Thinking Faith With Eric Gurash And Dr. Brett Salkeld

Continuing our Summer Bible Study with Deacon Eric Gurash. In this three-part series, we break open the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, looking at its relation to the Gospel of Luke, who wrote it, and why, and taking a deep dive into a few major themes. Show Snippet: "While the other gospel writers show this fulfillment (of Salvation History) in terms of the Resurrection experiences alone, for Luke something more must occur..."

Summer's here and it's time for another Summer Bible Study with Deacon Eric Gurash. In this three-part series, we break open the Book of the Acts of the Apostles, looking at its relation to the Gospel of Luke, who wrote it, and why, and taking a deep dive into a few major themes. Show Snippet: "And so we have the author we have come to know as Luke, most certainly a Gentile convert...whose most profound experience of Christ, we will see as we look to this Acts of the Apostles, was within the context of coming to faith within His Spirit-filled Church."

Our Catholic faith has much to say regarding maintaining our physical, emotional, and spiritual health. This week Deacon Eric spends some time examining the role of Rote and Intercessory prayer in building mental health resiliency. Show Snippet: "...rote prayers, like the Jesus Prayer, the Sucipe, or the Lord’s Prayer, can steep us in a world view that is centered outside of ourselves, outside of the pain we are carrying, and focused on trusting a God whose love for us and those whom we love far exceeds our own." Learn more at www.emmaussupport.ca 

We continue our conversation this week with Dr. André Polaniecki from Holy Cross Colledge at the University of Notre Dame discussing the Catholic Faith, athletics, health, and building virtue through sports. Show Snippet: "I could go on and on about the sporting connections you can make with different virtues...and like you say, of the Christian mystery; redemption and suffering..."

We sit down this week with Dr. André Polaniecki from Holy Cross Colledge at the University of Notre Dame discussing the Catholic Faith, athletics, health, and building virtue through sports. Show Snippet: "John Paul II was hugely instrumental in my own faith formation...and athletes are that for a lot of people...they have the capacity to be these giant, out-sized figures in our life and its really, really great when we get someone who's really good at encouraging people to be good."

Brett continues his conversation with Paul D'Hondt and Dr. Christopher Baglow on teaching science in a Catholic school this week on Thinking Faith. Show Snippet: "It ceased being a good thing that I could be helpful with, to something I got excited about, once I began to realize that taking science seriously was transforming and deepening my own understanding of the faith..."

This week Thinking Faith welcomes Dr. Christopher Baglow of the University of Notre Dame, and Paul D'Hondt from the Huron Perth Catholic District School Board in Ontario, Canada to discuss teaching science in a Catholic School. Show Snippet: "The mind or the reason of the Universe through whom the Universe was made is the one who became flesh in Jesus Christ. So you're already taking a step towards faith when you begin to appreciate something greater than yourself in the process of doing science."

We continue our Catholic Education series with a visit from Dr. Andrew Seeley and Thomas Quackenbush both from the Catholic Institute for Liberal Education discussing teaching mathematics from a Catholic perspective. Show Snippet: "The project has to do with the formation of persons. It's not about producing theologians or philosophers or scientists or mathematicians. You're forming souls so what is the formative impact of studying mathematics?" Find out more about ICLE: https://catholicliberaleducation.org/

This week we discuss teaching English in a Catholic school with Dr. Dan Guernsy K-12 School principal in Ave Maria Florida and senior fellow at the Cardinal Newman Society promoting faithful Catholic Education. Show Snippet: "Especially with children's literature...surrounding them with literature that is more ennobling...but if all you're doing day after day is teaching kids this darkness and despair, that's problematic." Find out more about the Cardinal Newman Society: https://newmansociety.org/

As Catholic education month wraps up, we take some time to visit with Robert Mixa, Education Fellow with Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire Institute, chatting about introducing students to the scapegoating philosophy of Rene Girard in the classroom. Show Snippet: "Whenever I go to Mass, I always think of Girard when I start with acknowledging myself as a sinner...that's like the first step then to actually hear the gospel well and then to commune with Christ." Read more from Robert Mixa: RENÉ GIRARD, UNLIKELY APOLOGIST https://www.wordonfire.org/resources/blog/rene-girard-unlikely-apologist/30555/

Catholic Education Month continues on Thinking Faith with part two of our conversation with Brett Fawcett, graduate from Newman Theological Colledge in Alberta and an educator currently teaching Social Studies in Guangzhou, China discussing how to teach Social Studies as a Catholic. Show Snippet: "I think Christianity actually allows us to teach...an appreciative understanding of Canadian history that can instill a kind of legitimate patriotism that is also very self-critical."

