Some of you are interested in reading a little bit of Mark Epockett, and this is probably the most accessible little introduction. I found myself seeing, about a year ago, someone Christianity has spread across the globe. But what has changed? We have, and I've heard a lot of Englishmen here talk about what hasn't changed, and where Christianity has kind of gotten off the path. So, do you have any thoughts on where that started?

[01:09]

It's just a feeling that just came over people. Well, you were trusted in saying it's not that Christianity has been trying and wanting it, but it's never been trying at all. Well, you know, of course, people like to put the blame into the voice of the Constantine when he regularized Christianity and then it became the official imperial religion. And so then it gets bound up inevitably with the political and economic concerns of the Middle Ages. So, it's been a slow-rolling defect. We're living, however, I think, in a time because of secularization, de-Christianization, the steady erosion of people's excessive attachment to the institutional forms of Christianity. It's a new day, I think, in Christian history, for many reasons.

[02:20]

But imperial Christianity is by and large, Christian, is by and large an exhaustive project. What it will become as it morphs in this third millennium, I mean, a sociologist by the name of Jenkins has written a book called The Next Christianity. and believes that the whole of the Christian world, for one thing, has shifted now to the Southern Hemisphere as the major axis. It's no longer Western or European. So who knows, you know, but for one thing it's for sure, Christian world is finished. Because it's an Indian church and all of its different aspects. There are other people who would like it to be resurrected, but I don't think that's going to happen. The world has changed, you know. That's not an answer we're looking for. It's a... Yeah, it's a long-term project. Well, I just have one more thing.

[03:22]

Your reading job is gone. Hebrews of Christ ascended as I recently put it in the context of the first temple. I say the thing that totally transformed it to say it's true. Yes. She's done incredible, incredible. You mentioned James Allison. How does he fit into this? I met Barker and Girard through James Allison. James Allison's recent work relies heavily on Margaret Barker's exegesis. And of course he's always been a Girardian. And what you wrote in this doctoral dissertation was basically a re-conceding of the doctrine of original sin, true as you are. So, that's my work. Another thought is, you talked about non-violence.

[04:26]

Do you think it can be taught, can you say, do you think non-violence can be taught, say, beginning with child development? James Allison's next book to be published is a catechesis which tries to, as you say, teach non-bibles. He has come up with a program, let's call it, of religious education that takes all of this material and tries to make it accessible and instructive. In terms of human development. Yes, the whole thing. Very exciting, actually. Because, you see, these problems are first and foremost in religious education classes. We give these impressions of how the God who's mentioned, the provider. We don't draw these reactions to our work. I've had servants, you know.

[05:28]

I've had servants, you know. They look at the crucifix and they say, it's not a God. But they're not seeing it. See, they're seeing it this other way. It's a tragedy. It's a tragedy, because this is a compelling message. This is a, this is the, excuse my language, the true fake. I mean, this is, this is it. It's the most exciting thing in the world. Why do you think it was called good news? But, so often it comes across as mediocre or bad news. So what do you say to your students then? Say what you said today then? We'll try. You know, there are distractions. But, um, let's try. You know, I'll tell you something, college fits more than that.

[06:29]

There isn't the hostility or the indifference even toward religion that there might have been perhaps in their parents or in their grandparents. There's simply a vacuum. Vacuums, of course, nature affords. Something will always build. That gives us a chance to be there about them. She's a very lovable kid. Tell me, tell me. When I go out to St. Bernard, I want to teach graduate theology. People would say to me, why would you do that? I was going to step down and say, well, excuse me. They're souls. And they are more receptive than you might think. It's not like it's important to be the first one to start filming that way, is it?

[07:35]

It's a race. Oh, we have lots of time. So, um... This might be an unfair question, but in the magisterium of the church, do we see any message, I mean, any message coming from the magisterium that takes this new way of thinking as, as you put it to begin with, Well, first of all, you have to be really careful, because usually the magisterium does not have any kind of official doctrine on the redemption. There are theories, theological theories, etc., but there is no, surprisingly, there is no defined way to understand this.

[08:47]

The decree is very simple, like for us, and for our salvation, So there's a tremendous leeway, actually, here for theologians to reflect. You definitely don't get too much trouble in this particular area of theology, as you might in other areas. But, well, the Divine Nurse said that, she said, hey, urge push. And I just said, well, at least count for the second. But I look at the upsurgence of that as not so much the magisterium as the sense of the faithful, the sense of fidelity. This has captured, captivated people. You ought to know from the first person I met who told me that he praised the chaplain of the Divine Mercy every day, using his iPod in his car on the way to work. And he kissed the Calvin wedding wine. That tells you that this isn't reaching much further than what I think what I consider this to be.

[09:54]

It's like when the devotion of the Sacred Heart became so popular in the 18th century. It emerges first, I think, from the heart of the Christian people, from the Magisterium, so to say, in the world. I think that's what's happening. So if I'm struggling to make a connection between devotion to the Divine Mercy that people are having and or at least the insight that I just now told you. Okay, the core, the core. You can leave aside all the devotional practices. Those are always central. The core of this is that mercy is the highest attribute of God. That's the core. And this mercy has been ritualized among the people of the first coming, especially in these ancient rituals of Atonement.

