and deny the real presence. Those people didn't exist in the first and second century. The real presence is true and therefore it follows that there was an incarnation. Exactly, exactly. So the argument just works totally upside down from how we would expect it. He's taking as a given the thing we now dispute and using it to prove the thing we now take as a given. Wow. Could an Orthodox read that

book and be like, yeah, 100%? Or does it get into areas where they might? I point towards, in the bit about bishops, we get into Irenaeus in Apostolic Succession and he talks about the role of the Bishop of Rome, and that it's necessary that other churches are in agreement with this church. And so you get the first kind of clear papal claim, one of the first clear papal claims there. So I think other than a couple pages, an Orthodox person would be like, yeah, right on. And then they get to those pages and be like, yeah, he didn't mean it, and then skip past and go on to the next bit.

One thing, one of the things I love about Jimmy Aiken is that he doesn't make an argument unless he can really show it to be the case. So, for example, when it comes to intercession of the saints, like there was some doctrinal development there. And so I love that that's not one of your things there. Like, like that you're sticking with, here's what there's actually really no disagreement on.

Exactly. I wanted to just take, I want to take the low hanging fruit. I want to take the easy stuff. Because the ordinary evangelical Protestant isn't just disputing something like, can we call Mary Theotokos? Can we call her the mother of God? They're disputing stuff that like nobody disagreed about. Or nobody remotely Christian disagreed about in the early church.

Everett Ferguson has a work on baptism where he looks at the first 500 years and he points that there's, and he's a Protestant scholar saying, everyone's in agreement on what baptism does. And they're using the same scriptural motifs and everything else, which points to this idea, this is not just some extra scriptural tradition. This is the apostolic understanding of how scripture works. My understanding you correct me if I was if I'm wrong, because I did a deep dive into this at one point that every father

who comments on John 3 5. Caesar does baptism. This is there's no one who disagrees with that. There's no one who takes out an opposing view to that, which of course, to be born again of water in the spirit. Well, you would think but then you chat with some Protestants today and they say, well, that's amniotic fluid. And so it's a natural birth. And yeah. Which is the understanding Nicodemus seems to have that Jesus then corrects. Mm hmm. And that's exactly right.

You know, like, yeah, how can I be born again? That's funny, isn't it? Because even when it comes to John six, the very thing that Jesus tries to correct is now in some Protestant circles, a Protestant interpretation. Yeah, absolutely. Because I've heard a good Protestant objection to John six, which is look all over the gospel of John and people are regularly misunderstanding him by taking him to literally John two. He says, destroy this temple and in three days I'll rebuild it. him by taking him to literally John two, he says, destroy this template in three days. I'll rebuild it. And he's not, the people aren't getting that as a metaphor for his body. John three, when he's talking about being born again, as you said, you know, he's not talking about physical,

the branch. Yeah, totally. Uh, but in John six, it works totally the other way around. Well, and that, and that in every, correct me if I'm wrong, in every circumstance where price is being misunderstood. Either the author of scripture or those around him. Correct. Correct it. And precisely because you don't want to say here's Jesus, here he is being misunderstood. I'm going to let the readers languish in that misunderstanding because if you just said like, yeah, this is how Jesus was misunderstood. No sane evangelist is going to say, good luck, you know, try to figure out what he actually made.

Because you've already, as an evangelist, as a witness to these things, you know this is capable of being misinterpreted in X way because it was. And so either Jesus corrects it or the evangelist spells it out, you know, but he referred to the temple of his body in John 10. And so the fact that that doesn't happen, or more precisely, the fact that it happens in the opposite direction in John 6, where they start off with a figurative interpretation and Jesus corrects them into a literal one, and then they take him literally, and then he doubles down on the literal language and then leaves them there. That reads like he doesn't mean it symbolically,

or you know, in a purely figurative way. Yeah, when I did a deep dive into that topic, I debated Cameron Batuzzi on the Eucharist. I don't do many debates because I'm not good at them, but Cameron's a friend and we did one. But the more I took a deep dive into that, I was in agreement that to be steeped in history is to cease to be a Protestant. Or that if you had, or if you didn't want to accept the Catholic view, then you had to accept to be a Protestant. Or that if you didn't want to accept the Catholic view, then you had to accept some kind of view. Maybe there's a Protestant view that you can accept of real presence, but this mainstream Baptist, this is merely a symbol, is just nowhere. This

is so late in Christian history. It's just a bad exegesis of John 6. I knew that people were going to leave him over some convoluted symbol that just means have faith. That's not even a controversial message. These are his disciples. These are people who already thought they had faith. I wanted to ask you, Cameron Batuzzi just wrote something on his wall, his YouTube wall, that's getting some traction.

Did you see it? I did. So for those at home, Cameron Batuzzi is a Protestant Christian friend of mine. Him and I have done different things together. I'm trying to find, I can't see how that chat a little bit of him. Was he, we should, we should call him up. Let's do it. And just put him on speakerphone. All right. Ready? I like you set the rules, man. This is your house. Just enjoy your drink.

Why don't you give me a second? Probably putting. Hello, how are you? Do you want to if I put you on speaker, do you want to be part of this live stream and chat with Joe Heschmeyer? Do you have time? Do you want to call me back when you're done? Do you want to call me back? Okay.

All right. Bye. Yeah. It's like terrible for lives. Live video. Call us back. He's having perfect. But what did he say earlier? Can you look? Yeah, I can. going to call us back. He's having a great. But what did he say earlier? Can you look?

Yeah, I can. I can. I can recount it. I remember. I don't have the YouTube app on this, but if you look it up, you might be able to read it word for word. Anyway, it sounds like he's questioning Sola Scriptura now. The point that he made is that Sola Scriptura presupposes a closing of Revelation. And and yet the case for the closing of Revelation. And yet the case for the closing of Revelation from Sola Scriptura is not very clear. The idea that Revelation is going to end with the last apostle

is not really something you can show from Scripture itself. Matthew 5 Or that there won't be another apostle who can give us Scripture. Jared Right, right. You can use Jude 1 verse 3, referring to the faith delivered once for all to the apostles. I actually think in some ways the issue is that both Catholics and Protestants misformulate the nature of revelation, by which I mean revelation is the unveiling of God. Like, revelation and apocalypse mean the same thing, like the unveiling of God. Like, revelation and apocalypse mean the same thing, like the unveiling. So what is revealed?

Well, it's God Himself, and the perfect image of God, we're told, Colossians, is Jesus Christ. So in other words, the fullness of revelation isn't scripture, and it's not really scripture plus tradition, the fullness of revelation is Jesus. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. Like, that's all, you know? The great epistemic question, well, just show us Jesus. If you've seen me, you've seen the Father. Like, that's all. You know, the great epistemic question, well, just show us Jesus. Just show us the Father, that'll be enough.

It's like, well, in a way, that's actually right. Just to see the face of God is all we've ever wanted as a people, as a creature. Your face, oh Lord, do I seek, the psalmist says. So, I think in some ways in the back and forth on Sola Scriptura, we're assuming revelation refers to either a book or a book plus interpretations or a book plus, but really the revelation properly refers to a person. Do you have the exact quote there? I just texted it to you. Oh, did you? Thanks.

I heard a ding. Yeah, my wife's also texting me, but Cameron's going to call so I need to leave it on. All right. So here's his exact thing. He said, quote, I've been, by the way, I just love that Cameron's so honest. He's just such a, he's a good man, sincere heart, loves our Lord, wants to find the truth. And I love that he's willing to admit when he's not sure about something, even though people in his tribe may not be happy with that. He says, I've been thinking more about solar scriptural lately, even if the doctrine can be successfully articulated in a way that's not self-defeating solar scriptura entails that divine inspiration has a stopping point.

The problem that Protestant face presence face by my lights is that the stopping point they arrive at seems arbitrary. Why not? Why stop at the Gospels and epistles? Like seriously, why? The more I think about it, the more I've come to realize that my own belief in the stopping point of inspiration is based on get this tradition.

Anyway, that he says. Yeah. So this is, I mean, this partly gets into the debate about like what's called cessationism. So within Protestantism, you've got a difference between the so-called magisterial reformers. And essentially, reformed people like Calvinists tend to be really big on miracles and all of that stuff, the stuff that really kind of flashy or showy parts of Christianity, if you want to call them that, end after the apostles, that they

had a particular purpose. And once that purpose is fulfilled, they stop. And there's a historical argument for that. The continuationists, on the other hand, you know, Pentecostals, Assembly of God, a lot of the people who are maybe loosely Protestant, if at all, they're kind of their own thing that's not directly tied to the Reformation, they're all about miracles continuing and still being a regular thing in lived experience. And there's historical arguments to make for that too. And it's significant that if you were to just read the scriptural texts alone, if you had never seen any of society after the first century, and you're just like in space or

something and someone gives you a Bible and you read it and you're reading about all of these, you know, apostles and wonder workers and all this stuff, you would probably expect to land and see apostles and wonder workers and everything still walking around. And we don't see that. And there's a good argument to be made for why we don't see that, but it's not argument to be made from scripture itself. Because the scripture itself doesn't say which things are meant to last and which ones aren't. I actually kind of refer to that in the book, that the problem a lot of Protestants run into is they're trying to reverse engineer what a church should look like by reading the scriptural data.

But they're not really just taking the scriptural data. They're taking the scriptural data in light of history, in light of like some small T traditions. And it doesn't work because the New Testament is being written to the church. It's not giving a blueprint for the church because the church is already there. So the best we can do is say, this thing was referred to, this office or this role or this ministry is referred to, and then we still don't know from the scriptural data alone. Is that meant to be an enduring thing? You like the diaconate or is it meant to be a first generation thing? And you know, when, when, for instance, St. Paul and first Corinthians, he talks about like administrators and stuff. Is that a holy order? No. But how

would you know that from scripture alone? Will you, I forget, were you Catholic growing up? Yes and no. So we were Sunday Mass goers and we took faith very seriously, but I was born in 85 and this period was not exactly a golden age for Catholic catechesis. And so, you know, the homilies were really a good encouragement to be nice. But for doctrinal formation, we discovered Protestant radio. And so, we were probably the only family on our block that both believed in the, you know, the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist and

the rapture. And so, you know, we were ready. But it didn't come. So, I mean, a lot of stuff I do now is Catholic Protestant engagement. And it's not born out of an animosity towards Protestantism. I have a deep love and respect for and a real appreciation for where a lot of these people are coming from. Because I've been in a similar, so in a lot of ways, like I had a journey like conversion to just be like, Oh, actually the Catholic church has a different view on this. And that view makes more sense than the view that I always heard. You know, there's a lot of dispensationalism in the water, but then you're like, Oh, that's just like a crazy idea.

And Anglican came up with in the 19th century. So when did you have a kind of reversion or were you always sort of Christian and just came into a deeper understanding of it? Well, in addition to all of that stuff going on of like trying to make sense of theology, there was also like the normal draws of sin with high school and college. But my freshman year of college, my RA, he's now a priest, Father Andrew Strobel, I would regularly buy these really bad cars for like, literally I think one of them was $600, and they'd last like a couple months.

This was not a good financial strategy, but God worked through it because he would drive me from, we lived near each other in Kansas City, and he'd drive me to our college in Topeka, Kansas, which is like 75 minutes away. And I would pepper him with questions about Catholicism. And often, like, kind of a question is maybe too polite of a word. I would just be like, come on, what's the deal with the church's teaching on? So at this point, are you on the sidelines of the church? Are you attending? I'm attending mass, but I'm kind of cynical about a lot of Catholic teaching. Like I believe very firmly Jesus is who he says he is.

So I'm very much like convinced of the Christian claim. Do not always live like it. Don't understand why Catholics believe what they believe because I've never heard any kind of coherent apologetic for it. I know a lot of Catholic teachings by this point, but in a really piecemeal kind of way without any of the underlying logic, so it just feels very legalistic. And I start pushing him on all this stuff,

and every time he comes back with a coherent answer, and we were both debaters, so we're able to go back and forth, the gloves are off a little bit, but he's still being really gracious, much more than I was. And so I'd just be like, oh, I mean, I guess I can see why you think that. And by like the 12th time you do that, you're just like, okay,

maybe there's something here that I got to take seriously. What year was that? That was 2003 to 2004. 2000 was my conversion. I'm about four years older than you, but I was. So very similar kind of point in life, I think. I was 17. Yeah, I was 18. So you're a little quicker.

Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that's awesome. And so when did you start? Cause you, is it, what was your name? Shameless Popery. Shameless Popery. 2009.