We continue Catholic Education Month on the Thinking Faith Catholic Podcast with a visit from Brett Fawcett, graduate from Newman Theological Colledge in Alberta and an educator currently teaching Social Studies in Guangzhou, China discussing how to teach Social Studies as a Catholic. Show Snippet: "There's lots of good examples of saints in our history, actually, who I would encourage Catholic listeners to study. There's Elizabeth Ann Seaton...a great American Saint who has a really interesting story who actually was canonized with just one miracle..."

This week on the Thinking Faith Catholic Podcast, Deacon Eric and Dr. Brett begin a multi-part series for Catholic Education Month starting with Dr. Denise Donohue of the Cardinal Newman Society and a look at ways to infuse our Catholic Faith throughout the curriculum. Show Snippet: "David Clayton wrote this book, it's called "The Way of Beauty" and he does two or three chapters just on proportion, and symmetry, and harmony...that's a very Catholic perspective." Find out more about the Cardinal Newman Society Curriculum Standards: https://newmansociety.org/educator-resources/resources/academics/catholic-curriculum-standards/

Deacon Eric Gurash discusses the healing grace in speaking our pain out loud and the role the Psalms can play in helping us to do this. Show Snippet: "God understands what the UCLA study and others like it indicate; speaking our feelings of abandonment, powerlessness, fear, and even anger out loud can be the exact antidote we need."

What does it mean that Christians proclaim belief in the resurrection of the body and what connection does this have to the end of human history. Join the discussion in this part 2 of 2, this week on the Thinking Faith Catholic Podcast! Show Snippet: "John takes all these things which we imagine in the indefinite future; judgment, exaltation, whatever, and he makes them happen right now...and its the same thing when Jesus says 'I'm the Resurrection' - yeah we know our brother will be raised somewhere down the line and he's like, 'No, you're lookin at it.'"

In this part 1 of a two-part conversation on the Resurrection, Deacon Eric and Dr. Brett discuss the intricacies of that most unusual of Christian claims, belief in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, and of our own lives. Show Snippet: "If your eternity doesn't transcend this reality if it's just an extension of this reality, then even 'heaven' becomes hell..."

Guest Fredric Heidemann discusses his written work with Word on Fire ministries on modernity, secular humanism, and the pitfalls inherent in breaking with a Judeo-Christian worldview. Show Snippet: "You're assuming all sorts of things about the moral life. You're assuming that morals can be properly grounded, which of course, as we discussed earlier, you can't really do from an atheistic perspective. You're assuming that there's free will, which pop-atheists deny...all these things and it's like, this is what makes us fundamentally human but they're just utterly ungrounded in that 'detached from religion' universe." Read more from Fredric at: https://www.wordonfire.org/author/fredric-heidemann/

In this part 2 of 3, We continue our visit with Fredric Heidemann of Word on Fire discussing his conversion from staunch atheist to Catholic writer for Bishop Robert Barron's global evangelization apostolate. Show Snippet: "The Catholic Church was the patron of all these arts, the Catholic Church was doing all this...and the Universities, and sponsoring all this education; and I think "man, I can't seem to get away from the Catholic Church!"...and I was reading through my history course, I took AP History, and I thought "if you were going to be Christian, why wouldn't you be Catholic?"" Read more from Fredric at: https://www.wordonfire.org/author/fredric-heidemann/

This week we welcome Fredric Heidemann, writer for Bishop Robert Barron's Word on Fire blog for a three-part series of discussions on his conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Show Snippet: "It's not like I read the Lord of the Rings and became Catholic overnight...but it made me recognize, and it was a kind of re-cognition, a re-understanding of something buried deep in the depth of every human soul, that the world is just fundamentally more enchanted than this sort of materialistic, reductionistic, atheistic world view..." Read more at: https://www.wordonfire.org/author/fredric-heidemann/

This week we reflect on the invitation to allow our hearts to be pierced by the crosses of the world through the lens of another of Flannery O'Connor's characters, Mrs. Greenleaf, as encountered in the story named after her - "Greenleaf".   Show Snippet: "We are called to be open to God's own heart, and God's own vision of the world...to be Mrs. Greenleafs by vocation; to roll in the dirt of all of the horror, injustice, sadness, and absurdity of the world and cry out with God that our hearts might be stabbed in the heart by Jesus."