[10:57]

Christianity, early Christianity, seems to have been part of an anti-temple center for the Bible. began to interpret the death of Christ in light of these atonement rituals. What I'm bringing out is the emphasis on Christ as the Messiah, as the essence of our mission. The ritual was undertaken by God himself. See, that is just about the identification of the high priest with the Lord. This is something new. new insight that you've brought forward from it. Right, so again, it's not appeasement. It's not appeasement. That's the thing that's a break, that notion that God needs to be on the heels, what we want. And so, what Barbara is saying is that the early Israelites

[12:08]

some there who see that insight, that understanding of God, of God is mercy. And then it's kind of very incommon in the repertoire. I mean, it's still in the Hebrew Bible in so far as God's, in particular, God's attributes in the Hebrew Bible is upset. But that could be translated mercy, or mercy for love. Sean, did you have to write the recent time magazine? The cover talks about how by a Bob Bell, I believe it is. He has 7,000 people every Sunday in his congregation. It's basically an old real ritual taking place and more of a discussion on various topics. He has put out a book about God's love. and questions the existence of hell well he's the evangelical he's got himself in a certain amount of trouble he was on good morning america and you know among the evangelicals like he's he's sated right like he's challenging one's thinking about hell and

[13:25]

And I see some sort of a connection with what you're saying, the thinking about vengeance, and how we hold hell over people's head from the time we started going to grade school and kind of get to the soft rock. Well, you know, with these Catholic counterparts, it's Hans Urs von Balthasar, one of the great one of the two great Catholic theologians of the 20th century. So he wrote this book to guide him into coming to the kitchen. See, for a long time, what Walter thought was sort of the poster boy of a more, say, conservative kind of Catholic. When he wrote this book, dare we hope that all people are saved. I think you'd be in trouble with people who are normally very sympathetic to him, just like these evangelicals who say, well, we're healthy. So, when he said that, he said, there we hope. But then he has this very profound theology of Holy Saturday, that the descent into hell is part of the paschal mystery.

[14:30]

Holy Saturday is that sort of something to be skipped over from Friday to Sunday. And then from Walter's eyes, these are his words, Hell, as it consequence, is a Christological place in the world. So that even into whatever hell means theologically, the effects of Christ's city in mystery have now penetrated there too. Now what that means, but we have to think about that more carefully. Thinking with some of the evangelicals in our Would you be surprised if you went to heaven and found Hitler and Stalin sitting across from you? Now, amongst Roman Catholics, the big issue is they're in hell for sure. Well, let the Roman Catholics, by the way, remind people that we have another little wrinkle in this picture called purgatory.

[15:31]

And Hitler and Stalin purified, in whatever that means, I'm not talking about planes, but whatever this process of purification means, that they could potentially have experienced. It's part of the process. You know, in the jungle, of course, boom, boom, you're, you know, you're up or you're down. We have a little bit of a different understanding of the post-mortem process of a hunting dog. By the way, if you want to read, you know who Rowan Williams is, the Archbishop? Y'all saw him yesterday in Miami, William and Catherine. Rowan Williams is one of the top time theologians alive at the moment. And he thinks very much of Girardi in turn. He wrote a little book, I recommend it to you for your Easter reading, it's called Resurrection.

[16:38]

He's so Girardi that he would give us a play joke. If I ever stalled it, he'd say, yeah, don't mention it. And he writes this book that's called Girardi, you know, in a subsequent edition. You know, I'm sorry, but he writes a lot. But anyway, read it, because you see there are sections in there, a lot of them, actually, that were really written. The image of God is that very face we lost, even by the most heinous sins and crimes. And so, you want to talk about a challenge to Christian spirituality, when Robert beats the road and beats Ways of Hampton. you have to see the image of God made of him as startling and as intentionally repulsive as that may strike you. That's what we have to be taking, because I did a study on that and it's easier to look at, you know, when it's so blinged.

[17:44]

But if you read Merlin Williams' letters of marvels to the book, you'll get Girard in other works I have a friend who got her master's degree at the Harvard Divinity School writing a paper on historical justice. And it was really wonderful. That is the way to go. And so if we as a world doesn't think that, we aren't thinking in terms of punishment. That's right. We think curative, we think vengeance. Listen to the way people thought. I want justice.

[18:47]

What they mean is I want vengeance. Right. This movement of restorative justice is so thoroughly Christian. But it's not my business going out. It is a way to perhaps lead me to the intractable ways. It's very non-Christian. And it's always true. And our church, where we go casting stones too quickly, you know, outside. We live in a very thin-plate glass house, folks. As recent events in Mark and Bill testify. What changed the events that you were talking about?

[19:48]

Well, priests and everything like that, the halls of the victim, rhetoric that we now live with continually, and people who have been ... I don't know what the word is. It's a bit wild. Well, that's about it. There was no restorative justice. In the current world, it's not going to solve it. An opportunity we had as a church to show the world the things that we talk about like healing, forgiveness, reconciliation, restoration, whatever these wonderful words you want to use might be. We had an opportunity to show the world a different way.