So that was like six years later. At that point, I'm in law school. Throughout college, I was like learning more about Catholicism. I started arguing for team Catholicism. I had a Presbyterian roommate. I started arguing for team Catholicism. I had a Presbyterian roommate. We both ended up going to seminary afterwards. Neither of us got ordained. But we were both really passionate about theology. And so, I don't recommend this part. We'd just get

drunk and debate theology. Yeah, exactly. In Vinno Veritas. Yeah, exactly. And it was kind of the intellectual. I liked the Catholic argument because I could be right. And I bet there are people listening right now who like to use it as a cudgel against their non-Catholic friends or on the internet, and maybe don't like take it seriously as a call to sanctity. And so then my senior year of college,

I start pursuing this same roommate's ex-girlfriend because I'm a good guy. She is a Protestant and actually takes her faith very seriously. So we get into a lot of Protestant Catholic discussions. And one day she says to me, this stuff you're saying about Catholicism makes a lot of sense. Why don't you live like it? Really? Oh yeah. It was a gut punch.

Cause I had no answer. And what was she referring to? Oh, just like my general life did not reflect the life of someone trying to be a saint. Getting drunk and. Yeah, chasing women and all of that stuff. And it was just like, oh yeah. And just being also just like,

being cynical, being like doing anything for a joke, that kind of, even apart from all the big stuff, just having a unpleasant sort of for laughs, like doing anything for a laugh without any regard to the morality or the decency of it. And so it was a real wake up call. I didn't have an answer. And I don't know if you've seen a threat.

I hate being just like dead wrong about something. And so first, like the priest, not a priest at the time, the RA convicted me about the intellectual stuff. Here she's convicted me about like the heart stuff and just not living according to these things I now know are true. And so I started to, yeah, slowly take this stuff more seriously. I pick up the book Catholic Matter, by Father Richard John Newhouse. And it was the first time I'd ever bought a Catholic book on purpose in my life. I kid you not, this is like-

Did you buy them accidentally at some point in the past? You said this is the first one you bought on purpose. Oh yeah, it's a fair point. I think I'd gotten some books, you know, where people would like gift them to me. But for like, to intentionally be like, I like this book. Well, I'd go to Barnes and Noble over my lunch break. Yeah, and I would just read books and put them back on the shelf Nice. Yeah, exactly. Stand up guy

But this one was so good. I was like I need to buy this Yeah, and it was it was life-changing and then it was like another book another book and and then I after that point went to The Diocese of Arlington. I was going to Georgetown for law school. And so I was living, or actually I was living in DC, but I was dating a girl who lived in Arlington. This same girl who had convicted me. Oh really? This was your boy, this was your friend's girlfriend? Yes, they broke up for like a year earlier in my defense.

All right, fair enough. I'd gotten the green light. All right. Well, there's a flip in here. Okay. So another girl had come to visit me on a kind of date and then discovered my roommate and ended up marrying him. So, I felt like we were square.

It was justified. Yeah, exactly. It was even. And I didn't marry this other girl. So, but she ended up going out to work in DC. I went out to law school there and she was living in Woodbridge, Virginia. So, we go to Our Lady of Angels Catholic Church. She is still Protestant at this point

But we come with me in Mass and so she does and it was the first time I'd seen a really beautiful liturgy And today I'm like a little more snobby about liturgy I don't know how beautiful I would even like he's in an a-frame church I would have probably found a lot more things to be like super judgy about which praise God That kind of cynicism hadn't like said it yet as as now. Yeah, hopefully, hopefully, but like I'm more aware of like, I know, it shouldn't be showing or, you know, or you're sorry for now.

It's your colors. I saw all that stuff. Yeah, it's an A-frame church. Oh, here's Cameron Batu. We should probably answer it. All right, everybody. Cameron Batu's he's calling. Hey, if I put you on speakerphone, is that OK?

All right, Cameron Batousi, you are live on pints with Aquinas with Joe Heschmeyer. Hi, Cameron. It's my first time being live ever. Can you put that your headphones on and make sure you can hear him? OK. Yeah, this is funny. We used to fly you in, okay yeah this is funny we used to fly you in but now this is just way easier but um we were talking about the comment you made earlier about solar scriptura um yeah and uh joe heschmeyer was thoroughly agreeing with your um doubts about solar scriptura shocking yeah um i've been thinking about that doctrine and a lot of these other doubts about Sola Scriptura. Shocking. Yeah.

I've been thinking about that doctrine and a lot of these other doctrines as well, kind of thinking through my objections to Catholicism as deeply as I can. And I was just the other day I was I was reading and I feel bad because I don't remember the name of it. Scott Hahn's book.

Oh, Rome Sweet Home. When you were here, when he gave that to you, I was here with you. OK, Road to Rome. Is that were here when he gave that to you. I was here with you Rome sweet home Excuse me, we just finished eating. Yeah, so Rome sweet home I was reading through that and I was reading this section on Sola Scriptura And I just I thought about how it kind of seems arbitrary where we draw the line where inspiration ends I've been getting some pushback by Protestants on my page, as you can probably

understand or appreciate. But it's just it's just something that occurred to me. This isn't like a knockdown objection to solar script or anything. It's just something I was kind of toying around with thinking about. Well, one of the things I did to post it. One of the things I love about you, Cameron, is your honesty that you're willing to say, hey, I'm thinking about this again. And it's troubling me, even though you know that you're going to have a significant

contingent of your audience not happy. I love that vulnerability you have. I think that's why people like you so much. I'm like right on the line these days of like, I have people who are like really hoping for me to become Catholic. That's probably like half my audience. And then I have half of the people that like really don't want me to become Catholic. So I'm like right on that line between like both camps. And so you're right, it is kind of intimidating to like post. It doesn't matter what side it's on, if it's pro Protestant or if it's pro Catholic, like it's still pretty scary to post anything these days because I'm gonna get a whole lot of pushback. Yeah. Doesn't matter what it is. Yeah, no, totally. It's a thrilling journey to watch.

Who is this guy that you're with? Okay, so this guy, his name is Joe Heschmeyer. He's a super smart Catholic, but also just a really good guy. I don't know. Some of you say super smart. You're like, yeah, he could be smart, but like an idiot or like a mean person, but he's not.

He's very smart. Yeah, possible. Both an idiot and a mean person. He's both an idiot and a mean person. And's not he's very thoughtful both an idiot enemy he's both an idiot enemy in person and whatever but anyway I don't know why we really called you it was just to say hi oh well I could I could run one of my objections or camera mbutusie's objection to Catholicism go the objection is and I'm hoping that I can find an answer to it.

I've talked to Trent Horn a little bit about this and he thinks that the two can be made compatible. So the objection is basically based on the doctrine of annihilationism. So I became convinced of this doctrine. I lean toward it, I'll say that. And it had happened several years ago at this point. I was actually in an atheist with a, I was in a debate with an atheist

and the atheist was basically assuming eternal conscious torment, the traditional view in his argument. And so I was like, well, no, there's these other doctrines that you might hold if you're a Christian. Anyways, the story behind it is not super important. I'll cut to the chase. Okay, here's the question. Is Catholicism compatible with annihilationism? Because if it is,

then that would be a sort of stumbling block out of the way for me. So what in your view, are those two compatible? Or are they like, if you're a Catholic, you've got to believe the traditional eternal conscious torment view What's your what's your view? So I don't know if you can hear me all right camera. I can hear you Okay, cool. I think it a lot depends on what you mean by annihilation ism by which I mean I don't know if you've read any of CS Lewis's stuff on this When he talks about hell one of the images that he uses is of a log being burnt in the fire. And a log that's been burnt up in the fire is still a log.

When you see that ash heap, it is in some sense the log, but it's unrecognizably the log. In other words, if there's some like person you really like who goes to hell, if you were to see them, they would not be the person you really like because everything you really like about them is in some ways the working of God's grace. And deprived of that, you just don't have the person in the sense that we're imagining the person. So, in the eternal conscious torment view, the mistake I think both sides are typically making is imagining a person with all of the things that make them good and decent and lovely in hell.

And that's actually incoherent. Because the things that make them good and decent and lovely are through the participation of divine grace and the divine indwelling and everything else. And those are the very things that they're saying no to in being damned and in damning themselves. They're rejecting all that is good and decent and wonderful about them. So do you have a person in the sense that both sides are anticipating or imagining? I think we have to really explore what that means. So I don't know that you could have a total annihilationist view that they simply cease

to be in any way, shape, or form. But I also don't think you have the view where they, in the sense that we think of them now, are just like in hell. In the same way that you kind of, well not in the same way, in a flip side, think about like St. Paul in 1 Corinthians 15 when he talks about the bodily resurrection. It's not true that we're just like disembodied spirits forever, but it's also not true that we get our bodies back in the sense that we have them now. We get our bodies back in some unimaginably different them now we get our bodies back in some Unimaginably different way that he compares to like a seed that becomes a plant and so the negative of that is

Like the you know popcorn kernel or something that is totally you know It's no longer what we're imagining it to be but it is still that thing in some sense You can't see it, but I'm nodding my head. Yeah, because is your is your primary objection, the it would be an unjust thing for God to punish someone eternally, because. OK, because prima facie, I feel that way. Like, I just feel it. It just seems insane that someone could whatever, you know,

say, I've heard a really good Protestant, not Protestant. I've heard a really good traditionalist defense of that from a guy named Jerry Walls. I've had him on my. Yeah. Four. And C.S. Lewis kind of said something along the same lines. They say, well, so here's the idea is that when you go to hell, you're not in a situation where it's just like impossible to send anymore.

And so if you continue to send, then you're kind of like continuously racking up punishment points, so to speak. So it's like you could in principle, continue to send in hell and continue to deserve more and more punishment. So it's not that you're Receiving an infinite punishment for a finite crime You're receiving finite punishments for finite crimes and that just that process goes on infinitely Can I suggest an alternate view camera?

Rather than thinking about it in kind of the penal way that seems almost legalistic of like well How many years do you get for you, blasphemy or something like that? We are made in such a way, and we could only be made in such a way, that our happiness in its deepest and fullest sense can only be found in the enjoyment of God. That you want goodness. Everyone who's ever lived wants goodness. And there is one one and there can be by definition only one infinite good and that's God. And so if we who have

this infinite hunger for good and I think that's demonstrable you know try satisfying yourself with sin, try satisfying yourself with worldly pleasures and you it stops being fun. You want something more. It's not satisfying. Like there's a reason alcoholism exists. There's a reason escalation and sin exists. It's because like that hit you got last time no longer does it for you. That's the nature of something metaphysically true

about us at an interior level. Not God's punishing you by making the second drink not as much fun as the first drink. No, no the way Happiness works and the way our metaphysical hardwiring works is our orientation towards good Needs higher and better good and the more we try to satisfy with lower goods the less We're actually happy like the person who's totally given themselves over to sin is less happy than the saint in every case. And as a result, the person who is made for infinite happiness and will only be truly

happy in a lasting enduring way with the full enjoyment of God, which is all of us, and even Aristotle realized that when we say no to that one happiness, we're saying no to the only thing that could make us happy. It's like if I say, hey, I've got this plug, and I'm not going to plug it into an electrical socket and then complain that I'm being punished because the computer doesn't turn on. Well, it's like, well, I said no to the only thing that would make it work. And so now I'm just enduring forever by refusing the only thing that works. So it's that idea, like God alone can satisfy our hunger.

So when we say no to that, it's not a punishment even. I mean, it's a punishment in one sense, but it really is us doing to ourselves saying, I don't want the only thing that's gonna work here and then complaining that nothing else works. That's like a really good way or a really long way of saying the C.S. Lewis quote that the gates of hell are locked from the inside.

Yeah, I think it really long is a good description of that. Well, hey Cameron, feel free to have the final word here that we should probably get going, but I want to tell people to go check out Capturing Christianity. Cameron Batuzzi, good friend of mine, awesome dude. He has wonderful intellectual discussions about the Christian faith on his channel, great debates, excellent stuff like that. So check it out, capturing Christianity. But any final words? You're way too nice. So yeah, I mean, I think that kind of answers my question. It seems like the answer is basically no, that they're not compatible in the more traditional sense of just what annihilationism would be. But I

mean, I feel like I've heard or not. It's not a feeling. Trent Horn told me that he knows of someone who thinks they're compatible. So I've got to like, that's what I'm currently looking into. I've got to look into it further. But I appreciated everything you said. Yeah, for sure. God bless you, brother. All right. Say hi to Brittany. Bye. OK.

You wait. The next video that comes out from Trent Horn, rebuttal video. Trent Horn, rebuts Trent Horn. Wow. I watched that debate, Trent Horn versus. Yeah. Wouldn't that be amazing? Trent Horn debating Trent Horn.

Just for those confused in chat, that wasn't Cameron, your wife. That was not my wife. She has a very deep voice. Yeah. No, that would. Is that what they thought? Well, somebody was saying that Cameron was Matt's wife. Yeah, no, nor am I in any sort of immoral marriage with a anyway.

