Tag Archives: Religion

Ep33 The Relationship between Grit and Success

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Father Len explores how grit helps us get through difficult times and succeed in life.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len explains why he is grateful for the COVID 19 pandemic.
  • Father Len explains how the pandemic helps reveal the existence of God and why God allows suffering in the world.
  • Father Len introduces the spiritual virtue of grit and illustrates how and why it helps us mature as human beings and succeed in life.
  • Father Len explains the dangers of living life as a “perfect fragile.”
  • Father Len explodes the myth of “talent” as the primary predictor of success in life.
  • Grit in the religious world is fortitude. It’s one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit.
  • Grit is learned and earned through sacrifice, pain, and a little bit of suffering.
  • “Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance” by Angela Duckworth
  • Life is sacrifice.
  • Father Len offers concrete ways to increase grit and determination.
  • Father Len shares the moving story of Adm. James Stockdale and how grit helped him and his fellow prisoners survive years in a Vietnam War concentration camp.
  • “The Immortal Irishman: The Irish Revolutionary Who Became an American Hero” by Timothy Egan
  • “Ungifted: Intelligence Redefined” by Scott Barry Kaufman

Ep30 Guilt and Shame Are Not the Same

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 28:39 — 26.2MB)

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Father Len explains why guilt is a good and shame is evil.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len reacts to the pain and suffering inflicted on Tarana Burke, founder of the “Me Too Movement,” by the shame she felt after being raped and sexually molested as a child.
  • Shame is evil because it mars the image of our being made in the image of God and crushes our self-worth.
  • Shame is dangerous and correlates to increased incidence of addiction, eating disorders depression, and suicide.
  • Guilt is about amending our behavior and increasing our self-worth.
  • Guilt is a tool for self-improvement; becoming more loving, more kind, more patient.
  • Shame is a tool of oppression, racism, and sexism.
  • Guilt is based on love and shame is based on evil.
  • Father Len shares a fun story about catching kids stealing dark chocolate from him to illustrate why guilt is good and guilt and shame are not the same.
  • Religion should be a force for inflicting guilt and healing shame.
  • Both guilt and shame make us feel bad, but for different reasons. Guilt makes us feel bad because we realize we could have done something better. Shame makes us feel bad because some horrific event causes us to define ourselves as trash.
  • Brené Brown’s podcast: “Unlocking Us”
  • Brené Brown’s TED Talk: “The Power of Vulnerability”
  • Shame loves to hide in the dark and doesn’t like being named. Privately and sadly, the lives of many people are controlled by shame.
  • Healing shame is not easy, but working through the process brings wisdom, compassion, and joy.
  • The Catholic Church is like a good mother who teaches her children guilt to help them grow and become better and more loving human beings.

Ep26 Judging and Being Judged

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:09 — 11.1MB)

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Father Len and Irish explore the frequently damaging temptation and tendency for humans to judge each other.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len responds to a listener’s perception that religious people are often judgmental and see themselves as better than others.
  • Father Len explains the difference between damaging judgment of behavior and attitudes and needed, useful and inspiring criticism.
  • The ability to honestly and critically assess our own behaviors and attitudes is healthy and important to personal growth and maturity.
  • Judging often has a damaging moral quality of shaming and denigrating.
  • For some people, judging others is a big smokescreen to hide the garbage in their own lives.
  • Presented with necessary criticism and helpful suggestions about their attitudes, decisions and behavior, insecure people tend to get angry, defensive, feel judged and dismiss it all.
  • Father Len offers some sage advice to fathers of daughters about the relationship between mothers and daughters.
  • Recognizing the difference between judgmental and critical thinking requires a lot of personal reflection and humility.

Ep22 Are the Bible and religion outdated?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:11 — 23.1MB)

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Father Len explains why the wisdom contained in the Bible about what makes for a good life is timeless.

