While in Los Angeles for the Religious Education Congress, I met a college instructor, Jack Kelly, PhD. (candidate) who teaches a course titled Christian Religious Education and the Child at St. Joseph’s College in Alberta, Canada. He went out of his way to tell me that he uses my book, The Catechist’s Toolbox for his course! Imagine how thrilled I was to find out! Check it out:

http://www.ualberta.ca/~stjoseph/academic/outlines/380_85_Kelly_0809.pdf

The above quote is from the blog of author Robert Hutchinson. I love his January 26, 2009, post about becoming a catechist. He really captures the feeling that many catechist have when thrust in front of a group of kids. Enjoy his account!

I have to say, it’s very humbling to become a teacher of any kind. When you have to stand up in front of a group of people and expound on a given subject, even one you think you know something about, it becomes clear very quickly how little you really know. As the old Jesuit joke has it, “I don’t know anything about that subject; I’ve never even taught it.”

Also, students have an annoying habit of asking questions that are so basic – so antecedent to the subject matter you are discussing – that you can be flabbergasted and utterly at a loss at how to answer them. Students can ask questions that are so basic they’re actually philosophical and therefore quite mind-numbing.

A lawyer standing up and giving a lecture on intellectual property law, for example, expecting and ready to answer knotty questions about the Internet and copyright, can be stopped in his or her tracks by a question like, “Why is it wrong to kill people?” or “What is a crime?” Questions like that are four or five degrees behind, or ahead of, depending upon how you look at it, what the lawyer really wants to talk about.

So it was that I became, kicking and screaming, a Catechist, a teacher for Confirmation. I agreed to do it because I have children going through the whole Confirmation program, my parish desperately needed teachers, I spent 10 years earning a master’s degree in theology, and I ran out of excuses. I also wanted to know what my own 14-year-old was learning from the program.

I’m a writer, not a teacher, but in the past whenever I imagined myself teaching a course of some kind, I always assumed it would be in front of interested, retired people or graduate students. I could see myself teaching Biblical Hebrew… or Kierkegaard… or Contemporary Philosophy of Religion. What I never imagined was standing in front of 15 or 16 nice enough but utterly bored 14-year-old Orange County kids who are being forced by their parents to attend confirmation classes and listen to a bookish, middle-aged guy (me) talk to them about such things as Baptism, Christian Ethics, the Gifts of the Holy Spirit, and so on, as mandated by the curriculum we were given.

Read more: http://roberthutchinson.com/apologetics/the-humbling-spiritual-path-of-teaching-teenagers/

Did you come on board as a catechist “kicking and screaming?”What’s you reaction to Robert’s account?

I received a plea for help from my colleague and friend Sr. Julie Vieira, IHM, (be sure to visit her blog, A Nun’s Life) who is seeking an effective response to an inquiry she received from a mom trying to help her 11 year-old son understand the relationship between the theory of evolution and the Catholic faith. The mom writes:

My son is 11 years old attending Catholic School and he has been asking questions about evolution. He has a very science oriented mind and watches the Discovery and Encyclopedia channels. He said he thinks humans came from monkeys and is even questioning if there is a god. This of course upsets our family, we try to explain as best we could. During one of my conversations with him I said if we came from monkeys why are there still monkey. He’s not sure? It is hard to teach a child when I don’t have all the answers. I called our [pastor] and he told me that it is ok to believe in evolution as long as you recognize that some where God intervened and gave us a soul. He could not recommend any books to read. At the school they also had no reading material or recommendations. I can look online and find a few books but before I purchase a book I would like to know what perspective it is written etc. A few years ago I saw two priests on a public access TV station giving a lecture to college students about this very topic. They had combined creationism with evolution. I have not been able to find anything from a catholic perspective on this topic to help my son with his spiritual dilemma. Can you offer any advice?

Here is my initial response to Sr. Julie. If you know of some good resources to recommend (especially for children), please send them along in your comments!

Wow, Julie, that’s a tough one. We can get into lots of technical discussions, none of which will be helpful to a parent trying to talk to an eleven-year old. Here are some basic points from which to continue the discussion:

·         The Church recognizes the theory of evolution as a valid theory, worthy of exploration.

·         The Church however does not endorse evolution because it is not a complete, scientifically proven theory. JPII basically said, however, that it is clearly more than a hypothesis and that scientific findings make a significant argument in favor of the theory of evolution.