Cameron, what a guy. Yeah, man, that's that was that's a beautiful discussion. I like what you said there, you know, that we do have this idea that hell is just you and then placed in unbearable agony. Right, right. Yeah. Well, I mean, a lot of the way even we understand sin, there was a Washington Post article a

couple of years ago that said pornography is bad, not because it's sinful, but because it hurts you. And I just thought, what did you think we meant by sinful? Oh, interesting. Like, did you think we just meant arbitrarily forbidden? Oh, yeah. It's like, no, no, we meant it hurts you. And I just thought, what did you think we meant by sinful? Oh, interesting. Like, did you think we just meant arbitrarily forbidden? No, no, we meant it hurts you. Yes. Yeah. So it's that idea, you know, what, you know, C.S.

Lewis said if there was one doctrine he could get rid of, it would be hell. But it has the full backing of scripture and tradition. What, what would it be for you? I mean, if you don't mind me asking. No, I think that's a great question. And it might be something more esoteric and nuanced, but is there something that you like? You know what? I kind of wish they didn't bind us to this thing. No, I actually think he's probably right with hell.

I think, you know, in ages past, people had a much deeper conviction of sin. I don't just mean Christians. I mean, pagans that you see sacrificial ritual and everything else. Like, this is the weird irony of sin. And I don't just mean Christians, I mean pagans. That you see sacrificial ritual and everything else. Like, this is the weird irony of Christianity, is that in some way it has alleviated the modern man's conscience. Here's what I mean by that. Like if you go to a traditional culture anywhere around the world, there's a really good chance that they do sacrifice. And they do sacrifice because they know they're not good with God,

or the gods, or the divine, or however they understand that. There's some sense, I know what perfect good is, at least vaguely, and I know I'm not that. And I know somehow sacrifice is involved. Something needs to change. Something needs to be given up. There needs to be a breaking of bonds. There needs to be a shedding of blood, whatever it is, to appease the gods and get right with them. That sense is really deeply embedded and Christianity comes along with a solution to that, which is why it's good news. But it's so successful that who in the West sees animal sacrifice? Like, unless you happen to live like near some Santeria neighbors something, like, chances are you've never seen an animal sacrifice.

You've never seen any kind of pagan reaching out towards God. And so, we sort of forgot we needed it in the first place. And so, we forgot the problem that Christ comes to solve. Mason- Is there a modern analogy to sacrifice in pagans, like this pagan society in which we live post-pagan maybe? Yeah, so I think I'd say, yeah, we are post-Christian pagan, which is in almost every way worse than a pre-Christian paganism. There's a sense of guilt and a guilt that we try to expiate through like being righteous in other ways, right?

We have a very kind of like, well, you know, I may have cheated on my husband, but I put Stand With Ukraine hashtags all over my stuff. Yes, and I recycle. Right, right. And so, and I don't, I don't just say that to mock it. Like I also say that to say there's a moral thing going on there that may actually be God at work in the life of that person because they're showing some sense of like, I need to be better than I am. And so I actually

think the person who's like deeply woke is maybe more committed to virtue as they understand it than a lot of average Catholics. Like the person who was totally bought into the secular mentality about what it is to be a good person. Which is why wokeism is more attractive than blasé Catholicism. Absolutely. Because it stands for something

and it's calling you to repent. Least of some ethos. It is calling you to repent of something and to commit your energies to the cause. Yeah, absolutely. It really is, any kind of movement is going to answer those questions like What's wrong? And how can I be better? And so I think any political movement has some sense of that

And because other no one wants to just say I just want more stuff And so here's a movement for me to get more stuff. Yeah, like that not satisfying. And so people want something nobler. And so, yeah, I think a lot of that stuff in secular culture is responding to that higher aspiration of racial justice or economic justice or whatever that looks like. And however well or however poorly that's formulated, there is a holy impulse there that we shouldn't take too lightly. And I think it's the closest thing we kind of get. The danger is it can be a cheap grace, meaning there is implicit within that some acknowledgement that I'm not the person I want to be. But we often skip that step to just the self-improvement part.

I see it within the world of like critical race theory stuff, Robin DiAngelo has some stuff, you know, a lot of that is cultivating kind of a white guilt. I mean, maybe that's impolitic to say, but a lot of it is telling comfortable white people, you should feel a little bad about that. And that pricks the conscience a little bit.

And then there's some like kind of pat solutions about, you know, that comes in and that's the part where we really kind of diverge pretty strongly. But there's still a pricking of the conscience. And I think our conscience is, maybe not in that area specifically, but in general, need to be pricked. And so that's the thing that makes Christianity difficult

now is that we have to sort of present the bad news. All of that's a very long way of saying. I think why I think C.S. Lewis is right is that hell doesn't make sense to modern man because he has no idea he's anything less than great. And people talk about going to heaven because they're basically good people and have no sense of the incoherent arrogance of that kind of claim. So when someone says that, I like to say, like, do you think you deserve like the presidential medal of freedom? You think you deserve like the Nobel Prize? And no one is insane enough to say yes to that.

Except Trump maybe. And so instead people will be like,, well no, of course not. I'm like, okay, cool. But you do think you deserve. Heaven. Unending bliss. Unending infinite bliss because you recycle sometimes and you only committed the sins you really wanted to and not the sins you weren't drawn to.

Wow. That's a really good way of putting it, man. Yeah. Yeah, it is funny how, and I've noticed this and so have you and's a really, that's a really good way of putting it, man. Yeah. Yeah. It is funny how and I've noticed this and so have you and so is Lewis that Christians aren't the ones who are saying I'm a good person. Right. Unless they're just Christian culturally. Right. But you do tend to find, Hey, I'm a good person among the atheist or the secularist. Yeah. Well, this was actually in the story. I kind of shared my own story earlier, but I think that was one of the graces of God, is that I didn't have any illusions about being a good person.

Even when I wasn't trying to be, I still was like, nah, I'm kind of crummy. And God can work with that. But when we tell ourselves, you know, and look, I was brought up with like the self-esteem movement, like my family didn't go in much for that, but like a lot of my classmates' parents, you know, had this idea you need to constantly praise your kids and build them up and act like they're great. And a lot of them weren't. And still, you know, rates of narcissism and all of that just have skyrocketed generationally because it's like praising people for doing nothing or the bare minimum. And then they

take that theologically because they believed you. And I get why they believe, you know, their parents, everyone they trusted told them they were amazing people when they were mediocre people. You know narcissism is a new buzzword that's real popular today and I somehow went down a rabbit trail where I found these videos on narcissism and there's a ton of videos like 10 signs your parents were narcissists or something. And I just thought, oh, like I get to watch a video that tells me I'm a victim and that my parents suck. I'm not sure if.

It was a video, just like a mirror you could gaze into or like a pond you could stare at your reflection in. Well, it's it's just like I just wonder what we mean by narcissist today. It seems like such an elastic word that's come to me in so many things. And yeah, it also makes me wonder too what sort of things we're doing today as parents that our kids are going to look back and scoff at us at. You know, there's no objective standard, you know. My wife and I are always joking about this,

like which of these things are going to like help our kids be saints and which ones are going to end them up on the therapist's couch or both. Exactly. That's the thing, man, because kids will and just human beings interpret things, even well-intentioned things that could end them up on the therapist's chair. I don't know, for me, I just think I want to know what the early church said. And, you know, there's it's, I guess as I've kind of like grown in my Christian walk and I've I've begun to kind of convert my mind in certain ways towards more kind of gospel teachings that at one point I dismissed. Right. Maybe that's fornication, sodomy, or even other things like the husband being the head of

the house and how Christians are so quick to dismiss that. What they'll say is, well, yes, but what does that mean? It means the husband has to die for his wife. Who has it better here? And that's a true statement. And yet it was used to dismiss the awkwardness of something we're not willing to hear in our modern society. Right? So my point is, as I've come to kind of accept this more and more, I'm like, you know what? I just want to be docile to the teachings of the fathers. And so speaking of John Chrysostom, I mean, he's unreal when he talks about Ephesians 5 and women and husbands. And then also, he's got a whole sermon on how to choose a good wife. Yes, actually, part of that sermon is the back of

our wedding cards. Okay. Do you remember what it was? I can't quote it, unfortunately, but it was just about like when you find the right woman, like what to say to her. It's a beautiful, beautiful, I, I find the early church fathers more relatable than modern Christian writers. Yeah. Even Thomas Aquinas, who's writing in a very different style. But if I'm just going to read someone to plainly tell me something, you just can't go by the fathers, you know, you can't go past them. Even in his sermon on Ephesians five, he's got this great advice for husbands. He says, never call your wife just by her name. Always say it with some endearing term. And he gives you examples.

My love, my beloved, things like this. What a beautiful bit of advice from a monk. Was he a monk in the 300s? He became a bishop. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it's pretty amazing. Yeah, there's something very profound. There's such a radical embrace of the beauty of married love. And he takes it seriously. That's one of the things that's

really striking about the Church Fathers is on the one hand, they are totally clear that they view celibacy and virginity as higher states than married love. And on the other hand, they cannot praise married love enough. And when you see that, it's really like, oh yeah, of course it makes sense. It's not good versus bad, it's good versus better. And the good is so much better than the world makes you realize it is. Because you know, now we don't really have a place

for virginity or celibacy in our culture, and we don't think marriage is very good, and we don't think singleness is very good, and we're just unhappy. And it's like, okay, we're not doing something right. And so to see that kind of recognition of the beauty of this vocation, yes, it's transformative. What is it, Ado Zoria?

Was that Urijin Singh to his wife? I'm not sure. He has like a thing, some of it's very beautiful, some of it's kind of weird. Was this before he castrated himself? Good question. Well, maybe I want to say it was origin. I may be totally wrong about that. But yeah, you just see this stuff where there's just like these profound insights about married

life. And like you said, St. John Christin is a great example because he gets those little details right in such a way that it's very appealing. He also has this great thing, right, where he talks about how the house is not a democracy. There's not two heads. That doesn't exist. The husband is the head. The wife should not stubbornly contradict her husband.

But then he says things to the man where he is, what are you to do if she belittles you and makes fun of you? Doesn't matter. You love her. You do your duty. You make her submit to you the way Christ made the church submit to him, not through threats or through being a tyrant, but through humble service and love. I mean, it's just beautiful. I'd find it difficult for anyone in the church to really object to him. What's so funny is we hear this and we object to it with our modern sensibilities And who are we expecting to answer the question modern society? But in society doesn't know what a man is or woman is or what marriages so no

For straight you look I mean actually the the stuff that I think is most interesting or border called happiness studies And all they do is ask people if they view themselves as happy. And men's happiness is the same. Well, you love them. I've just always thought that that's such a good example of like, a lot of times people like cite certain things as like very decisive, especially in psychology, when it's usually based on studies like,

the example that I go to is the one you were talking about, the happiness studies, where they like ask people if they're happy. Like, what are they, that's such a terrible, like one you were talking about, the happiness studies, where they ask people if they're happy. Like, what are they, that's such a terrible, you can talk about it. Yeah. Hey, do you want a beer? Sure, yeah.

These are really good. These are really good beers. Good job, Neil. You're welcome. Who cooks for you? Feels like a very low- Oh, that's what it's called? What does it even mean? Who cooks for you?

I thought you were trying to trap me on the Ephesians five stuff. Okay, it's my wife. I'm a terrible cook. What do you want me to say? Hey, I know you don't know who John Henry is. Friend of ours. I've watched a little bit of that. He's just my favorite person.

But one of the one of my favorite memories of John Henry is I went into his house and just so everybody knows, he's like this big hunter guy, very manly and all the kind of traditional ways. And I'm in his house and his wife and kids have been gone for a week in Minnesota and the place is just a bomb. And he says very unironically, do you know how to use that? And it was the dishwasher just loaded. I mean, yeah, you put the you put the soap and you press about it. Yeah, I don't know how to do it. Could you do it? Sure, sure. I'll do it.

Which I think is only OK because he hunts literally all of the meat that his family eats. If he was just a slob on the couch refusing to use the dishwasher, that's not OK. Yeah. And you know what? I give a lot of latitude to couples as they kind of navigate those duties. For instance, my own dad, I think my mom's okay with me saying this on a YouTube channel that gets a lot of views. My dad, a much better cook than my mom,

by her reckoning, by ours, by you know. No, for sure, and there's just different temperaments in men and women. Right, and he likes it, and she didn't like it. So, you know, the duties in the house didn't line up for like leave it to beaver, but there was a clear sense't like it. So, you know, the duties in the house didn't line up for like, leave it to beaver. But there was a clear sense of like the two working like true complementarianism where it's like you do this, I do that and we help each other.

