The Patrick Coffin Show | Interviews with influencers | Commentary about culture | Tools for transformation

Fog of confusion has settled over the Catholic Church on a number of fundamental teachings in the last 50 years. This is the certainly the case with capital punishment. Countless Catholics have been led to believe that "the death penalty" is morally equivalent to abortion, and many documents from the episcopal level have appeared urging Catholics to vote against laws supporting it. The late Joseph Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago tried to square the circle with his "seamless garment" approach. While Catholic moral teaching does belong to a whole tradition and thus can't be segmented into separate silos, the net result of the Bernardin proposal has been further confusion. Did the Catholic Church change her teaching on capital punishment under Pope Saint John Paul II? What about the informal remarks by Pope Francis? What does the Bible say about it? Are there conditions under which a Catholic can still support capital punishment in good conscience? Enter Dr. Ed Feser, co-author with Joseph Bessette of a substantial guide to these questions and more. It's titled By Man Shall His Blood Be Shed: A Catholic Defense of Capital Punishment, and you owe it to yourself to become familiar with what was once unexceptional and ultimately unquestionable. In this interview, Feser tackles the main objections I threw at him based on the many denunciations of capital punishment I have heard in my life. Finally, a voice of clarity and reason speaking to an issue so prone to emotion and sentimentalism. Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Please leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

The question mark is facetious. More and more men of good will around the world are waking up to what happened on June 2017. That was the day Bill C-16 got Royal assent and became law in Canada. It adds "gender expression" and "gender identity" as a protected ground to the Canadian Human Rights Act and to the Criminal Code provisions dealing with hate propaganda, incitement to genocide, and aggravating factors in sentencing. Trans-lation? Misgendering someone (say, a "non-binary" or "trans person") in Canada is now against the law, alongside hate propaganda, and incitement to genocide. Its defenders are playing a game called antics with semantics as to whether it compels speech. We'll see what the real world punishments are soon enough. I sat down with the highest profile critic of Bill C-16, University of Toronto psychology professor Jordan Peterson, and Sen. Don Plett of Manitoba, one of the few Canadian Senators who opposed the bill's passage. Was this bill adequately debated? How does it manifest Prime Minister Justin Trudeau's mandate to institutionalize what is essentially a totalitarian impulse? What's really going on here? In this two-guest conversation, Dr. Peterson and Sen. Plett tell us what might constitute the next right step in abolishing and rolling back the effects of the law that imposes an extremist agenda on 9.75% of Canadians. America, you may be next. Elections matter, almost as much as culture. Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Please leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated! www.patrickcoffin.media/itunes www.patrickcoffin.media/stitcher Connect with me: Facebook: www.facebook.com/patrickcoffin.media Instagram: realpatrickcoffin Twitter: @Patrick_Coffin

British historian, journalist, and broadcaster Tim Stanley sees connections among ideas and movements. Take the modern conservative movement, for instance. He produced a documentary for the BBC titled How Marx Made the Right in which he credits Karl Marx as a major causal factor in the rise of the Right in the 20th century. In this interview, you'll gain insight into life as a Catholic convert working in the public maw of secular Great Britain (or the "U.K." as the more nondescript nomenclature goes) and into the importance of participating in the process of public story telling, which is another way of describing the media's "news coverage" function: facts + value = story. Tim earned his PhD in history at Trinity College, Cambridge, and has taught US history at Sussex, London and Oxford. Reticent to be called conservative, he says, "I prefer traditionalist - the Amish seem to know what they're doing." Either way, he speaks clearly about the need to preserve the foundations of the great thing called western civilization. Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Please leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher.

Former atheist turned Catholic, John Lawrence Hill, discusses the natural law's impact on morality and civil law. He breaks down the concept into bite-sized morsels, touching on classical perspectives, the meaning of 'Logos', and the influence of John Locke on American constitutional tradition. The podcast explores teleology, utilitarianism, and the intersection of natural law and legislation.

