The Brian Holdsworth Podcast

In this episode I discuss the recent dust up over a bishop in Florida sending a letter that forbade "ad orientum" posture at mass while another of his priests got caught committing some serious liturgical abuses that went unnaddressed by him. I spend some extra time talking about the practical and rational reasons ad orientem makes more sense.

A conversation between Jonathan Pageau and Brian Holdsworth in which we discuss faith and reason, classical vs. modern thought, how and why we shifted away from metaphysics, scientism, empiricism, symbols, patterns, culture, customs, liturgy, and more.

Support the channel by joining the Reinforcements at https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com As many of you know, if you've followed this channel long enough, I'm a big admirer of CS Lewis and even employ some of his argumentation in my videos. This in spite of the fact that even though his Catholic friend J.R.R. Tolkien was instrumental in his conversion to theism and then Christianity, he never converted all the way to the Catholic Church. He instead, embraced a kind of high Church Anglicanism. Lewis was famous for trying to build bridges along the fault lines of Christian denominations by promoting what he called Mere Christianity, or what was essential and mostly agreed upon by the main denominations – you could call this credal Christianity because it promotes the fundamentals of the ancient creeds which we almost all agree on. This is probably why Lewis wasn't in the habit of criticizing any Christian church or tradition, but he is supposed to have compared the Catholic Church to an overwhelming jungle where people can get lost and distracted before they ever get to the fundamentals of mere Christianity. And, I, in the course of my own conversion to Catholicism have found it hard not to sympathize with that criticism. Catholic thought and beliefs are so substantial that it can be easy to miss the forest for the trees. For example, I've met Catholics who could tell you all about the apparitions of Medjugorje but don't know what the phrase "consubstantial with the Father" in the Nicene Creed means. I've met Catholics who know all about the life of St. Juan Diego, but can't name the 12 apostles. So maybe Lewis has a point. But instead of describing it as a jungle, I might amend the comparison to be a library – a massive library. Because, if we're talking about the Church's intellectual tradition, her teachings, and even her dogmas, you actually do have something like a library of content. But the challenge with a library, is that it's easy to get distracted with the stuff you want to read as opposed to the stuff you should read.

We live in the age of information, but as any reasonable person can appreciate, most of the information that is available to us, is pollution and noise. Most of it does not educate or illuminate our minds. Plenty of it is misleading. This is a consequence of unflinching admiration for technological advance. It blinds us to important ethical questions like, "Should we do this?" And since we've refused to ask those questions, we now find ourselves in the age of fake news and having to try to fight back against it. But instead of revisiting those important ethical questions that we've neglected, we've decided to technologize a new solution to fix the old: enter fact checking! But the phenomenon of fact-checking has introduced more problems of its own. The authority that it brings is too tempting and intoxicating to not breach its own requirements and now we find ourselves getting censored for conclusions that cannot be easily called into question because... you cannot fact check an argument. That requires counter-arguments, but that isn't fact-checking, yet the self-appointed fact-checkers aren't willing to admit that what they're doing is argumentation because they're too used to the unquestioned authority that fact-checking has brought them.

If you've ever seen videos of street corners in the late 19th or early 20th century, if you have a soul, you may notice how beauty is exemplified in so much of what is captured there; from the architecture, to the carriages, to the dress of the people. And, if you have a brain, it may have left you wondering, what changed? What happened to our culture that caused us to go from sensibilities that would inspire men to aim at a vision of masculinity like this to something more like this? The first reason for the shift in our cultural sensibilities that I'd want to highlight is that as the influence of the Church and Christianity has waned over the years, we've been more easily persuaded to believe that external appearances do not convey anything necessary about internal realities. We say things like, don't judge a book by its cover. By that, we mean, there is some internal value that you can't see when judging an object or a person by their external appearance. Whereas Christianity has, predominantly, insisted that human beings are body-soul composites and that the material world expresses the spiritual reality of God's creation. All of which is to say, the external does tell us something about the internal or incorporeal. Just as a person's words tell us something about the content of their thoughts, so too, does our appearance, tell others something about our mind and our soul. For example, St. Francis de Sales said, "External cleanliness is a sort of indication of inward good order." But as we've slowly embraced this dualistic idea that external and internal are distinct and irrelevant to each other, we've, in theory, become more accepting of unconventional appearances.