Absolutely. Where it's not just like I go do your thing. Well, I'd be screwed if it was just a matter of you do the male roles and all of the female roles, because I would imagine a more male role is like taking care of the checkbooks and balancing the budget. I'm hopeless at that. Like just the worst. And my wife's not good either, but she's not as bad as I am. And so she does that, you know? Yeah. I think rather than trying to fit into some imagined, yes, the historical past or trying to fit into some imagined like present ideal. Just look at the two individuals and say, hey, you do this really well, I do this thing well,

or maybe we're both bad at this, but I'm slightly less bad. How can we help each other? And it's like you wouldn't do that with any other, you wouldn't say, hey, well, if you're gonna have a company, you better make sure the head of the company only does these things and never does those. That's such a weird artificial set of constraints to put on something as dynamic as human relationships. But we're in a weird moment today.

We are. We're in a weird moment where we're all just trying to figure out what the heck is going on. Things are falling apart. We feel like we're free falling. And so I said this to you today when we were in the airport, I give latitude to people on both sides of the spectrum here. And maybe I shouldn't, right? But when I hear about another Catholic who's apostatized, or I hear about Patrick Coffin saying Pope

Francis isn't the Pope, that he's an anti-Pope, I disagree with Pat Coffin. I don't want the person to apostatize, but I'm like, we're all just trying to figure this out and to pretend that it's really easy what's wrong with you? It doesn't seem reasonable. It's it's it's not that easy. Things are nuts. In the not that distant past, there was a certain amount of sort of a spirit of triumphalism within a segment of conservative Catholicism that I would identify with. I would. You know, if you've ever heard the phrase biological option.

No. So, it's the idea of like, we don't need to tackle the problem of like heretical older priests because they're going to die out. Yeah. And then like the younger priests are really good. I've heard that recently. And then it's just like, hey, that was never a Christian response because you're not loving those older priests enough to like take care of their souls by actually having uncomfortable conversations. And it's incredibly arrogant to just assume what tomorrow holds

because the trajectory of today looks exciting. And if you've read the Epistle of James, he's all about like, don't guess about tomorrow. And then it turned out tomorrow looked very different than we thought it did. And things didn't go on the course that it seemed like they were going to. And that should be a wake-up call to not just assign our own program to God and say, I've got this grand vision for what Reform of the Church looks like, and therefore it must be God's plan. But to instead do the hard work of like, I'm going to try to be the saint God wants me to be, and I'm willing to have the hard conversations or do the hard things that need to be done for that to come to fruition. And I don't know what tomorrow holds. And I don't need to because that's not where I'm going to encounter God.

I'm going to encounter Him here today. We talked about this in the car too, but I think it ties in that the two places the devil wants to take us are to the past or to the future, because God's the eternal present. So like God is here in the moment, in the present now. And so what does he try to do? He tried to say, Hey, look at how you used to be in the past. You should get caught up on that or look at how good things used to be way back when and get caught up on like this fictitious past or freak out about tomorrow, worry a lot about tomorrow and get caught up in a fictitious future rather than living in reality, living in the present moment.

I want to share a little prayer with you from St. Faustina. I texted this to my mate Derek recently and it's exactly what we're talking about. She says, oh my God, when I look into the future, I am frightened. But why plunge into the future? Only the present moment is precious to me as the future may never enter my soul at all. It is no longer in my power to change, as the future may never enter my soul at all. It is no longer in my power to change, correct, or add to the past, for neither sages nor prophets could do that. And so, what the past has embraced I must entrust to God. O present

moment, you belong to me, whole and entire, I desire to use you as best as I can. And although I am weak and small, you grant me the grace of your omnipotence. And so trusting in your mercy, I walk through life like a child offering you each day this heart burning with love for your greater glory. Yes. Like that is it. That's it. Like the past and future need to serve the present. The past. If you say like, here's the thing I need to offer to God, then maybe I haven't given this thing over. Now the past and the service of the present. The past, if you say like, here's the thing I need to offer to God, then maybe I haven't given this thing over.

Now the past is in the service of the present moment. Or like, I think God's calling me to this point in the future. How do I change my life now to better be prepared for that? But it should just be to leave the beauty of the present moment, to be constantly scheming or lamenting or fretting or, you know,

all of that stuff, you really miss the joy and the beauty of what God has for you here and now. And maybe that joy doesn't look happy. Maybe it's like, well, a lot of stuff is going really wrong in my life right now, and that's still where I'm going to meet God. Like, maybe I'm on the road to Calvary and I know someone else has been there before my life right now. And that's still where I'm gonna meet God. Like maybe I'm on the road to Calvary and I know someone else has been there before and is there now. Like that's, I don't know, that's the thing we wanna run from.

Can I tell you a weird, I'm going to, a weird kind of thought experiment that I have to help me appreciate the moment. I've explained this to people in the past and they've not understood it. Have I already said this before? I haven't heard this before. And I always feel like lonely when people don't understand it.

But I'm going to try it again. No pressure. Especially for like sci-fi nerds, they might find this funny. So like there's been times in my life, you know, raising kids and it's been difficult. You know, maybe my kid's up at two in the morning and they're not going to bed and I'm holding them and then waiting for them to go to bed and they're not going to bed on me. And I have this thought.

I'm like, what if in the future we develop a time machine and it can actually bring us back to any point in our history? Can't go forward, perhaps, but it can go back. The one snag is when you're back there, you won't know that anything about the future, you won't know that you took the time machine. So maybe you said it for like an hour or five hours and then you'll go back for that time. But while you're back there, you don't know that you took the time machine. So maybe you set it for like an hour or five hours and then you'll go back for that time.

But while you're back there, you don't know that you sent yourself back there. So I'm sitting there holding my kid and I think to myself, this could be one of those times. Which is just- Maybe I'm from the future, don't remember it. Which is just a sci-fi way of saying like, what's beautiful about this?

But like that weird thought experiment really has helped me and helps me now. It's sort of like Andy Bernard's line in the very last episode. Right. Right. You don't know the good times. I wish there was a way of knowing you're in the good old days, you know, when you were in them or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Before you'd left them. And my wife and I were just talking about that line recently. And I think that the answer to it is just to make now the good old days.

I mean, not in such a way that your future is miserable. But I hope today is the worst day of the rest of your life. But for your sake. But you know, like, what can I do? I laughed because I didn't understand what you just said. Worst day of the rest of your life. What did you say? I hope today is the worst day of the rest of your life.

Today is the worst day. Of the rest of your life. Everything else is better. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah, if today was the best day of the rest of your life. The day is the worst day of the rest of your life. Everything else is better. Thank you. Yeah. Yeah. If it was the best day of the rest of your life, it's only going downhill. Yeah, that's a really good line. I like it.

No, thanks. What do you do for fun? Other than Catholic stuff? What do you, what do you enjoy doing that has nothing to do with the only gets nerdier from here? I mean, unfortunately, like I'm doing a lot of an analogy. Dad, yeah, exactly. Get lost in Wikipedia, rabbit trails. No.

Oh my gosh. Wordle and Quirtle and OCTURTLE. I don't know what they are. It's word games. It's like you try to try to guess the word. Hey, you don't know what word is. No word. I've heard with words with friends is that was like 10 years ago. Sorry. Just papered over Scrabble. Yeah. play Wordle. Yeah. Thanks, Neil. But yeah, it's not cool anymore. Okay, Wordle. Wordle is like an extremely popular,

people are posting this stuff all the time. They're like, how many guess, you have a five letter word, and you're trying to guess it, you've got six tries. And you have a bunch of words below, and you've got to fill it in? No, so you've got five squares, five letter word, you just guess a word, and it tells you every,

there's three colors, either gray, that letter does not appear. Green, right letter, right place. Yellow, right letter, wrong place. So it's like an advanced hangman. Okay. Yes, I know what you mean. I've played that. Yeah, that's such a cool game. Yeah, like that. But instead of colors, it's with words or, you know, and so then you're like, okay, cool. Well, this word ends in a T and there's an R, but the R isn't here, it's somewhere else in the word. And then you try to think of another word that's like a five letter word that fits those criteria. And just a good like mild mental stimulation.

It's kind of like what our parents would have done if they didn't have crossword puzzles and they did have iPhones. Oh yeah. I also do a lot of crossword puzzles. So yeah, any kind of word games. I love playing with words. What about like geeky, you know, Trent Horn, Jimmy Akin comic book stuff? Are you into that? I was I feel like this is gonna sound very judge. I was when I was younger When I was a boy I thought as a boy exactly I mean I like I will go see a Marvel movie But I don't have time for like I'm so uninterested in Marvel movies. I don't see this

I'm not just saying that to sound cool, but there's no zero interest in me. The last one I saw was I think Your endgame or whatever one came right after that and then I haven't really had it's the other thing. It's like Going to a theater right now. It's just I've got a two-year-old at a seven month old. I Unless I just leave them at home and hope nobody notices for two hours and then I gotta like call the fire department You know, just word games. That's it. I don't know As well, I think you like I'm not no, yeah, like I like sitting and talking with people that's really it I don't yeah like sitting by the fire. We have a fireplace in our house. Nice real It's gas but it's still mine to fire. I hate it so much

Someone recently say oh, there's this some movement that's saying like you really shouldn't be burning wood. It's bad for you These are the same sorts of people who tell you to stop drinking coffee They can just go away My wife is really big on butter over margarine and so any of these movements were like artificial things replace real things She's got her like antenna 20 years are gonna find out but that's true. It's a real fire. Fair enough. Yeah. So, you know, just sitting around the fire talking and, you know, uh, occasionally board games. Favorite board game.

Party game secret Hitler. What the game is called secret Hitler. If you've ever played the game mafia, I've heard of secret Hitler what the game is called secret Hitler. If you've ever played the game mafia I've heard of secret Hitler. Tell me how it goes. So the setting is 1920s or 1930s Germany and you've got some people who are secretly Nazis and some people who are secretly Democrats like small D and You're trying to pass legislation that helps one side or the other trying to pass legislation that helps one side or the other. And so there's two people involved in like the passing

of the legislation and the way it works, either of them can like basically scuttle a thing. And so then if they're like, oh, the Nazi thing passed instead of the democratic thing, which of them is a Nazi or was it like, you know, so it's that kind of thing. How many people do you need to play that game? Five or more, like it's like five to 10.

So rarely do we get a chance to do it. That sounds really one of these great ones. We're trying to read the other people in the room. I did hear a funny story. I was talking about this with a priest friend recently. And he said that a priest he knew on a retreat had said, Oh, I hear there are a lot of secret Hitler fans here. Didn't think about the fact that those words without

italics, like a nun wrote to him and was like, that was totally inappropriate. Father. Yes. Like a nun wrote to him and was like, that was totally inappropriate. Father. Yes, it was. That's what he meant. It turned out that was a total misunderstanding. So yeah, it's that where you're either playing as a good guy or a bad guy. And there's Sutterfuge and all that stuff where you're not really playing a board.

You're playing one another. And there's just enough chance to make it kind of like it's thrilling. It's interesting. And yeah, I like that. My mate Mike Welker lives a few doors down from me. He teaches game theory. Yeah, yeah. It's a school and his his kind of room is filled with board games.

But you know, if somebody's got to spend a lot of time explaining a game to me, I just get bored so quickly. I have a good check on that in my head. I don't have the disk. I like to read occasionally how a game works. Yeah. And my wife does not know. And she doesn't like to listen to it either. She wants to just like find out while playing or or she'll just complain.

Like, you didn't tell me about a rule. You didn't let me tell you about that. So I wanted to give you an hour lecture. Exactly. I think it's just cool to hear about how all the pieces could work. I think the latest game I played that I can say I actually enjoyed it as opposed to pretended to was Settlers of Catan. Oh, yeah, sure. It's classic. That was a real fun game. And it was the kind of game where you could be conquered and then all of a sudden turn around, almost kind of turn around and win the game. What about you, Neil? Well, I mean, my girlfriend, I've bonded over the fact that we both don't like

settlers of guitar. I just think it takes too long. Yeah. So it's frustrating. I love that. That's something you've bonded. You know what board game I hate? Monopoly. I really.

Because it's just a game of chance, isn't it? It's not. There's no strategy. Yeah. Why everything games that are just like pure chance. Francis Sayles actually talks about this. He he says it's fine to gamble as long as he's on a game of skill, but it's sinful to gamble on a game of chance. Yeah. And because it's just not fitting with human reason. Yeah. And there's something about that.

Whereas like, oh, yeah, that kind of makes sense. And I think with board games like war is a terrible game. Candyland is a terrible candy.land is strictly double predestination. It's all, you just draw a card and you go over the card, tells you. And literally the reason you can play with a kid is there's no strategy, there's no autonomy. You have the illusion of being able to make a decision.

You call one of the characters yours, but you're no more in control of it than your opponent is. The cards determine everything and it's so what about a game? Like Farkle have you played that I gotta be careful with my Australian accent when I say Farkle Forkl it's a dice game. I think you got six die. Oh Yeah, and he's died a single Or plural I always forget die is plural. Yeah sink. I get confused. I don't know. You should definitely look it up Catholic Jamie That's your job.

