Holy Week is busy. Here's a short episode!

Fundamentally, there seem to be two reasons to climb a tree. Listen in to find out more! 

If the show notes are much longer, they'll be longer than the episode!

Please do feel free to share and rate and review our podcast. This one might be especially fun to share!

Full disclosure-- Joseph recently joined Toastmasters, a speech-giving club, and this is a speech he'll be giving soon after publishing this episode. It's the speech where he's supposed to use a lot of body language, so try to imagine him climbing trees throughout the episode...

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Jesus gives five major sermons in Matthew's Gospel-- the sermon on the mount, the sending of the twelve, the parables, this sermon in Matthew 18, and a final one with a lot of woe and destruction. Of the five, I think we know which one gets the most talked about, and it rhymes with the merman on the fount. But this sermon, Matthew 18, is worth a look at too. In it, Jesus lays out what we should expect if we live in the Church.

It's not immediately obvious that Jesus should paint the picture that He does. In fact, it's pretty counter-intuitive. Become like children. Scandal and temptation are going to come. People will sin against us. Repeatedly. We need to face those who wound us. They still might not concede an inch. We probably will have the right to insist on our own way, and on receiving our due, and yet somehow, there may be a better way. God doesn't want any of the lost to be lost, even the ones who have hurt us. 

Not intuitive stuff. 

Enjoy!

As always, 

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This is a controversial topic in Catholic circles, and we try to treat the topic fairly and as fully as we can. Because it touches on questions of life and love and marriage and children and decisions in the past as well as decisions in the present and future, we ask that you listen with an open mind and heart. 

Catholic couples sometimes approach natural family planning (NFP) with an odd mindset, almost like they've got a solution and now are looking for a problem to justify using it. Another unfortunate mindset in approaching NFP is to see it as a solution to a problem that they're not willing to admit to having, for fear that people might judge them. There are issues to both sides, and we hope we've been able to set out a third mindset, in which marriage is fundamentally for the procreation and education of children as well as the sanctification of the couple. Natural family planning, or the deliberate use of infertile periods in a woman's cycle for the marital act and deliberate exclusion of the fertile periods in order to avoid pregnancy, figures into that vision as a legitimate means to allow for the addressing of the serious reasons that prompted the need to avoid another pregnancy. Something is legitimately wrong, and needs to be addressed, for NFP to make sense in this context, otherwise the wedding vows don't make much sense. 

Let us know your thoughts by emailing us at [email protected]!

Hopefully you've been able to listen to the "Charting Cycles of Fertility" and "Humanae Vitae" episodes, because this builds on them! We think you can listen to this episode on its own, but if we're wrong, you'll want to go back to the last two episodes!

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
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• and please rate, review, and share!
• If you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign up for some time to chat with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph

When Pope Paul VI wrote Humanae Vitae, he flabbergasted the world, especially parts of the Catholic world. Many expected him to signal a change to almost-two-thousand years of Catholic teaching regarding human sexuality, and when he didn't bend, he faced widespread rejection and ridicule. 

Despite the reception, the encyclical itself is a beautiful presentation of the call of married couples to remain true to their vows and true to their natures. It's a sticky subject when we are culturally averse to permanent commitments and to conceding that we have inherent natures, and so for those for whom those are leaps too far, his encyclical may be of little interest. For those who think that natural law applies even now, and that wedding vows are not just empty words, this encyclical is eye-opening and beautiful!

(As an aside, Crystal asks Joseph for an analogy around the four-minute mark. He does provides it, but not until around the 20-minute mark, with a lot of intervening commentary in between.)

We hope you enjoy our discussion of it; it's just Crystal's favorite encyclical. It's also a relatively short work, so check it out if you have the time! 

http://www.vatican.va/content/paul-vi/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-vi_enc_25071968_humanae-vitae.html

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
• catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/
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• and please rate, review, and share!
• If you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign up for some time to chat with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph

There's a controversial topic in some Catholic circles-- NFP-- Natural Family Planning. Some Catholics think it's just like contraception, so wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Some Catholics think it's a lot harder than the contraceptives they're using, so wouldn't touch it with a 10-foot pole. Or so we've noticed...