It's the third rail of both the world and the Church. Anyone who touches it risks social electrocution in the form of the argument-stopping (?) accusation of bigotry and hatred. It's homosexuality. Regarding homosexual behavior, the teaching of the Catholic Church, following the Bible, is abundantly clear. Implementing it in a human and pastoral way, however, can be a challenge. Dan Mattson's up for it. Drawn into the gay lifestyle for many years and rescued by the bracing message of chastity, Mattson's story is living proof of a number of things: that one's deepest identity is as a son or daughter of God the Father, not as a "gay person;" that no one is exempt from the call to chastity, which frees us from the slavery of impurity; and that the Church is very close to those with same-sex attraction. Dan, a professional musician, tells his riveting, powerfully honest story in Why I Don't Call Myself Gay: How I Reclaimed My Sexual Reality and Found Peace and in this interview, he expounds on the important details. Dan Mattson subverts all the stereotypes, with his joie de vivre and earthy sense of humor. I recommend that you share this one with friends, family members, and pastors who are looking for a winsome presentation of an authentic Catholic anthropology regarding homosexuality. Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Please leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

Fake vs. Real News from "the Vatican" with Edward Pentin The mainstream media love to quote "Vatican sources," or "the Vatican," or "the Holy See today said…" What is "the Vatican" and who speaks for it? I sat down with, to my mind, the best Vaticanista journalist writing today, Edward Pentin, the British-born Rome correspondent for The National Catholic Register, and author of The Rigging of a Vatican Synod: An Investigation into Alleged Manipulation at the Extraordinary Synod on the Family. We cover a multitude of bases of interest to news junkies, especially the kind who pay attention to things papal. If you've ever scratched your head over the latest allegedly official Vatican pronouncement, or tried to understand what Pope Francis just said (or, more frequently, is alleged to have said), don't miss this interview. Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Pease leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

Iranian-born atheist Sohrab Ahmari has had an unlikely path to the Catholic Church, He announced his intentions to convert upon learning that Father Jacques Hamel was murdered on the altar of his quiet Normandy parish church in July 2016, and was received into the Church some months later. Ahmari is a London-based editorial writer and editor for the Wall Street Journal, and he has a new book that will help you understand how modern art (really post-modern, but you knew that) became corrupted by identity politics and hard Left messaging. The book is titled The New Philistines and if you're looking for the answer as to why beauty is not (primarily) in the eye of the beholder, this is a conversation worth hearing. Theatre, movies, books, painting, even architecture: art is now mainly driven by PC-driven concerns. So much of contemporary art is ugly, politicized, and incoherent. And that's supposed to be its charm! Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Pease leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

Marcus speaks with a quiet authority, with the air of a contemplative craftsman. Founder of Marian Caskets, his avocation in life is now his family business. He makes beautiful wooden caskets. Moved by the funeral rites of Pope John Paul II in 2005, particularly the plain wooden casket of the late great Holy Father, Marcus took on a life of service to the bereaved and, by his intercession as he works, the deceased themselves. He joined me to talk about the carved messages in these elegant, rough-hewn caskets and about how our culture's widespread denial (and fear of) of death has kept us far from the presence of God, although He is near. Check out his website and accompanying intro video at www.mariancaskets.com Don't forget to Subscribe to the show in YouTube, as well as the podcast so you can get the weekly show updates. Pease leave an honest review of the show in iTunes or Stitcher. Ratings and reviews are extremely helpful and greatly appreciated!

We live in an age of divorce parties, Hallmark Cards that celebrate divorce, and sit-com plots that revolve around the "hilarious" hi jinx that ensue when the ex comes over. The necessary premise for this age is the notion that kids don't really suffer because of divorce, not really, right? The kiddos are resilient, right? Mommy and daddy were so unhappy, until that boo boo was fixed, right? Wrong, says author and married mother of eight, Leila Miller. The 70 courageous men and women in her new book Primal Loss: Now Adult Children of Divorce Speak tell a very different tale. Their experiences – laced with uncomfortable truths about how divorce is almost invariably the "gift" that keeps on taking – are finally brought into the open. Finally, we're having a conversation about the central characters in the drama that are usually not given a speaking part: the children. If your parents were divorced or if you're on the verge yourself, pay attention to this interview.

Dana Gioia is a poet, a librettist, the Judge Widney Professor at the University of Southern California. As the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Dana was unanimously confirmed twice by the Senate to lead the NEA from 2003 through 2009. He has been given ten honorary degrees and won numerous awards, including the 2010 Laetare Medal from Notre Dame University. In 2015, Gioia was named the Poet Laureate of California by Gov. Jerry Brown. This is one of those conversations deserving close attention, even if your only exposure to poetry was in high school with e.e. cummings and Alan Ginsberg. Dana is a master at communicating subtlety and mystery, and bears interesting insights galore. Catholics and other Christians need to get into the game of creative writing, music, poetry, and other sources of beauty for which this sad world is…starving. Here is a great intro to his work, 99 Poems: New and Selected You're welcome!