But you roll the dice and then you're trying to get a certain pattern. And then you choose a couple and you put them aside because you want to build off that. It's kind of like a poker, you know, you, then you roll the others. So in some sense it's strategy, but it's also risk. Yeah, yeah Yeah, so what about that kind of game yeah something like that I've really enjoyed that kind of thing and that's nice because it's got just the right level of complexity Yeah, something where there's a little bit of a Gamble in it. Yeah, I'll give you an example. There's a game called medieval mastery and you Doesn't matter like you go to war with other people and blah blah blah Yeah, I'll give you an example. There's a game called medieval mastery and you

Doesn't matter like you go to war with other people and blah blah blah But you play one card and you've got anywhere from like a one to six card in your hand Or you have a card that's just a dice or yeah a dice I die. Sorry, I still had it backwards And so you can either say like, okay I've got like a four and maybe I don't have a five or six. If they play a five or six, I'm just sunk. Okay. Or I could play this dice card and then roll the dice.

And then I have whatever that is. So I can just choose the chance option. Okay. What's this game called? Medieval Mastering. I like it. It's kind of a clever design, um, where you can choose kind of a level of chance that you want with it.

If you've got, if, if your strategy is really well done, you may be unbeatable. But or maybe the person comes along and says, oh, here's this whole thing. You were expecting what would Thomas Aquinas have to say about poker? That's a good question, because I know lying is always off the table. Yeah, I don't think he's against sort of insinuating one way or the other, necessarily. But I'd have to brush up on that. I'm not sure. Bluffing and all of that. It doesn't even because he's pretty clear from my reading of him online

that it's a speech act. And, you know, it's it's not just misleading body language, not just poker. Think about football. Yeah, you can juke left and run right. Yeah, either football would make you think enough, you know, any of that sort of thing. You're not lying there. What about poker, though? You like poker?

I'm trying to get you away from theological topics. Oh, yeah, totally. Totally. I do like poker. And then you're like Francis de Sales. No. Sorry. You can see I'm very boring at parties. Let's play a game. Well, Francis de Sales. Exactly. But do you like poker? I do. It's a fun game.

I haven't played in a while, but it is one of those classic games where you're playing the other people. I like games like that. Yeah. Like if it's me playing a board. Yeah. Yeah. If it's me like trying to figure out what the other person's up to. Yeah, that's a lot more fun. Yeah, I'm a big fan of any activity that forces people to sit down together. I like cigars because you got to commit to like an hour or an hour and a half with someone. You don't get up and walk around with a cigar typically.

Right. Right. Right. Board game. Same kind of thing. Yeah. I think video poker sounds extremely boring. Yeah. But in-person poker. Yeah. I wonder why people do that. Is it to kind of hone their skills so they can be better with in-person poker or are they making money off? I think there are also people who the thrill of poker is not the interpersonal thing. It's the, uh, who was it? Was it, uh, Dostoevsky? I think it was he's epileptic and he said like right before a seizure was like the most incredible feeling.

Wow. The sensation of the closest thing. Just losing control or what? I don't know exactly how he described it. I feel like it's like a light, I think, if I remember. Yeah, yeah. Exactly, that kind of, the closest thing he found to it

was betting huge sums of money he couldn't afford to waste. That's why he became an addict, yeah. Yeah, and so that kind of thing, that's also the hallmark of the addict. You're no longer playing for the enjoyment of the thing. There's an adrenaline rush with the danger of of the law and like, and that can only escalate. That can only kind of go up. I heard it said from one gambling addict that he was trying to lose all his money because

once it was gone, then he could finally breathe and go home. But as long as he kept making money, he had to keep spending it. And it was just this. Yeah. I don't, thanks be to God, I don't have that particular inclination. But I understand it. You're like, the hunt for adrenaline, the hunt for that kind of high, a very specific kind of thing. Yeah.

Where, yeah, I heard or I read about, a gambling night, if you put himself on one of those like lists, where he blacklisted himself from the casinos, and then he had a hand with the royal flush that he had to play and he won a huge jackpot that then they wouldn't give him. No way. And then they kicked him out. Cause he was blacklisted.

Yeah. And so they were happy to take his money after he'd blacklisted himself. When he actually won, they kept the money too. I mean, it was, it was actually pretty sick and very like predatory. Yeah. But you did thinking like, what were you do? What were you hoping was going to happen? You know, there's something just so strange about the behavior itself that in some ways is like more interesting than it is. Because like pornography is more understandable to me than gambling. It's like sex you have a sexual drive Fornication is attractive. I get it. Yeah, but gambling and because game well, you know

What's interesting is gambling is not about money and right isn't about sex All right, so what you understand that yeah, yeah I think I think for a lot of a lot of people who are addicted to porn It's not about like, oh, the sexual release or something like that. It's about doing something they know they're not supposed to do, and they kind of high off of that.

Novelty, yeah, yeah. The escalation of just chasing, it's a, what is that called? The eudaemonic treadmill, where you're just chasing happiness and chasing more and more and more and more and more. But happiness in the very broad, I'm not saying like, oh, this will satisfy. Yeah. What about video games?

Were you ever into them? Yeah, I was. But I I have enough of that addictive personality. There's a reason I get even these addictions. I'm not drawn towards. Because you and I about this. Well, you're a little younger, but we're about the same age. And America technology advanced far quicker than Australian technology. So you probably had the technical gadgets before I did, even though I'm older.

So what were you playing when you were? I was forbidden from having a Nintendo when they first came out, because my parents saw something in me that worried them. And they tell this story when I was I mean, I was really young. Whenever Nintendo was first like becoming a thing, I was like, I don't know, five or six. And my parents tell me I can't have a Nintendo. And I say, well, I'm going to ask Santa because I think he has different values than you do.

Yeah. It turned out he didn't. He didn't, yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I remember having friends who had a Nintendo 64 and GoldenEye being like, amazing cutting edge graphics. And now you go back and look at it and you're just like, oh, that's hilarious.

But the gameplay was terrific. GoldenEye, that's what you were for. and look at it. You're just like that was terrific That's oh, yeah. Yeah, that was so good. Yeah, so that's you that sort of thing our Games all kinds of things. I mean, it's a way that I stay connected with friends from college Like digital versus person things but um, I'd say net total it's been a good thing But what game were you like the most jazzed about at the time when you were playing? Oh, when I was... For me, it was a game called Red Alert. It's like Command and Conquer. Yeah, Command and Conquer is what I associate it with.

And then Red Alert. I think it was good. I think Command and Conquer was the big brand. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's the kind of game where you can buy the Soviets or the Allies. That game was a lot of fun. It's unsurpassed in the realm of point-click strategy. Right. It really is. The Civilization games are kind of a similar thing. It's a different. You don't get like I've never really got Russians, but Yeah, we'll make sure that's a really short clip. You don't get a blow for it. I mean, maybe that's a moral advice

Yeah, we'll make sure that's a really short clip. You don't get a blow for it. I mean, maybe that's a moral advice. Yeah. No, no. Is, uh, yeah. What did you, well, I mean, it's not been one thing when you were talking about golden eye, that's one of the earliest games that I remember playing and watching my siblings play had to be on paintball mode that you couldn't have it on the blood.

Yeah. That was the rule. That was the rule. Yeah. But, uh, yeah, just all kinds of things. Recently, I've started playing Civilization, so I like that. Which one? Six. Is it good? Is it? Played five, I've never played six.

See, for me, I haven't played video games in a long time. And what I find is when I try to go back into them to recreate this nostalgic memory I have of losing myself, And that's the word in a video game. I can't replicate it and I don't like it. I want to like it. I want to lose myself in a video game. But I don't know. I'm so old and boring right now. It's like books and conversations of what does it for me. Yeah.

That sounds pretentious. I believe me when I say I want to get into video games. But but so for me, if I was to make the jump from Red Alert to Civilization six, I think my head would explode. I think it would be far too complicated for me. Can I say the game I don't get Minecraft? I like Minecraft. It has the graphics from when our. Yeah.

Like that's what that was like Nintendo 64. And you're right. Yeah. What's funny is these kids have never seen those graphics. So to them, it's like this novel. Yeah, that's the thing that I like. It's like one of my friends complains about camping. And he's like, we spent 10,000 years not having to do this. Like this is insulting to a lot of progress. Yeah.

And I feel the same thing about Minecraft. Yeah. Like you're just doing this for fun. You're just having bad graphics on purpose. Have you played the game? I have not. It's quite cool. Do you want to pitch it?

Well, I was just going to say I'd point to if I had to point to one game that'd be one that I you know have kept going back to over the years it'd be mine. It's it's it's infinitely creatable I mean you just find yourself in a place and you can build whatever you want you can build a castle there's people who waste their entire life building these things and then putting them on YouTube and. My son's like, look how amazing. And my wife tries to discourage him. Like, oh, yes, but think about all the time he wasted. And I'm like, shut up, nerd. You know, me and my son laugh at her together. No, not really. That doesn't happen. There's a line, you know, there's an old Hitchcock movie, The Third Man.

Third man. I've gotten into Hitchcock recently. I think it's Hitchcock. I'm not sure. Orson Welles, it might be Orson Welles. I'm sorry. Orson Welles movie. OK, who is that? I'm excited. Orson Welles or who's? Yeah, I don't know who Orson Welles. He did Citizen Kane. He's like, I've sorry, Orson Welles movie. OK, who is that? I'm excited. Orson Welles or who's was? Yeah, I don't know who Orson Welles. He did Citizen Kane.

He's like, I've never watched it. It's a regularly. I heard about it. Greatest movie of all time. OK, I don't get it. And I think it's a problem in me. Like, hey, it's one of those things where it's like, I have to assume there's more to this film than I'm understanding. Yeah, because it doesn't.

But Third Men, I love it's a film noir. But there's a line in there. What did you just say? A film noir. It's like a 40s era. Is that what they mean when they talk about it? Yeah, like Humphrey Bogart does a lot of those. It literally means black film. Oh, is that what it means? But like, it's like something's a little like darker. Now we're like really into that with like, you know, the new Batman and all that. Like, back then it was like a detective movie and everything didn't always turn out hunky dory.

It wasn't just like the bells of St. Mary's, like there was actual crime and you looked at the face of, yeah, it's gritty. But like back when that was novel and interesting. In there, one of the characters says, you know, Italy was ruled by the Medici and like had all this bloodshed and they produced Leonardo da Vinci in the Renaissance. Switzerland had 400 years of peace and prosperity and

they produced a cuckoo clock. And that line has really struck me. And I think about it a lot. Like it's pointing to something really, it's very funny, but it's also like pretty, pretty profound. And I just think about this with all these Minecraft videos, like is this the Leonardo da Vinci of our day? Is he at home playing 34 hours of video games a week? That's funny. I thought you were going to put that in a positive light being like, now we'll appreciate in the future the Mona Lisa that he created out of blocks. But no, no, no, I think like there's a certain way in which it is genius.

And there's a certain appreciation you can have for it. But I also lament the way that genius could have been used elsewhere. I'll take it. I discovered Domino videos. Look, this was a YouTube rabbit trail. I'm not proud of it. Shut up. We all have our secrets. Domino videos. People really elaborate all that sounds fun to watch different colors. And it's it's beautiful visually. It's like an incredible work of art and genius. And if you make a mistake, you'll undo like six hours worth of work because all.

But then when they get it all set up and they just flick one thing and like an entire room like fills up right now, we just lost like a thousand people watching the show. They're all now watching Domino videos. Yeah, that sounds great. Yeah. I one thing I like to watch with my son, Peter, we lay in bed together at night. Occasionally we will watch Bob Ross videos. Oh, yeah, sure. Yeah. You know, the controversy with Bob Ross, the what? The controversy with Bob Ross.

Apparently that style of painting he got from his mentor. And then like. Well I think it was just the white, what was it called? The wet canvas. Yes, yes exactly. And then he kind of was like, acted like he'd invented it and so there's some bad blood there. Which is sad because Bob Ross is such a fun kind of character. But see even things like that, like I just hope that's wrong. I'm not going to buy that. I'd like to think that maybe he didn't pretend but he just took it and hey that's wrong. I'm not going to buy that. I'd like to think that maybe he didn't pretend, but he just took it and that guy didn't necessarily have it patented or anything. But yeah, now he's really enjoyable to, to watch the kids love it.

And he's, yeah, he's, he's upbeat. He's happy. He, he, and like Mr. Rogers, I put in the same. I've never watched Mr. Rogers. He, you know, there's the video or whatever, the movie about him. Yeah. Was it good with Tom Hanks? Yeah. Whatever that one's called. Won't you be my neighbor?

Whatever it's called. Are you talking about the documentary? Yeah. No, the movie with Tom Hanks. I actually don't know. No, no, no. I actually, sorry. You're right.

