The Brian Holdsworth Podcast

When Bram Stoker's Dracula was first published, it featured themes of death, seduction, temptation, and eternal life, and something about the arrangement of those themes, produced a story that was horrifying to its Victorian audience. But vampire stories, mostly in movie form today, don't have the same effect. When people today think of the scariest movies they can, very rarely will a vampire movie feature among them. Vampires of contemporary story telling are just as often portrayed as our friends as they are our adversaries and the worst thing they can do to you is kill you which is no worse than any other human adversary. They're no worse than serial killers, which is bad enough, but it doesn't produce the kind of uncanny terror that other concepts can in us. So why is it that vampire stories, especially the original vampire story, have lost their ability to terrify us the way they once did? What about us has changed so dramatically that this story no longer produces the terror and dread it once did?

My family and I recently went on a few hikes in the Rocky Mountains and there was one particular hike that was such a spectacle, in every direction you turned, that I was reminded of an anecdote that CS Lewis introduces in his book, the Abolition of Man, which, by the way, I believe is one of the most important modern books I've ever read. He treats a scenario in which two people are observing the same waterfall and in which two people could have different responses to that encounter. You could say something like, "It is majestic, it is beautiful, it is sublime." Or, you could say, I am experiencing sublime feelings, I am in awe. And the difference between these two reactions, can reveal to us the very heart of human evil. Take any obvious example of evil that we can point to and you will find the same common denominator among them all – the same erroneous pattern of thinking and the behaviour that proceeds from it, is at the root of all evil.

If you're like me, you may have felt like the whole world, including the Church, has gone insane and you're exhausted from standing your ground in opposition to it all. In this video I describe a recent experience of contemplating a way that I could surrender the fight, especially the fight for traditional Catholicism and where that time of prayer led me. Support the channel by visiting https://brianholdsworth.ca Music written and generously provided by Paul Jernberg. Find out more about his work as a composer here: http://pauljernberg.com

Joseph Pearce's enthusiasm for the Catholic faith, and some of the great writers who incarnate it for us, is contagious. I was fortunate enough to hear him speak early on in my faith journey and I have no doubt that he helped plant those seeds much deeper so that they would persevere. It was a joy to speak with him about great authors such as C.S. Lewis, J.R.R Tolkien, and G.K. Chesterton. We discussed literature, culture, art, and the liturgy.

A conversation between Timothy Gordon and Brian Holdsworth. We discuss the risks of "celebrity and popularity" as Catholic pundits and whether that can motivate our behaviour and the type of content that we produce. We also spend some time exploring faith and reason and how and why reason is so important in order to make the necessary distinctions that so many people in the age of social media, don't seem to be able to make - for the good of the Catholic Church and society.

For the past century or so, there have been two competing views about sex that have raged at each other in the hopes of winning the acquiescence of the people through sermons, editorials, research, and even political legislation. They can basically be summarized like this. One believes that sex, like most things, brings with it an intrinsic moral dimension which means that sex can be partaken in conformity to what is good or in rebellion against that good in the form of evil or perversion. According to this belief, since sexual behaviour requires moral consideration, we as moral agents, must govern our appetite and behaviour accordingly. This means that whatever we do, we have to do what is right, we have to make good and right choices and actions. – let's call this the traditional view. The other view claims that there is no moral dimension to sex or if there is, it's far less pronounced than the traditional view would have us believe. Sex is just like any other leisure activity that we might choose to engage in and it's unreasonable to expect people to moderate their behaviour because that will only exacerbate our sexual appetites and it's unrealistic anyways. This view encourages us to explore and liberate our sexuality and taste all the fruits and experiences that it has to offer. So, to ensure that we can engage in as much sexual activity as we might want, we've developed technology to mitigate the negative consequences. We can call this position, the liberal position. And we see these two positions clash in a very revelatory way whenever there is a health emergency or an outbreak of sexual transmitted infections. The tradition side will say, if people would just commit to having only one sexual partner for life, then these outbreaks would never occur. And that's true. But the liberal contingency will reply that this is far too lofty a solution and it will never work, so the best we can hope for is to continue to encourage promiscuity while promoting a reliance on technology to mitigate these adverse consequences. Well, I think there are ways that we can demonstrate that sex is a profoundly moral act of the will and how we engage in it will ALWAYS have significant moral consequences. Unlike the liberal advocates, I think it's abundantly obvious that sex is very different from a range of leisure activities that we might want to compare it to.

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 I would say, the reason to save sex for marriage is similar to the reason that we have locks on our car doors or the front doors of our homes. The reason we have locks on our doors is because we can't trust strangers to respect our dignity and the effects of our hard work. Now, don't jump ahead, I'm not saying that sex is a property or a commodity. I haven't gone that far with the analogy. It's merely that you can't trust strangers to respect and protect your well-being. And that's not because all strangers are untrustworthy, but it is because enough strangers are, that you need to protect yourself and your privacy because they will attempt to use that access and that knowledge that serve their interests, often at the expense of your interests. So, you defend yourself against that kind of risk by locking your doors and governing who has that kind of intimate access to you and your home. Not everyone is welcome to enter your house. Only those who have earned a measure of trust are welcome inside. Think about why we wear and have always worn clothing. We often assume that there is a natural utility as the reason, like to protect ourselves from the elements. But in truth, as far back as we have records for, we have examples of people wearing clothing for reasons that have nothing to do with protecting themselves from the elements. There was always some form of decorum or ornamentation as a feature in human clothing. On the question of decorum, an obvious motivation is: privacy. We aren't just protecting ourselves from the cold, but from exposure to other people. When we wear clothes, we are protecting ourselves from the crude and possibly even vulgar assessments of people who have not demonstrated to us that they can be trusted to protect that intimate knowledge the way we protect it ourselves. In other words, they haven't proven that they love us. Because that's what love is: it's a willingness to do for a person as they would do for themselves. To love someone is, in part, to protect their interests to the same degree that they would protect their own interests. When a person only has a superficial knowledge of us, they do not know us intimately and therefore, they do not care for us as much as intimacy requires. And from that, a principle should announce itself to us which is that we should only give intimate knowledge of ourselves and our privacy, including our physical form, to those who have demonstrated a deep concern for our wellbeing and who will care for that knowledge the way we do ourselves.

I know it's easy to villainize those who have not received their vaccines yet which makes it even easier to disregard the infringement of their rights by vaccine passports and mandates. You might be thinking that they deserve it because they're putting everyone at risk. And I've read quite a few articles in the media about who these people are and why they are hesitant and the explanations demonstrate that whoever is writing these articles has done very little research into the real reasons why people are hesitant. It usually gets chalked up to the conclusion that they are anti-vaxxers across the board or that they have bought into crazy conspiracy theories. The truth is, I know a lot of people who have not been vaccinated and while some may be stretching their logic a bit, most don't fit those characterizations. So what are the real reasons why they hesitate? Will mandatory or coercive campaigns be effective in increasing vaccinations and even if they are effective, do the ends justify the means?