This isn't an episode on that. Instead, it's a step or two before that topic-- why women benefit from knowing how their bodies work, and a bit about why men are better off knowing some of that, too.

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
• catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/
• see what we have upcoming in terms of events here: https://ouroutpost.org/events/
• send us an email at [email protected]
• and please rate, review, and share!
• If you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign up for some time to chat with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph

We felt like we had some missing pieces in our last episode, and so we called in a ringer-- Fr. Steven Oetjen. 

We talk about his experience in learning the liturgy of the hours, as well as a couple of meta-lessons in learning. 

We also talk a bit about controversial parts of the Psalms that are currently not part of the Psalter. 

And ultimately, we talk about not just the benefits, but the deepest reason to pray the liturgy of the hours.

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
• catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/
• see what we have upcoming in terms of events here: https://ouroutpost.org/events/
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• and please rate, review, and share!
• If you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign up for some time to chat with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph

If you've ever looked at other religions and thought, "Man, I wish we had set times where we would stop whatever we were doing and joined in a communal prayer," then have we got a Christian prayer for you!

If you've ever wanted a way to pray through (most of) the Psalms over the course of four weeks, have we got a prayer for you!

If you've ever wanted to pray with a spouse or a roommate or housemate, but couldn't agree on a private devotional, then have we got a public devotional for you!

Here’s a link to the iBreviary app!  

https://apps.apple.com/us/app/ibreviary-ts-plus/id422601705

We're not experts on the liturgy of the hours. But what we have, we'll share. And for our next episode, we'll bring on someone even more conversant with the liturgy of the hours!

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
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• and please rate, review, and share!
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Did you ever wonder why the Bible comes with a song-book in the middle? 

It didn't have to. In fact, people were Israelites and worshipped God without an official songbook for some time before David came along. Looking at the Psalms as gratuitous can be helpful for us to foster gratitude and avoid taking them for granted.

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
• catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/
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• and please rate, review, and share!
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Interrupting the flow of the Joseph narrative at the end of Genesis is this one-chapter interlude, telling us how it came to be that Judah has descendants. Onanism and prostitution are mentioned, so not exactly an episode that would make sense for younger ears. Levirate marriage is also discussed, but that probably isn't as big of a deal for younger listeners...

And yes, this is another story in salvation history where the characters go through something that looks pretty bad, and potentially is pretty bad, but it gets redeemed in the end with the advent of Christ. If you've been noticing a theme for every time we've dipped our toes into the Torah, you would be right!

As always, 

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Lectio Divina, or the prayerful reading of scripture, is often mentioned in Catholic circles. We've found, though, that many times people will talk about lectio divina without really knowing what it is or how to do it. In fact, that may well be the story of one of us podcasters...but we don't go into that. Instead, we talk about the steps, or movements, or rungs, or stages of lectio divina. If we think that the Bible contains the word of God, we're sorta forced to admit that we do hear God speak, everytime we read scripture. The question isn't whether God is speaking, then; the question is whether we are responding. Lectio divina is one way to frame how to respond to God's speech.

Incidentally, part of it elucidates the stages we should go through when we read 'most anything. Part of it is also a handy diagram of how we ought to respond to anyone who is speaking to us, so by teaching us how to pray, it also may teach us how to relate to 'most any person. Combine the two, and it's lectio divina.

As always, 

• check out our work, and join our email list, at https://ouroutpost.org/
• join our free resource library platform here
• catch our other podcast, Love Your Marriage, by clicking here: https://ouroutpost.org/podcasts/
• see what we have upcoming in terms of events here: https://ouroutpost.org/events/
• send us an email at [email protected]
• and please rate, review, and share!
• If you're a Catholic husband, feel free to sign up for some time to chat with Joseph! https://bookme.name/ouroutpost/45-minutes-with-joseph