I did mean the documentary, but I know there's also a movie with Tom Hanks. Okay. All right. But it's the documentary. I've never seen the documentary. I've never seen the Tom Hanks movie. I've seen the documentary. I've never seen the documentary. I've never seen the Tom Hanks movie. I've seen the documentary. I see. And it's just like someone who is very.

Not in a ostrich head in the sand kind of way, but just sees the good in the world. Yeah. And it embraces and it like affirms that. I know there's something really beautiful. Would you mind getting my match out there? I have a I have a lighting box, but I don't have a match And I've been waiting Well, I've always said you are

You're unmatched unmatched But video games back to video games The thing I thought about the minecraft like Magnificent sculptures is kind of this idea that just because it was hard to do doesn't mean it's kind of grandiose I guess. So like if someone paints a giant sculpture and they say it's out of blood, but it doesn't make it look any different.

I mean it adds because now it's a story along with the painting I guess, but in terms of the effort going into it that doesn't necessarily make it more of something. So to me the limiting medium, it's cool to see it, and it becomes its own story that they put this work into it and done it in this weird roundabout way, but at the end of the day, it's not anything more of a product because of that. Yeah, the art versus the artistry,

that's an interesting distinction. You know, you can say, here's this great portrait, and oh, by the way, the artist painted it with his teeth He's like, oh, that's kind of a weird thing is a painting any good though. Hmm How does that apply to Minecraft? Well, it just takes a long time to you know Go into this virtual world and build it with little blocks. I say it's like, you know 3d modeling it or something Yeah, Legos are the same way in real life. It's very therapeutic though to make those little blocks I think that's that's part of as well people aren't going in there with blood sweat and tears, right?

It's actually it is somewhat enjoyable. There was a funny tweet where someone said the children are longing for the mines We've we've banned child labor too soon That is so funny Yeah Yeah, I the other kind of games. I really like sorry. He didn't expect to talk about this constantly, but it's my show Is there's a game called Pandora Directive that was huge when I was about 15. It was the kind of game where you would just make your way through a world asking questions

of people, following clues, solving puzzles, but how you would treat people would affect the ending. Oh, very nice. So if you were just rude and took advantage of people, it would end very badly for you. And there's no way for you to know what way you're headed. So you kind of encouraged to be more of a moral person. In parenting, it's like this. Something may be coming to you down the road.

It may be terrible. The way you act now is going to impact it. And it's not totally clear how. How old is your oldest? Two. Oh, crikey. Wow. Yeah.

Yeah, it's funny. I think if I could go back and give young father, Matt Fradd advice, I would just tell him to just chill out. Yeah. OK. So the catechism, I mean, just do it. Think of back to the video games. Think of Trent Horn. His folks basically just put him in front of the television. And that's it. And he's just like, yeah. And then Trent Horn came out and like we are. I mean, maybe that's how you do it. I don't know.

No, or, or, or, you know, the other way to think about it is what if they had to put him into like a learning Mandarin and playing the piano, maybe far more brilliant. But, or I really do. So I think so much of it is just, uh, nature. Freakonomics talks about that. They look at 10 different trades. The book Freakonomics talks about 10 different traits and what they find in terms of statistical correlation is that parenting matters a lot less than everyone thinks. That's a weird conclusion.

I totally agree with that. And socially it feels a little transgressive to say it, but I think there's a real sense. I mean, already our two kids, a toddler and infant, could hardly be more different in some regards. We're not doing something radically different with one or the other to make them that way. Like there's just a strong inbuilt temperament

and personality and like you can work with it, you can mold a little bit, but you're not dealing with tabula rasa. And they're independent human beings You can work with it, you can mold a little bit, but you're not dealing tabula rasa. And they're independent human beings with their own decision making. And I wish that I, and maybe people will listen to this and think it's bad advice and people have to decide what's best for them. But I wish I could go back and just tell me to just relax and to condescend into my child's

interests as opposed to shaming them for it. Yeah, I never intentionally shame my children for their interests. But you know, when my kid took a liking to say Minecraft, it was like, oh, gosh, like you really should be like memorizing Shakespeare. Like I'm failing here. Why don't you know more Latin? It was it was all about me. And just as the Heavenly Father or the second person blessed Trinity, condescends into our world and into our interests, 1 Peter 5, 7 casts all your anxieties, not just the big ones. He's interested in the little things. That's the advice I would give to younger

dad, Matt Fratt, and I give it to me now, is just to condescend into those little things that don't mean anything to you, but that actually means something to them and not to trivialize them, not to dismiss them. That's beautiful. I think a lot of that's the first part about not being so anxious. This is, I think, connected to smaller families. Like if you've got one kid, it's really hard not to make that kid your personal project. Cause you have the luxury of doing that.

Yes. You have the power cause you're bigger and more intelligent and you have the time. You got one kid, you can just totally dominate and control their life. My mother-in-law is the oldest girl of 17 kids and you don't have that kind of luxury to make one kid your personal project. And there's good and bad with that, right? You know, like maybe you don't get the same amount of one-on-one time,

but your parents also just are forced to be a lot more relaxed, a lot more chill. And so virtually everyone in my wife's family, and my grandmother-in-law has like 330 descendants right now, and almost all of them are so practicing the faith. And they had to just be chill. And they had like a family choir they formed. Wow. And just like traveled around and like a bus and sang and were like the California Von Trappes. Von Trappes, yeah. Yeah. But it's like that kind of thing where now it's much more like you need to be in like these five extra curriculars. I'm gonna drive you around all the time. We're all gonna be burnt out. We're all gonna be unhappy. Yeah.

But then someday you'll get into like some really good secular college so you can fall away from the faith and style. Wow. Well, I compare like two families. This kind of really, this has all been kind of coming together for me, but I can think of one particular family I know where they do and have done everything right on paper. You know, they drive the kids to mass every day and their kids wear the veil and their kids know day and their kids wear the veil and their kids know Aristotle and their kids memorize poetry.

And I'm not for a moment putting that down. I think that's your kids would be much better if they did that. But, you know, there's I don't know, there's a bit of a defensive crouch against the world. There's there's not like this whatever. But then I have other friends here in Steubenville where the parents, I think, in my estimation, give their kids too much freedom with technology and things like this. That horrified me when I first moved here

because I've just traveled the country for the last 10 years seeing the carnage in high schools. Yeah. Right. But I sit in the kitchen and their kids are free to be in there and they laugh with the parents and the parents just chill and they chat with them and they laugh and the kids are welcome. And I'm like, wow, I want that. Like I want that. And I'm seeing that actually as my kids get older, I just really enjoy them.

I just love sitting around in the kitchen and hearing them talk and do handstands randomly and yeah having kids that you enjoy rather you know because I think the temptation is one of vanity right you have this really like amazing superstar child that looks really good in the christmas card uh yep I also think there's a lot of fear that drives a lot of that you know I think if you're parenting from a place of fear, even legitimate fear, like that's a big red flag, that can't be the driver, whether that's physical danger, whether that's spiritual danger. Like avoidance of sin is not a good enough goal

as a parent. And it has to be like, how do I help my kid want to be a saint? And it's probably not just like cracking the whip constantly so that they're never exposed to evil. It's rather about like empowering them. You know, like I've seen a lot of parents, like the kind of distinction you're describing,

not to put these labels on those families, but I see a lot of parents who govern a sort of fear-based approach, their own fears, right? Like, I want to keep you safe from all danger. And in secular families, that's like physical danger, and Catholic families, spiritual danger. And then there's like an empowerment approach of like, I'm going to make sure you know what to do

when you get there. And help build off of the gifts and talents God's already given you. Now again, like look, I got a two year old and a baby. So what do I know? But it seems from the families that I've seen. Yeah, but see like, look, I got a two year old and a baby. So what do I know? But it seems from the family that I've seen. Yeah, but see, there's a difference though. There's a difference because I've heard parents who don't even have, no, not parents. I've heard, I know of a person, a Catholic person

who will go unnamed, wrote a children's book and didn't have kids. But it wasn't the kind of freedom attitude that you're kind of giving. It was more that like, this is what you got to do. It's like, dude, like you don't have kids. Right. So, you know, I've been really influenced. I've got some, uh, sort of extended family. It's actually my aunt and uncle who live about an hour from here and the aunt's sister has family in Germany. Yeah. Uh, and the kids there have been going to forest school in Germany.

So forests. Yeah, it's amazing. Southern Germany, And the kids there have been going to forest school in Germany. Forest school? Yeah, it's amazing. Southern Germany, they just go in the forest from about the age of three and just you learn in the forest and it does not matter how bad the weather is, you're going out in the forest and you like read books or do whatever. They teach you how to like whittle and build fires and do a bunch of cool stuff. You're not allowed to play with knives until you're five. That's the rule they told me. Just like that.

My son, Peter, is just such a terrific boy, and he starts fires now without asking me, which is probably not OK, given that he's seven. But what I do is, you know, this this cardboard problem that came about with Amazon. It's like you ever get you get angry and start kicking cardboard. You know, I never used to hate cardboard. But so whenever we get like a box from Amazon or somewhere else, I open my door and just like throw it out the back.

So there's a big pile of cardboard. And so now my son, he goes into the, he gets the drying, what's it, the dryer lint. And then he just starts these gigantic fires in my backyard. It's really cool. Wow, I know a country that had a problem with that recently. Oh, a few years ago. Australia.

Yeah. But I don't know. It's kind of cool. It's cool until student bills on fire. And then I'll repent publicly. This is going to be exhibit a and I'll repent publicly from a different location. Yeah. That's awesome. You know, here's another thing I was thinking. I see my wife had a lot of health health issues and and when she gave birth, it was very difficult.

So she had four C-sections. Oh, good. Parenting wasn't an issue I knew little enough about. We're going to now talk about pregnancy. Let's talk about this. And here's why. If I could do it all over again, I would not have concerned myself with NFP in regards to abstaining, except that she had these issues.

And so in my case, I think NFP was a little more called for. When you say you wouldn't concern yourself with NFP, you mean like we would just have as many kids possible. That's what I mean. I'm not an anti-NFP guy, because in my wife's situation, like there was there was health issues, but yeah, Jason Everett tells me the story of him and a friend was standing at a barbecue and the friend said to Jason, he's like, you know what?

I think to myself, if we had have never worried about abstaining, all the heartache and hassle that brought our family. What? We'd have like two more kids now, maybe three more kids. What what what were we doing? Right. I like that. Yeah. The comparative like difficulty. You know, zero to one is a big jump. One to two is a big jump. I hear two to three is pretty deep, but it starts to level off at a certain point. I like how Janet Smith puts it. She says, after three, you've reached a point of chaos from which

you can't possibly return. So you may as well just keep going. Yeah. So I mean, again, like my wife and I got married in our thirties. So the end in NFP has already taken its course. That's quite late. Yeah. Which is why, you know, our kids are so young. Yeah. Yeah. Like we're not doing anything to control that. That's just nature. And. Well, that's right. Yeah. C'est la vie. The windows like won't be there open for. Right. Right. Right. Yeah. So I mean, that's sort of the, and again, like, there's a bunch of exceptions to that, but I think the thing with NFP, look, I, I'm going to, I want to give this all the right caveats so I don't end up becoming a clip.

Yeah, take your time. There's a claim that I've heard from some more traditional Catholics that NFP is used with a contraceptive mindset and they'll quote this to JP too. And that's a total misappropriation of what he says. The contraceptive mindset is the mindset behind this to JP too. And that's a total misappropriation of what he says. The contraceptive mindset is the mindset behind using contraception. He is never saying that to critique people using NFP for what their neighbor doesn't consider a grave enough reason. And Cassidy Canoobie and Humanae Vitae are both clear that you do need a serious reason. If you're going a serious reason. You know, if you're going to do anything other than that,

just live a married life kind of approach that you just described. And it sounds like there's a legitimate medical reason with your situation and a lot of people have those. And we're never in a position to judge them. But with all those caveats out of the way, the temptation we have as modern Westerners is to wanna control everything.

And that's stressful and it's annoying, and it's not something that I receive joy in, not something I think a lot of people receive joy in. And to just be like, yeah, I don't know when I'm gonna have another kid, if I'm gonna have another kid. I put it in God's hands. I'm not trying to stymie it but like Okay, whatever happens if you're in a position where you can do that. That's so much more relaxing than like Doing all the charting and doing all the like just stressing about it and even like on a secular level people who are contraceptive

No, there's so much stress in like chemical stuff that's going on and like the cost of that we don't normally talk about, but to just like relax. I think there's, I don't know a better way to say it than just like, we don't have to make life as difficult as we make it. Like our great grandparents had a bunch of kids and they didn't read a bunch of parenting books and the kids who made it to adulthood did okay And let me just add to that not just in the secular sense of we don't have to make it more difficult

but even from Catholic wisdom or Classical wisdom and what I mean is like to do all of my kids need to be like learning Latin and playing piano and doing Gymnastics and like things that are like alter serving and like how hard does life need to be exactly? Right. Yeah. So the Catechism has some good stuff on parenting and I really would recommend it for anyone. You know, we always quote one line of it. Parents are the first teachers of their children.

