A North American Catholic: A Conversation with Sam Rocha

Today’s guest on What Matters Most is Sam Rocha, associate professor of philosophy of education at University of British Columbia. This was a wide-ranging conversation and as I say at in the intro to the podcast, I am still processing all of it because we covered so much territory. 

Sam is the author of a number of books, including A Primer for Philosophy and Education with Cascade Books, Folk Phenomenology: Education, Study, and the Human Person,  and The Syllabus as Curriculum: A Reconceptualist Approach. His website contains more information on his writing, music, and other interests. 

​I should mention, though, that Sam is an author who has been published widely in popular Catholic media including First Things, Commonweal, America, Our Sunday Visitor, The Catholic Herald, and Church Life Journal. Previously he wrote online for Vox Nova and Patheos on the Catholic channel. Sam also has a pugnacious presence on Twitter, engaging especially with the Catholic Twittersphere and calling out racism in the Church and hypocrisies of various sorts. He’s a terrific follow. He also has his own podcast, Folk Phenomenology that I encourage you to check out also. 

In this conversation we spent a lot of time talking about his upbringing in Texas and Mexico as the son of lay Catholic missionaries in the charismatic renewal and the precarity of that life.  He mentioned a number of groups such as Sword of the Spirit, Bread of Life Community, Cursillo, and Catholic Charismatic Renewal in Latin America.

Sam also mentioned a great number of people, including authors and their works, Milan Kundera, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Ivan Illich, John Stuart Mill, Gloria Purvis, George Weigel, Fr. Michael Scanlan, and Alasdair McIntyre. I also mentioned Nicky Cruz, Run, Baby Run, and David Wilkerson, Cross and the Switchblade. I also mentioned an article of mine on Jesus' teaching on marriage in Journal of Moral Theology with a long title “But from the beginning it was not so”: The Jewish Apocalyptic Context of Jesus’ Teaching on Marriage, Divorce, and Remarriage.

We also spoke a lot about Pope Benedict and Pope Francis. Sam is giving a paper at the Pope Francis conference coming up this week at St Mark’s College, the Catholic college at UBC. Join us and the 45 other speakers coming to Vancouver in early May 2023.  You can register at the website. The document I mentioned that Cardinal Ratzinger wrote about the German professor who was not able to teach New Testament any longer ( Friedrich Wilhelm Maier) was Relationship Between Magisterium and Exegetes. 

Since St. Mark’s Centre for Christian Engagement seeks to enable the creation of a culture of encounter and dialogue, let me invite you into that discussion. Please follow me on Twitter @biblejunkies, or on Facebook, at Biblejunkies, or on Instagram @biblejunkies. Or email me at jmartens@stmarkscollege.ca. Let me know what you think.

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John W. Martens