Highlights, Ideas and Wisdom

  • “There is nothing new under the sun” – Qoheleth, Ecclesiastes 1:9
  • People have forever struggled with the same problems, made the same mistakes, and needed the same solutions to solve their problems and the same remedies for their mistakes.
  • The Bible stories are always challenging our tribalism, addictions, use of money, our sense of justice, our compassion, and even our sense of religion.
  • “Faith and evidence are inseparable. Indeed, faith is a response to evidence, not a rejoicing in the absence of evidence.” – John C Lennox
  • Technology does not make us evolve. It adds conveniences to our lives. What really makes us evolve is religion.
  • We are hardwired for religion.
  • “Why God Won’t Go Away: Brain Science and the Biology of Belief” by Andrew Newberg, Eugene D’Aquili, and Vince Rause
  • Every experiment in atheism has led to massive slaughter.
  • If we get rid of religion, we just replace it with something else. We always end up worshiping something.
  • “In the day-to day trenches of adult life, there is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. If you worship money and things — if they are where you tap real meaning in life — then you will never have enough. Never feel you have enough. It’s the truth. Worship your own body and beauty and sexual allure and you will always feel ugly, and when time and age start showing, you will die a million deaths before they finally plant you. On one level, we all know this stuff. It’s the skeleton of every great story. The trick is keeping the truth up-front in daily consciousness. Worship power — you will feel weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to keep the fear at bay. Worship your intellect, being seen as smart — you will end up feeling stupid, a fraud, always on the verge of being found out. And so on.” – David Foster Wallace
  • Religion is only outdated for those who are unconscious that they’re worshiping something.
  • Whatever controls your life is what you’re worshiping.
  • What people resist when they say the Bible is outdated, is not the Bible. It’s their interpretation of the Bible.
  • “Brave New World” by Aldous Huxley
  • “Great Expectations” a movie about “gods” that control us.

Ep20 Good and Evil Are Hard to Define and Fully Understand

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Father Len explains why defining and fully understanding good and evil is pretty much beyond our ability as humans.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • The only wise reaction to evil is faith in God.
  • The mystery of what seems like evil to us may actually be something used by God for our good.
  • Father Len explains why we shouldn’t settle for cheap and easy answers for why evil and suffering exist in the world and instead humbly ask questions and more questions.
  • We will not understand evil until we can have the same perspective as God.
  • There might not be answers about good and evil that we can see and understand until we get to heaven and can look back in time.
  • Real wisdom is acquired through intimate experience with suffering.
  • What we proclaim as good may actually be bad for us.
  • What we proclaim as evil may actually be good for us.

Ep18 Politics, Religion and the Slogan “Black Lives Matter”

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:37 — 18.0MB)

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Father Len and Irish grapple with the difficulty of having a spiritual, moral, and meaningful conversation about the slogan “black lives matter.”

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Father Len explains why he is reticent to make statements about political slogans.
  • It’s cowardice for religious leaders not to lead and speak out about spiritual and moral issues.
  • People have to come to the truth by themselves, but religious leaders can and should help lead them there.
  • “We are generally the better persuaded by the reasons we discover ourselves than by those given to us by others.” – Blaise Pascal
  • We have become so politically rigid, polarized, and hell-bent on winning in the United States that the search for truth gets lost.
  • There are good people and evil people. The line between good and evil cuts through every human heart.
  • Father Len is reading “Black like Me” by John Howard Griffin to become more compassionate and feel the pain and suffering that can come from discrimination and being a minority.

Ep13 Understanding Human Evil

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 25:40 — 23.5MB)

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Father Len reveals two primary impulses God gives us and how we can use them for good or evil. This episode was recorded before the murder of George Floyd, but it couldn’t be more relevant.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Human evil is the most difficult kind of evil to grapple with because it’s what we do to ourselves.
  • Human evil is never part of God’s plan.
  • God created human beings with two primary impulses. One is rooted in self-interest or self-protection. The other an inner sense that alerts us when we’re violating God’s law and urges us to live lives of generous care for other people.
  • “The line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either, but right through every human heart.” – Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

Ep12 Spirituality without Religion

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 12:21 — 11.3MB)

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Father Len explains what’s missing in spirituality without religion in answer to a listener who asks: “Why do I need organized religion? I’m spiritual and I have a personal relationship with God.”