But then you go on and read the rest of what they're talking about. They're not saying you're going to be the first one to teach Aristotle to your kid. They're saying you're modeling how to be a virtuous person. That's like, in other words, we're worried about all the wrong stuff. If you want to worry about anything, you should be worried about like, how is my sinfulness? How you talk to your wife. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And kids pick up on that. It's true. And that's probably the most impactful thing on a child. And it's the thing we're not even maybe that concerned about in regards to their education.

We don't even realize it. And so modeling disinterested service and mercy and those things, that's what the Catechism is actually talking about, about parents being the first teachers. And then like a few paragraphs later, it talks about the need to like apologize to your kids. And that's something that I never hear. That's difficult, especially when your kid's a teenager and is

infallible. That's very difficult to do. Yeah. I mean, it's just broadly speaking, people on the internet are sometimes smug and right. And you're just like, oh yeah, not on YouTube. Everyone's pretty polite in comm boxes. Yeah. Because you ban everyone else. That's right. Exactly. And you're a tightly controlled dictatorship. Everyone is very agreeable. And that's what I'm saying got like a 99% reelection and it's amazing what happens when you control who gets to speak. But yeah, in all seriousness, like there are times where like someone is like totally smarmy and that's on the

internet. That's also someone from the house and you still have to be like, Oh yeah, you're right. And I was wrong. And that's a bigger death to self than like, I'll spend two hours driving you to violin practice. Yeah. Yeah. No, for sure. It's, it's difficult, but so important. Um, how has it been? I mean, it's difficult to know so important. How has it been? I mean, it's difficult to know because you can't compare it to anything else.

But I imagine getting married older is difficult and something you probably wouldn't suggest if you had another option. But thank God. Yeah, I don't know. This is a topic my wife and I obviously discuss sometimes. And so my whole journey, the girl I mentioned earlier in the episode, this episode, I thought I was going to marry her. We dated for like three years. And then I discerned I was called the seminary.

And I spent five years. I thought I was going to be a priest. And then I discerned I wasn't. And when I realized it was called the marriage after all, it was pretty clear who I needed to kind of approach about that. It was a girl I'd kind of cut off contact with, I'd been friends with and then sort of, I said, hey, I can't talk to you for a while. And then I just reached out to her out of the blue.

I actually flew down to Phoenix and asked her out on a date through caution to the wind. And then we had a pretty short dating, pretty short engagement. And so we suddenly found ourselves married and it was exciting and it was thrilling and it was hard. And it's been all of those things even a few years on. The big trade off is we are wiser and less energetic

than we were in our twenties. And so our kids, we have a better sense of what to do and less energy to do it. So there's a real kind of concrete trade off that I think will only become more true as I enter like my forties with kids. Yeah, yeah. I've got a few years, but still, like, I see those days,

I'm not gonna become like spryer, if that's a word. Yeah. And so keeping up with them is different. But I think, my wife saw us with therapists. So she's really good at knowing here's what works, here's what doesn't work. And she sees a lot of the people who are products of what doesn't work. So I think having that kind of experience, I don't know, it means that like on paper we know what to do, but some of us are still too exhausted to do it. So I've loved the journey. I would say for people who are like in their thirties and still single, don't despair that like,

you know, it's too late or whatever. But I also see why God normally has people who are young, overly confident idiots have kids because that's often what works best. Yeah, totally. That's 22 and I wish I got married at 18. Well, I was going to say, 22 is like old historically. Yeah. There's something to be said for it.

Just keeping up with them. And that's the other thing. It's like, this is getting back to what we talked about before, you're going to make mistakes. Whether you're 22 or 32 or 42, you're gonna screw up. And you might screw up more at a certain age. You just apologize more. And there's very little that you can't bounce back from

as a family. Like the resilience is something that we really underestimate. We underestimate the resilience of kids. We underestimate the resilience of families as units. We also underestimate how much a sincere apology heals. Yes. We can fall into despair thinking, okay, it's been 10 years and I've wrecked this relationship with this person and gosh, I don't know how.

But, you know, if someone's listening right now and they had a bad relationship with their father or their mother and still do, what would it be like if that father or mother came to you and sincerely apologized and owned it all? Wouldn't, I mean, it's kind of like that's enough. If they really meant it and they saw it and they understood it and they apologized, it would just be so liberating. And conversely, make that as easy as possible for them. Like if someone has wronged you in that way, you just be the person who, it doesn't mean like be a doormat and allow yourself to be stomped on, but so often in the name of not being that, we make it very hard for forgiveness to happen

and very hard for reconciliation to happen. I know the case, well even, I'll share, I don't think this is over-divulging from my own family. When I was six, my older sister ran away and was separated from the family for like 20 years. Oh my goodness, I'm so sorry. Oh well, in the providence of God. Like my mom was fantastic at reaching out to her on her birthday. Six years old? Yeah. Can I press and- Oh, I was on her birthday. Six years old. Yeah. Can I press and-

Oh, I was six years old. She was 16. Oh. Yeah, yeah, no, no, no. Sorry. That makes more sense. This was not a child abduction case. I was six.

She was 16. Yeah. And for like 20 years, she was not a feature in the family in any visible way. My mom would just like reach out to her very- never like, I'm not sure early on. It was probably a different thing. But as old as I can remember, she was very gentle about kind of inviting and sending her little gifts on her birthday or just reaching out or you know, just those little things. And she really paved the way to make it easy to come home. And eventually she did. And there was an amazing

reconciliation and she is just a normal part of the family now in a way that in the not too distant past I would have viewed as impossible. Yeah, I'm thinking. And I know, so I just did a three-day parish mission on the prodigal son, looking at the younger brother, the older brother, and the father. And after a couple of these nights, people would approach me with their own stories of how that has kind of played out in their family. Kids who'd been away for situations like that.

And this is way more common than people realize. So I'd say if you find yourself in a situation where you say, oh, that person doesn't get it, there's this whatever reason, not to despair of it, pray for it, and really discern what you can do to make that more possible. Now that doesn't mean that they're going to ever do it but like do your part so that if that piece doesn't come it's not it's not something that you've you've withheld. It's awesome, dude. This is great. It's nice.

It's nice doing these long form chats because I feel like it's usually the case. It's like for the first hour, a conversation hasn't begun yet. And then it's just like you just start chatting and you kind of forget. Yeah. So what are your plans with Catholic answers? Are you heading to San Diego? You stick in? Are you doing long distance like Trent?

Yeah. So it's something where, my wife's from California, she's from Southern California, she's from North of LA, and she lived in San Diego, she actually worked for Catholic Answers years and years ago, right before you.

Did I ever meet her? I don't think so. 2012 I was there. Oh yeah, maybe it was a little bit before you. It was like fresh out of college, she worked at Catholic Answers. And she was in like, I don't even, she tells me the name, she's listening to this and I'm forgetting the name of what she did for like the 200th time. But she like basically shipped products when people

would order things. We all, we have like a group that does that now. It's not even something we do in house anymore, but she used to like do that. And then so she knew, she was like Darren Delosier and people who were like old timers, carry back all those guys. You know Darren's not old, right? You just couldn't be, I just want to be clear. Old timer at Catholic Games, he's not in the scheme of. I'm pretty sure he's younger than me. Yeah, he's, he's not actually an old guy. He's, he's a young guy, but he's been at Catholic Games for.

He has a long time. Yeah, he's a fixture. He was born there, I think. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. So just we're like, well, we found this baby. We might as well try to run. How to be useful. Yeah. As an introvert, I'm sure he loves his shout out.

Darren Deloge. Can we do a separate clip that's just Darren Deloge? His face. People should look him up right now. Darren Deloge. Everyone's emailed Darren. What's going to be great is, yeah, everyone right now, text Darren. Don't tell him where you heard about him.

Don't give him the time stamp. Just say wow. Just say I've been hearing about you a lot on the Internet. That's right. And let him do the rest of the work. So no, yeah, she was she's she's from California. She lived in San Diego. She loved San Diego.

It's beautiful. The problem is, I don't know if you've heard about this recently. It's insanely expensive. And gas is like more like if you just had a car that ran on gold, I think it would at this point be a cheaper option. So given all of that, the financial realities and the other thing, I mean, that's just one very big issue. I guess you can say to Katha Ganses, I'm happy to move here if you triple my salary.

Yeah, give me just like a huge stockpile of gold. But also like my parents, my four sisters all live in Kansas City. That's nice, yeah. And especially with having little kids, having them near all their cousins. So important. It's so good.

And I've heard that St. Louis has a good Catholic community. Oh, it's Kansas City, which is better than St. Louis in every way. Yes, yes. In every conceivable way. I was born in 1985, we won the is better than St. Louis in every way. Yes, yes. In every conceivable way. I was born in 1985. We won the World Series against St. Louis that year. I don't care about the umpire in game six.

And the ninth inning. Kansas City, Kansas is where you are? Kansas City, Missouri. Actually, Lenexa, Kansas, which is a suburb on the Kansas side. I was born on the Missouri side. So. But you went over as quickly as you could. I was in Kansas by the grace of God Missouri and by birth. I saw

Yeah, very good. Yes. Yeah, I mean if everything works out, I mean we love Kansas City There's a great Catholic community there like City on a Hill the adult group, which is really targeting an underserved community of like say 22 to 40 community of like, say, 22 to 40 has been fantastic. And they're, they're vibrant. They've got a lot of people who are really involved. And we made a lot of friends through that. There'd be a lot of costs to that. Yeah. Of moving, you mean?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Like non, non-financial costs just. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, I don't think it's I think it's I think it's advisable to stay where you are unless you feel you feel moved. It's not easy as someone who's moved a billion times since I got married. It's not easy. Yeah. I mean, I've done a fair amount of moving in my own lifetime and it isn't pleasant. I mean, whatever it is, what it is. And if that's what the cards hold, I'm happy to do it.

But yeah, right now, the other thing, it's way easier to write books when I'm not in the office because I'm an extrovert and I love everyone I work with. And so I need to be as far away from them as possible. Yeah. Like I just hide out of the Panera when I'm in Kansas City. And the opposite of Trent, who hated people coming to his door and knocking at it.

I say hello to all of them and I genuinely enjoy talking to all of them. And I got a lunch. You know a secret about Trent's office that I'm not sure anybody knows. Oh, please. If you know Trent, text him, just say, Matt and Joe, we're talking about you. And you really should just look it up. Don't give him the time stamp. He had a bed in his office at Catholic answers Yeah, he had a couch that trans transformed into a bed and he would move his desk And he would lock the door and put a do not disturb sign and take a nap

But you can do that when you're Trent Horn because you write two books in the morning take a nap write three books Call today. Meanwhile, I'm like, what's up guys? Hey, go who wants to talk about stuff? all day. Meanwhile, I'm like, what's up guys? Hey, who wants to talk about stuff? He's very, very productive. That guy. He is. He is a machine. He's a great person to learn from and know that I can't. Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Yeah. I'm hoping he's like a really bad dad or something. I know. You know what sucks? He's great. Yeah, exactly. That's so much fun. He's such a... Come on. He really is though. Like I'm not...

He is actually... It's why people don't like Superman as a character. Yeah, exactly. No, he's awkward though. He's charmingly awkward. I remember like... See, that's... He needs to be uncharmingly awkward. Ah, well, maybe he's not charmingly awkward. He's charmingly awkward once you get to know him. But I remember going out, we'd be in San Diego, We'd go on a lunch break together and he'd be like, well, the thing with the homosexual marriage. I'm like, stop saying it so friggin loud.

OK. But, you know, it's funny is like when my wife first met Trent, she was like, I don't know about this guy. Like she wouldn't even. Here we go. She's in breastfeed in front of him. She's like, I don't know. He's a bit weird, you know. But then she met Laura, his. Yeah. And Laura is to Trent, what the church is to Christ. She made him intelligible.

And she's like, OK, he's amazing. I totally understand him now. Laura Horne. I don't tend to find women that funny. But Laura Horne is one of the funniest human beings I have ever met in my life. Do you know? I have never met her. People text Laura, tell her me and Joe are talking about a rot. Now, man, she's hilarious.

Funny for a woman is I think where you settled. No, I'm just kidding. I'm happy to say something that offensive, but I don't even mean that. She's funnier than like most men I know. That woman is. I'll tell you some stories once we're off air, but she is so funny. But yeah, when I saw Trent as a dad, I couldn't believe it. That man is so patient, so kind. He's so good.

I honestly think those skills like what make him a good dad are also the skills that make him a good apologist. Yeah, because the calm and yeah, totally. It's so easy to want to like when someone's wrong in the internet, you want to just dive in there and be like, you idiot. Yeah. Um, well that's a good point, but just really like love the other person. He blaze Pascal and the pence's love him. Uh, I think it's nine and 10. He talks about how to correct with advantage.