[20:49]

Are you taking this time to go? I connected with what you said, and I had gone through before, that desire is a creative thing, it's not an image. That's our Indian, yeah, that's our one culture. Somebody called up, this is the fashion for the year, this is the route to hell, this is the thing to do, this is the place to go, this is the church to belong to, and we have to take our own clues from the Lord. and not from the herd mentalities. But it is... I can't imagine what would happen if the media stopped creating our desires. There would be no media. The media is chained by aggression. That's right. It would be a pain.

[21:57]

But I think the duty is to not be able to watch that in our lives. What do I want because somebody else did it? Because somebody else said I shouldn't want it. Now, I just finished teaching a course called Church and Culture. And this had come up a lot at consumerism, et cetera, et cetera. And again, these students, I mean, they certainly recognize that they are, you know, ploys of the advertising industry. And many of them say I'm the, you know, the latest iPad or whatever they come up with that they have, you know. So that's the awareness. I don't know if they'll be able to resist it, but there's certainly an awareness that they're living in a culture that is unhelpful, creative of, uh, initiative, as I put it, that's what's going on. They seem to recognize it. Not only that they can resist it, but they can recognize it. That's the respect I think. I think there was some other hand up just ahead of you, in the back.

[23:00]

Well, it's not an attempt to pick up on your clarification about historical justice being pivotal to the dynamics of historical justice in light of the correlations is the kind of community that functions as a facilitative agent, for example, to be able to use your quote from the analysis, I guess, bridge the gap between victim and perpetrator. Absolutely. Almost as if to say, there is no outsider. Exactly. Exactly. And that's a very different group relations by now, that trace solving the typical paradigm of collusion trick, which is very difficult to track when it's unconscious.

[24:05]

Collusion, self-denial, and escape. And that the leadership of the church can't get that, didn't get that. It wasn't even on the radar screen that I saw or see. It's mind-boggling to me. How do you read the parables of Jesus? It's mind-boggling to me that the church and its leaders could not see there were other ways to handle this big thing. The other outcome is then, as you said, creating a whole class of outsiders on both sides. The priests and the weavers. It's mind-boggling. It breaks my heart.

[25:08]

The Christianity, to answer your question, doesn't seem to work. But it can work. It doesn't seem to work. Because I don't know. I don't know, isn't it? Right? We can't see that we are adherents of another what? Cancer. Last weekend, the press finally hit some articles about church, like Christmas in Easton. talking about how numbers of evangelicals packing their auditoriums and congregations. I forget the person's name, but he has four services on a Sunday, packs them into a total of about 30,000 people. That's right, he's one of them, you know. And his message is, you know, to kind of give him a comforting, wonderful message.

[26:13]

The thing is, I'm sure there's tons of Roman Catholics attending those, because it's got the modern this and the modern that and family orientation. And of course our Roman Catholicism and our ritual is boring to a lot of people, you know, all that sort of stuff. So, when you talk about religion and culture, culture is definitely winning out. Even amongst evangelicals, you know, give them a nice talk, have them look back, And with 30,000 people, boy, what a great collection to gain a buck apiece, you know? Well, I think he rakes in a million bucks a month. Yeah, I'm sure that'll get him. I mean, instead it gives a commentary of their growing leaps and bounds, why, and even amongst the so-called institutional churches, there's fewer and fewer and we are afraid to look at the question. Meanwhile, the Vatican is just talking about revising the Roman Missal come the first Sunday of Advent, because our translation should be more literal, when we're dealing with this larger issue.

[27:18]

The Parish is dealing with the issue of what I just said, with what's going on around the world now. I mean, that's rather a sad commentary. You know, in the latest statistics, one in three adults who were raised in the Catholic Church no longer, not just don't practice, don't identify as Catholics. One in ten adults in the United States is a former Catholic of some description, whether they clung to another church or dropped out altogether. This is not, by the way, the non-practicing. So yes, and they are talking about, I'm not going to say on important things, but my goodness, we are. Maybe it's necessary, I don't know.

[28:28]

Maybe the whole church needs to be rebooted like a computer. Or get the program to run again without the virus. I don't know. But it's an amazing situation like this. I think Brother Gabriel, would you have your hand up next? Yeah, you know what, there was a question about the church and not responding to the opportunity at the time. But, you know, the dear bishop, they were so scared of the media and the lawyer, that's why you say, you know, Zero tolerance. The worst representatives of the culture, they are the volunteers. The virus that you talked about I think is a more profound thing for us to counter than the Catholic Church owns alone or any other member group.

[29:35]

Religion may be the oldest form, or among the oldest forms of that behavior, but it may be our structure of consciousness itself. The mimetic desire wasn't created by the ad-industry, it's amplified by the ad-industry. It's who we are and how we are given to ourselves through others. So the project that you indicated by beginning with your humility and saying, leaving behind their accustomed ways of human thinking is a very substantial project. It requires a discipline reflected in the Benedictine community of fear, right?

[30:14]

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