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • What is a “personal” relationship with God? What does it mean? Father Len explores the difference between an intimate relationship with God and a private relationship with God.
  • Father Len explains how religion satisfies the natural human need and desire for being social and how that makes an essential contribution to a spiritual life.
  • The very definition of what it means to be human is to be connected to other people.
  • We survive and thrive not only because of our intelligence, but also because we live and work as a group.
  • Religion and spirituality should make you a better human being.
  • We are more of who we are and who we are meant to be in community with other people.
  • Father Len shares an inspiring story of enemies protecting enemies during the Serbian Croatian war to illustrate the meaning, power and importance of true community.
  • Spirituality should lead you into the very essence of community.
  • Private spirituality can lead to becoming your own God.
  • Religion is like a marriage, a marriage between us and God.
  • “The Five Dysfunctions of a Team” by Patrick Lencioni
  • Father Len explains how conflict is an important element in strong marriages and good religion.
  • Being spiritual but not religious means there is likely no one to challenge your ideas and beliefs.
  • “Love in the Time of Cholera” by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

Ep11 Why do we need religion?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 19:20 — 17.7MB)

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Father Len explains how religion helps us recognize who we are meant to be and helps us become our best selves.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Religion is to spirituality what tea is to water. Religion adds flavor and extracts the essence of spirituality.
  • Practicing religion makes people happier, healthier, and live longer. It reduces depression, lowers blood pressure, crime, and the divorce rate.
  • “Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community” by Robert Putnam
  • Religion brings people together and helps them recognize who they’re meant to be.
  • We all need a community that cares about values and way of life to bring out our full and best selves. Working together with a common purpose, we begin to share each other’s story and become more concerned about other people’s stories than our own.
  • Human beings have always searched for the divine.
  • The common translation of the word shalom is peace, but it really means unity. This unity has four parts. Unity between us and God. Unity between each other. Unity within ourselves. Unity with creation. When you have all four, you have shalom and a great analogy for religion.
  • “Lost Connections: Uncovering the Real Causes of Depression – and the Unexpected Solutions” by Johann Hari
  • We all need connection with a goal and purpose in life that is greater than us.
  • Father Len reveals what he believes is missing in our Facebook “connections” and why he believes the “Facebook life” is likely contributing to rampant depression and the rise in suicide, cynicism, and mocking in our society.
  • Research has shown that worship produces a Spike in the love hormone oxytocin that helps bind us together.
  • Worship helps us discover our personal worth, other people’s worth, and the worth of God.
  • Father Len shares a little fun “family trash” to illustrate the relationships, values, and commitments that flow from religion and help us improve ourselves and our lives.
  • Religion is about a sacrifice and an offering of that part of us that thinks only of ourselves in hopes that part of us will eventually die.

Ep10 What is religion?

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Podcast: Play in new window | Download (Duration: 27:02 — 24.8MB)

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Religion has been with us since the beginning of human history. Father Len explains what it is and what it always has been.

Highlights, Ideas, and Wisdom

  • Religion is a binding of a relationship and commitment to God and other people.
  • Religion can be traced all the way back to the Stone Age, Paleolithic and Neolithic times.
  • Early religion was a mix of storytelling, music, art, architecture, astrology, and ritual that brought people together, unified them and tied them to a common purpose.
  • Stone Age caves were like churches often containing the same 32 symbols that are believed to be a hieroglyphic response to God.
  • Religion is not a monologue from God. Religion is a dialogue between us and God with us responding to God.
  • There’s good religion and bad religion. Good religion is one that binds us together and to God. Bad religion is just a structural form for coercion that often divides us.
  • Good religion is both educational and unifying. It helps us discover the presence of God in our daily lives.
  • Human beings have forever been trying to answer this call from a mysterious thing we call God that binds us together and directs our lives.
  • There have been cultural experiments without God in countries like Soviet Russia and Communist China. These experiments in atheism haven’t gone so well and led to lots of bloodshed and millions of deaths.
  • Atheism’s failures can be traced to the lack of a higher moral code beyond human reasoning.
  • We like to proclaim ourselves as rational, but we’re not. We’re really good at coming up with excuses to justify our behavior.
  • Atheism says there is no source of justice beyond “how I view things.” In religion, we say God is the source of justice and our behavior will be judged by God.
  • Atheism is a type of religion. It may take more faith to believe that “I am the measure of morality” than the faith it takes to believe in God.
  • Taking the Lord’s name in vain is to misuse religion for power, wealth, or violence. To commit evil in the name of God.
  • There’s good Scripture and bad Scripture. When you think God is telling you to do something that is not in the Bible, that’s bad Scripture.
  • Father Len explains how to choose a religion and why not to choose a religion.
  • Love is not just an emotion. Love is also a type of reasoning.
  • Father Len shares a fun MacMillan family dinner table conversation to answer the question, “should you choose a religion for your child?”
  • Religion is incredibly human because it’s constantly seeking the deep connections we all crave and need in this life.