A Note on my Religious Work

For those of you who know me from EWTN, the Society of GK Chesterton, the Prairie Troubadours or The St. Austin Review, I am no longer affiliated with any of those groups.

"The truth will set you free" (John 8:32)
"To this end was I born, and for this cause came I into the world, that I should bear witness unto the truth. Every one that is of the truth heareth my voice." (John 18:37)

If we deny the truth, we are bad Christians and bad human beings.

If we put our faith in a lie - including a Big Lie - we are bad Christians and bad human beings.

If we endorse vulgarity, violence, bullying, gaslighting, fraud, irrational conspiracy theories, sedition and hate, we are bad Christians and bad human beings.

Since March of 2020, I have felt like a character in the play Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco. In that play, the bestial inhumanity of rhinoceroses becomes a fad and people start turning into them - willingly discarding reason and free will and mocking others who don't.

Meanwhile, since I think some of my posts on this blog contributed to this problem, I have taken them all down [Edit - though I am now planning on reposting some of them - Sept. 30, 2024]. You may follow me at https://theateroftheword.substack.com/.

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The Full Story on Bishop Finn

" Let's step outside and settle this thing like men ," she said, and she was a lady. " You're spewing anti-Catholic rhetoric !" he insisted. "How can you criticize a bishop when you're an actor and everyone knows actors are perverts and nitwits ," she screamed. (That last gal had a point). These are all reactions to my post last week about Rod Dreher's article on Bishop Finn's Indictment. And above all, people are charging me with believing the biased media coverage of the scandal. This, at least, is not true. In fact, everything I say in this post will be taken not from a media account of the scandal , but from the independent report on it as commissioned by the diocese , the Graves Report, which you can read on your own here . So let's shove the media aside and see for ourselves what's contained in this internal diocesan report conducted by an independent firm. *** Fr. Shawn Ratigan was a priest of the diocese of Kansas Cit...

Escape from Utopia

“Karen, I was right! Someone escaped! She says they are a cult!” I said to my wife, exuberant. It was Monday, Labor Day. We were at the Lake of the Ozarks, in mid-Missouri, and Karen, my wife, noticed a group of people standing near the overlook on the hill above the lake’s dam. A man about my age was about to take a picture of a group of teenagers with the lake in the background. All of them were well groomed, well behaved and wearing polo shirts and caps that said “Shepherdsfield” on them. Karen offered to take the picture for this man, so he could be in it as well. He was very grateful. “What’s Shepherdsfield?” I asked after the photo had clicked. “We’re a Christian community near Fulton, Missouri,” the man answered. “We’re on our Reward Trip. These young people have been working very hard all summer, and we’re taking them on a Reward Trip before school starts again.” My eyes locked with one of the young people....

What Follows ...

At one point I took all of these posts down, because I felt I had been far too willingly brainwashed into a religious system that was doing more harm than good. But, lately, I decided to republish some of the more interesting posts. What follows is about ten percent of what I posted from 2007 to 2021. They are in an odd chronological order, becuase Blogger is a clunky. Meanwhile, you can find my more sane (and more recent) musings here - https://theateroftheword.substack.com .

Waiting for Godot to Leave

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