It's that time of year again, when Christians of various stripes complain about the war on Christmas and if it isn't Christmas it's some other effort to marginalize or erase Christianity from the public sphere. By a war on Christmas, they mean the watering down of the festival of Christmas in order to turn it into some secularized silhouette of its former self. For example, the vernacular authoritarians will complain that it's offensive to non-Christians to use the word Christmas, so we have to substitute it with some vacuous alternative like "happy holidays" which is amusingly ironic because holiday means holy day which should give you some indication of the origin of the concept of a holiday… it comes from the Catholic Church scattering days of celebration throughout the Gregorian calendar, which the Church invented. All of which is to say, if you want to fully vandalize the Christian cultural heritage to make it appear like it never existed, there's more work to be done. And when some Christians complain about such cultural appropriation, they are met with ridicule from non-Christians as well as some Christians who claim that this is not worth getting upset about and that if you truly think you're being persecuted, go learn about REAL persecutions and martyrdoms and if your current marginalization doesn't compare, then stop being such a mollycoddle. This kind of response is a bit absurd, though, if you compare it to other possible scenarios where this might apply. Imagine if someone broke into your house and stole something of value to you and when you called the police for help, they said something like, "you know there are people who have been murdered recently. Unless what has happened to you is that bad, you shouldn't be complaining to us." It's a reprehensible assessment of a victim's experience that insists that unless they have suffered the worst out of anyone, then their suffering, to whatever degree it is measured, doesn't matter. Which is insane. But I'd add, that Christians have good reason to have an elevated sensitivity to this kind of thing because it doesn't take much for a subtle current of animosity towards Christians to turn into something far more insidious and terrifying.

This is my conversation with Mark Mallett (https://www.markmallett.com) in which we discuss the Catholic tradition concerning the apocalypse, eschatology, mysticism, prophecy, and if he thinks we're living the end times today.

In the beginning of the movie, Fiddler on the Roof, they break out into a song about Tradition where the main character admits that some of the things they do, they don't understand. They do them for "Tradition"! That's the great chorus they sing out. And in many ways, that story is about the collision of Tradition with new and emerging, "progressive" ideas of the modern world. But from that opening chorus, it's easy to conclude that tradition is something we blindly adhere to without employing our reason or critical thinking. It's the lazy reliance on a way of life without ever challenging yourself to think for yourself or progress to something better than your ancestry would allow. It's a mark of fear and ignorance rather than courage and enlightenment. And there may be some truth to that. There are some traditions that we inherit that you could say we blindly follow simply because they are traditions. But does that make the alternative more prudent or discerning? Well, let's take some time to consider why traditions exist at all. Tradition is what happens when ideas, practices, beliefs, and culture are passed down from one generation to the other. And why exactly do we invest all the effort it takes to transfer these goods from one generation to the next? It's so that our descendants won't have to unnecessarily solve every problem that has already been solved. If we made discoveries and acquired knowledge and customs that have a clear benefit to us, if we truly love our fellow man, which includes our descendants, then any good society would want to save them the trouble of having to go through all the sacrifices, danger, and difficulties that we had to in order to overcome our adversities. If we've already mapped out certain landmarks of the human experience, it would be cruel and evil to withhold the knowledge contained in discoveries from future generations. As I spoke about in a previous video, this is the whole reason we have education, to transmit knowledge and culture which means the work of education is inherently a process of a living tradition. And a lot of people seemed to misunderstand what I was saying in the past about that. This isn't to say that there is no room for innovation or authentic progress – there is, but the only way you get progress is by starting where your ancestors left off. You first have to inherit what they have to offer, become intimately familiar with it, and then build on from that point.

I just had the pleasure of listening to Matt Fradd's podcast on why you shoud get rid of your smart phone and was so excited by what he had to say, that I had to join in and add some of my own thoughts to his. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca Matt's original video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZTJu-...

This is my interview with Barrie Schwortz rom the Shroud of Turin Education and Research Association which runs www.shroud.com. We talk about how Barrie became a member of the first team of scientific researchers to examine the shroud, what their research discovered, and how it changed his life.