Blessed Are the Freaks

When my wife started exploring the Catholic faith, confession was one of my big hangups. It wasn't the act of a human having the power to forgive sins, which is strongly supported in scripture , and to a wide degree also practiced by the Protestant churches I had been involved with my whole life. Instead, my issue was with the authority given exclusively to the priesthood on that front, as with many others. The confession booth is a popular trope in television. Sometimes, it seems characters are made Catholic just so that they can dump their guilt in the confessional for the viewer's benefit. Daredevil (pictured above) on Netflix takes the faith of the protagonist a little more seriously, but the Sacrament of Reconciliation is still one of the most forward ways we are shown about the character's religion. We don't see him partaking in Eucharist . I don't recall him ever praying a rosary or even the Our Father. We don't see him fasting or praying for the inte...

I wanted to post something for Easter, but I've struggling to come up with something relevant to say other than, like, "Easter is cool" and "welcome back to life, Jesus! Sorry we killed you and everything." So I thought I'd talk about something that's pretty damn related, but kind of tangential: Communion. There's a lot of different ideas about communion, and what it represents, and what it does. I'm certainly no authority on it, and even if I were I'm not interested in dumping a theological argument at you, but I can talk about my own experience. I've participated in communion with a lot of different groups: Presbyterian, Catholic, Episcopal, Reformed, Lutheran, non-denominational. I've had a lot of different thoughts about what it is and why we do it. But the one thing I find most poignant about the Lord's Supper, at least right now, in a divided world -- as I confront my own prejudices, as God forces me to come face to ...