And he says you have to first see the perspective they're looking at the issue from, because from that point of view, they're probably right. And then affirm the area they got right, and then show them that they're still missing. That's true, he does that so well. It's so good. And that's also how to be a good dad.

Yeah. Like, oh, you thought this thing would make you happy, and it's really, like, I can see why it's really frustrating to show your toys, or you know, whatever. I don't, I assume this thing would make you happy. And it's really like, I can see why it's really frustrating to show your toys or whatever. I don't, I assume there's other problems later on. But like, affirm that and then give the but or and also, and then the other part.

And usually people are much more willing to hear it. Even I'll say little kids, my wife is great at this as well from a parenting perspective, like to really affirm the good thing and then like redirect within that. It's so powerful and so, it's so much harder than just yelling and saying, you moron, to the Internet or to your kids. Yeah. Yep. Yep.

Trent. Good dad. There was one day, um, Trent came over. He wasn't married yet, I don't think. Maybe. Yeah, he wasn't married yet. And we were watching Superman cartoons and we were like sitting on the carpet eating wings and my wife walks past like, you boys want some juice?

Shut up. I don't know what the like, yeah, they could. It's not a comic book. It's a graphic novel. walks past like you boys want some juice? Shut up. I don't know what the like, you know, they could sort of comic book. It's a graphic novel. I don't know what the equivalent is with cartoons, but there was something that Trent shot back. Yeah. You can't just say a graphic video because I think that'd be something totally different.

Well, fair enough. Yeah. Yeah. Cool. Tim Staples. What a guy. Yeah. This is the great thing about working with Catholic Answers. And I think you, you've

been there so long ago, maybe you didn't have the same experience. I don't know. But for me, like I heard about these guys and they were like guys that I listened to. I actually have a similar experience coming here to Steubenville and you're just like, that's where Scott Hahn lives and like that's where the Pope lives. And that's where, you know, whatever, like every, every Catholic person I've ever heard of lives like a few doors down from each other or whatever. It's sort of like that working with Catholic answers from like, oh yeah, these people I watched on the internet, now we're like in the office down the hall or like I'm joining them for lunch or they're asking my thoughts on something that I'm totally unqualified.

You know, it's a, it's something that I'm totally unqualified to. And, you know, it's a it's exciting. I was so starstruck. I got to be honest when I went there for my interviews. But the thing about Tim that I found so impressive is when I met him, I was sure it was a it was a facade. Yeah. I'm like, no one can be this energetic and joyful constantly.

So at some point, but not never did. He was just always just so passionate, so energetic and just just a moral guy. And that's so refreshing because you hear about meeting your heroes and then getting disgruntled or whatever, or getting disappointed, disillusioned. But, you know, him, Jimmy Akin, like when you're with him, you just know you sense that he's trying to be good He's just such a good person. Yeah. Yeah There's no like oh this person is secretly horrible, but we all just pretend they're good because they do good stuff

And Carlo Broussard. Oh my gosh Carlo. I think is better off the air in some ways. In other words, like I liked the kind of public persona, Carlo Brossard, but then you meet the guy and you're just like, oh, you're like, like you just said, like you're this way all the time, but even more, like just the buoyancy in the- Probably more natural in one-on-one relations. Yeah, yeah, totally. You can really see him shine.

And as you've probably gotten from this conversation, I love talking about normal things and then inappropriately adding some specifically Catholic theology, whatever. And he totally is the same way. Where he's like, oh yeah, Aquinas says blah, blah, blah. But in a way that just fits, where he's not trying to impress you, he's not trying to like, he's just being a formed Catholic who's into you know, into like powerlifting or whatever he's into.

And, you know, you know what I've noticed in Trenton, I were talking about this, that there's like a way older people, older Catholics speakers speak and how younger Catholic speakers speak. Right. So I was I think I know what you mean. But yeah, I was asked to give a talk at a Catholic answers conference a couple of years ago. And, you know, Tim Staples got up and gave a talk talk and then Trent and I were talking about how our way our style of speaking is very different to his Ours tends to be more like podcast rambling, but it feels authentic. Yeah, whereas Tim Staples I'm gonna give you like it's it feels more theatrical right and I like for me I wouldn't be as moved by that.

I would find it maybe a little overproduced, but maybe there was a time when that wasn't that way. Whereas today I find people are a little bit more casual. Yeah. You know, the Marshall McLuhan line, like the medium is the message. And I think we underappreciate the way differences in media And I think we underappreciate the way differences in media change the way you have to deliver a message that in written format, I'm going to give a very different presentation of an argument than I'm going to give something like this. And if you didn't, you would be a bad writer.

Exactly. Or a bad guest. I'd be like, yes. Or I've had them on. They're great, brilliant people, but they speak like a book. Yeah. And that's sort of in amusing ourselves to death, Neil Postman talks about kind of the dumbing of America, dumbing down of America.

And one of the things he talks about is that like at the Illinois State Fair, the original Lincoln Douglas debates, you know how long they were? You tell me. Like six or seven hours. Yeah. And the people who were like really into books could stomach that. And so it occurs to me that like, if we're really shaped by long form podcasting,

then when we go to the Catholic Church Conference, we're expecting something sort of like that. Yeah. Whereas if you are formed by listening to Protestant preachers on the radio, which was an earlier medium. Yep, yep, yeah. And Tim Staples is your guy.

Yeah. He's more in that vein. He famously says, Jimmy Swagger made me Catholic. So you know kind of what the influences are. And every speaker, I don't care if you say this isn't true of you, every speaker is influenced and informed by what they think and expect from other speakers. No one is totally, totally. I began began by sounding like an Australian Jason Everett. Yeah there you go the best advice I ever got on speaking was from Christophannik I wrote to him and I'm like what do I how do I do this.

And he said just go out there and be big goofy Matt Fred yeah and that was so freeing yeah. It helps when you have a nice accent. You get like 10 seconds. If you've got nothing after that, you got nothing. But the 10 seconds help get you in the door. Exactly. The Matthews. But I thought that was just capitalized on this in the church. I'm not going to say the other one. Yes, yes, yes.

No, but it's it's it's really true. And I think that's true about people who want to run a successful YouTube channel. It's like it's so tempting to try to mimic what you see. But if you would just have the freedom to be yourself warts and all things that irritate people and please some people, that authenticity is really what builds an audience. So if people can trust that you're actually being sincere. Yeah, totally. Because if you're trying to do a voice, it'd be like if you, you know, if I was going to do Batman voice when I came on the show,

about 20 minutes in, I would have been like, okay, I can't like, can't sustain it anymore. And it becomes unsustainable. So too, like if you're trying to do a voice in your writing and your podcast and your, whatever, if it's not just authentically you, it's going to seem fake because it is, it's you putting on your play acting like people can see through that. And the way I like to think of it too, and I give this advice for those who are starting a YouTube channel is it's

okay to not appeal to everybody. In fact, it's desirable because things that appeal to everybody appeal to nobody. You're like dentist art. A friend of all is a friend of none, you know? Yeah. That's a dentist starts a good one. Dentist art, elevator music, or even elevator advertisements in hotels. You ever see those hotels? I can tell you. I've been in so many hotels recently that I can tell you the ones Hampton Inn has, there's a dog wearing a hot dog costume. Yeah, who cares? You know what I'm saying?

My daughter, I'll tell you. She is a huge fan of that particular art. But the point is, it's clearly designed to be as least offensive as possible. It appeals to every single person, and so therefore no one cares. Hey, let's get slightly controversial here. All right. A lot of parishes operate on that model. Like two and a half hours in, let's do it. Let's get controversial.

Let's finally save something controversial. Finally do it, now that no one's watching anymore. Exactly. A lot of parishes operate on the model you just described of how can we avoid like you're upset at anyone and, and the way dialysis and structures are set up really encourages that kind of bland approach. Uh, because you got a vicar general in every diocese and if you preach as a pastor,

anything controversial, that's going to get to the vicar general. And in an ordinary dynasties, he's going to reach out to you. Now in a good dynasties, he may say, I'm not scolding you for this. I'm glad you're speaking on this, but you should just know this has come to our desk. Even that is giving a negative feedback every time you do the right thing. And so you learn pretty quickly, if I say this thing,

I'm going to get called from my superiors and maybe not exactly scolded, but it's going to feel like scolding. Yeah. That's how you train someone to be bland because you just say, Oh, someone didn't like this. And that's not a good way to live. I was a seminarian for five years. I had plenty of conversations about outreach and all of these things.

And regularly the attitude I would get, I had to look, I should caveat, I was in some great parishes, I saw a lot of fantastic Catholics were really on fire, really wanted to do good things. But I also saw a lot of people, especially people who were maybe a little older, who technology was kind of scary for.

And like the idea of like going out there on the internet and like saying things where people could say something wrong in the comments or they could be mean. They were just like, what if they do this? What if they're like unhappy? And they would prefer to do nothing than like offend people. Not because they were cowards, but because they were trying to be kind. Like because they were trying to say like offend people, not because they were cowards, but because they were trying to be kind.

Like, because they were trying to say like, okay, how do I not offend them? And the answer is, you don't. Like we live in a culture in which just being a person who loves Jesus Christ is offensive to huge numbers of people. If you're actually serious about that, you're gonna have enemies.

And a really good indication of that is that he did. And he did it all perfectly. Like, it isn't like you're going to find a better model than Jesus had, where you just get rid of the enemies. Nope, they were there. Like, they were people who did not like the gospel. Like, this is, like, the repulsiveness of Christ is something we want to shy away from. That Christ repels people. In John 6, they're scandalized and they walk away. If our teaching doesn't cause that, we're not preaching Christ. Yeah. I mean, you've thought about this for a while. Have you any suggestions then to priests who are trying to deal with this?

This is like me giving suggestions to parents, you know, but even less qualified. I would just say, I think on the diocesan level, dioceses should just take those complaints. And if they're valid, go and talk to the priest. And if they're complaining about things that are just a piece of that, call them and congratulate them. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Or just like, why are the other priests

not getting these calls? Well, I tell you, here's something that we can all do who are watching right now, is we can always praise our priest when he steps out in courage and says something that's going to upset people that's in line with the gospel. Exactly.

Everyone can do that. And you might be tempted to think, well, somebody will thank him, or I don't need to thank him. No, go out of your way and say, thank you for having courage. And so I think the other thing that there's a fake courage, there are priests who will at a very liberal parish talk about how bad conservatives are or at a very conservative

parish talk about how bad liberals are. And it looks courageous, like, oh wow, way to stand up to them, Father. But they weren't fair. Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I've been to like Latin mass parishes where they just talk about abuses in the Nova Sordo. That's a bad homily because no one here is guilty of that. And the people who need to hear that aren't hearing it. So you might as well preach about like why like the Chinese premier did something wrong. It could not be further removed from the lives of the people you need to preach. What are the sins that your people are struggling with? Preach to those. Like if you're not getting some negative feedback,

you're probably not touching the wounds. And so I would just say, take heart, like be courageous to priests who are getting some of that feedback. Like maybe you're getting feedback cause you need to do something differently. Maybe you need to be gentler about it or whatever, but it may also just be a sign that you're doing the right thing. As you wrap up, where can people get your book and where else can they follow the work you're doing? The early church was the Catholic Church. The Catholic Church. Do you have a description?

Do you have a link in the description? Yeah, you can get it in a lot of places, but- And you can send it to Cameron Batuzzi's address. Let me just get that number. Actually, so this is a cool thing. A guy bought like a case of 20, right now a case of 20 on shop.catholic.com is 60 bucks, which is $3 a book. So a guy bought a case of them and just like went on Facebook and was like, who wants a copy? And just started giving copies away. That is really cool. But even if you don't want to do that, if you only care about yourself, I understand you're at the beginning stages of sanctity. If you just

want one copy, shop.catholic.com is probably the place you're going to get the best deal. I would also say people who get it, I'd love it if you rated and reviewed it on Amazon, it really helps. It helps people who maybe didn't know they were looking for it, discover it on accident. And yeah. So those- Are you working on another book right now? I actually am taking a brief breather. I know what I want to do Which I want to do one based on Edmund Campion's arguments against the Reformation Which I've entitled in my head ten reasons to reject the Reformation But which Todd my editor may give a better title to so we'll see good old Todd Aglio Loro

He named this book by the way, which he named it. Yeah, the early church was Catholic Church I want to name it something lame like before Constantine He named it? Yeah, the early church was Catholic Church. I want to name it something lame like before Constantine. Yeah, that's why he does what he does. All right, everybody. Thank you so much for being here watching Pines with a Quinus. This has been Joe Heschmeyer. Be sure to hit subscribe and that bell button and that way my ego will feel good about me. I don't know. All right. God bless. Thanks, everyone.