·         The Church continues to stress that there is no conflict between evolution and the doctrine of faith because the former seeks to explain precisely how things came to be while the latter seeks to come to grips with the meaning of all things. Here’s a good quote:

We cannot say: creation or evolution, inasmuch as these two things respond to two different realities. The story of the dust of the earth and the breath of God, which we just heard, does not in fact explain how human persons come to be but rather what they are. It explains their inmost origin and casts light on the project that they are. And, vice versa, the theory of evolution seeks to understand and describe biological developments. But in so doing it cannot explain where the ‘project’ of human persons comes from, nor their inner origin, nor their particular nature. To that extent we are faced here with two complementary — rather than mutually exclusive — realities.

– Cardinal Ratzinger, In the Beginning: A Catholic Understanding of the Story of Creation and the Fall [Eerdmans, 1986, 1995], see especially pages 41-58)

·         The Church does not endorse intelligent design because ID purports to be a science when it is not. Rather, the Church continues to embrace theistic evolution which is a reconciliation between science and religion (recognizing their complementary relationship). In other words, the Church teaches that the whole discussion cannot be contained to science but inevitably leads to faith.

·         I’ve not read the Ratzinger book mentioned above but it looks like a good resource for the Mom to read for her own enrichment. That still leaves the issue of how to engage the child. Take a look at this link: http://www.love2learn.net/science/creation.htm. The site reviews a book, Creator and Creation (second edition) that seems to address the issue thoughtfully.

·         Take a look at this link from John Allen in which he synthesizes Benedict XVI’s views on the issue: http://nationalcatholicreporter.org/word/word090106.htm

·         I think that the bottom line is that the child’s interest in the science of evolution should not be hindered but encouraged along with an encouragement to explore the mystery of our being – the WHY of our being – which can only be explored in the realm of faith. The child should be led to understand that the theory of evolution is not necessarily atheistic, but expands our understanding of the complexity, intricacy, and intimacy of God’s relationship with all of creation…like a loving parent’s relationship with a developing child.

I hope something in here is useful!  Thanks for asking. -joe

By now I’m sure you know that, while in Iraq, over the weekend, President Bush was the target of an Iraqi reporter who threw his shoe at him. As is my custom on this blog, I’ll avoid political comments but draw an interesting catechetical lesson from the event.

At first glance, throwing his shoes may seem like a rather silly and feeble gesture, like a woman hitting someone with her purse. Howver, a little knowledge of Scripture points out why this gesture is more accurately an expression of great insult.

I’m sure we’re all familiar with the following words uttered by John the Baptist: “I am baptizing you with water, but one mightier than I is coming. I am not worthy to loosen the thongs of his sandals.” (Luke 3:15-16).

As I point out in my book, God’s Library: A Catholic Introduction to the World’s Greatest Book, (in a chapter teaching about the importance of reading footnotes in the Bible), a man’s sandal was considered his lowliest possession in middle-eastern culture. John the Baptist was making quite a profound statement when he referred to Jesus’ sandal.

In the same way, we hear the prophet Amos speak the following words: “Thus says the LORD, for three crimes and for four I will not revoke my word; because they sell the just man for silver, and the poor man for a pair of sandals.” (Amos 8:6)

And finally, in the Book of Deuteronomy, we find the following strange passage describing the penalty for a man who refuses to marry his sister-in-law after his brother has died without leaving a son: “If he persists in saying, ‘I am not willing to marry her,’ his sister-in-law, in the presence of the elders, shall go up to him and strip his sandal from his foot and spit in his face, saying publicly, ‘This is how one shoud be treated who will not build up his brother’s family!’ And his lineage shall be spoken of in Israel as ‘the family of the man stripped of his sandal.” (Deuteronomy 25:5-10). Strange to us Westerners that he’ll be remembered, not as the man who had his face spit into but as the man who had his sandal stripped, clearly the more powerful gesture to the original biblical audience.

Whether a sandal or a shoe, that which covers the foot is considered dirty in Mid-eastern culture. To throw your lowliest, dirtiest possession at someone is an expression of profound insult.

All this to say that the Iraqi reporter was not just throwing the only thing he could get his hands on at the moment. He was executing a calculated insult – a message that was understood loud and clear in the Mid-east but lost on many of us in the West.