Almost Good Catholics

As we start the second year of Almost Good Catholics, I asked my old friend David Basile, the theology teacher (and our very first guest last year) to come back and explain the mystery of our redemption in the sacrifice of Christ crucified. What is more central to our Christian faith, and yet – at least for me – what is more difficult to understand?

David Basile is Chair of Theology at Archbishop Rummel High School in Metarie, Louisiana. He explains how Paul’s verdict—“the wages of sin are death” (Roman 6:23)—is not the bad news it sounds like and how the power of sacrifice and redemption—“whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it” (Matthew 16:15)—is good news indeed.

The episode ends with two Christmas carols from Josh and Margot of the Great Space Coaster Band: What Child is This? and Silent Night.

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Peter Hall is my old friend, a once-atheist who now calls himself an agnostic; we’ve known each other for fifteen years since we both taught English literature at an international school in Egypt. He and I talk through our hopes and doubts about God and man. It’s an episode that departs from the Almost Good Catholics model and it begins with me explaining how and why the podcast was moving to the New Books Network: Academic Partners in December of 2022.

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Archaeologist Ilka Knüppel discusses her master's thesis—The Search for Jesus's Final Steps: How Archaeological and Literary Evidence Reroutes the Via Dolorosa—and how she came to write it. To use both ‘archaeological and literary evidence’ requires digging in both the earth and in books, and to ‘reroute’ the Via Dolorosa reveals that many of the traditional fixtures are pious inventions of later centuries.

Ilka talks a bit about her life, how she became an archaeologist and what kind of projects she has been undertaking since wrote her master’s thesis. 

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Professor Cathleen Chopra-McGowan examines some the incongruities of our Bible in the context of the Ancient Near East, showing how the stories and traditions of Israel resembled and borrowed from those of Babylon and Assyria. She compares the Genesis narrative to two others, the epics of Gilgamesh and Atra-Hasis, especially discussing the universal flood narrative and rationale for sacrifice to show the evolution of our ancestors’ religious practice and thinking about God.

Professor Chopra-McGowan teaches courses in the Religious Studies Department at Santa Clara University, including Near Eastern languages, literatures, history, and archaeology, as well as uses of the Bible in contemporary society.

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Historian John Jeffries Martin traces narratives of the Apocalypse over the last 500 years in the Christian, Jewish, and Muslim traditions in his new book, A Beautiful Ending. This discussion about the culture of Apocalypse follows (and is the second part of) an interview we began on the New Books in History Podcast which was a historical discussion.

Professor Martin is an Early Modern Historian at Duke University. His earlier books include Venice’s Hidden Enemies: Italian Heretics in a Renaissance City (1993), and Myths of Renaissance Individualism (2004). He is also editor of several books, including The Renaissance World (2007), which I remember reading as a graduate student.

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Dominican Friar John Vianney Russel has made a habit of talking with homeless people and shares what he has learned. He doesn’t have all the answers and, in fact, we agree we are not even clear on the problem; but we start to pull on some of the threads—spiritual, psychological, material, political—of this very tangled knot. Brother John Vianney also talks about his own vocation and how we might listen for the voice of the Holy Spirit.

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Since 2016, and with the blessing of Pope Francis, Father Jim Martin has been talking with LGBT Catholics about their relationship with their church. That’s the subject of his book, Building a Bridge, and also a documentary film by the same title; we talk about what the bridge is and where it might take us. He also reflects on his vocation as a Jesuit priest and editor-at-large at America Magazine: the Jesuit Review and about his travels in the Holy Land.

In this episode we refer back to earlier conversations, including episode 16 with Colleen Dulle of America Media and episode 17 with Fr. Greg Boyle, SJ of Homeboy Industries, both from May of 2022.

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David Geisser was a Swiss Guard protecting Pope Francis and the Apostolic Palace between 2013 and 2015. He was following the footsteps of his father who had been in the service a generation earlier under Pope John Paul II, including on the dark day (May 13, 1981) when a would-be assassin shot the Holy Father. I ask him about his experiences in one of the oldest (est. 1506) and smallest (135 men) military organizations in history.

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One morning in December of 2012, Laura Phelps’s little children went to school and lived through an attack by a madman who shot 20 of their classmates. Laura’s community was devastated and she became a ‘Sandy Hook Mom’ helping people find their way through trauma of this senseless violence. She describes her walk with Mary, who watched the execution of her innocent and perfect son, in her book, Sweet Cross: A Marian Guide to Suffering.

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Derya Little has been a Muslim, an atheist, and a Protestant; today she is a Catholic writer and apologist. She tells the story of her conversion, talks about faith, family, Islam, history, the role of women in our Church. Since she and I are both fans of Star Trek and some other science fiction narratives, we riff about these as well (through a lens tinted by Dostoyevsky’s ‘Grand Inquisitor’).

Derya Little is the author of From Islam to Christ (2017), At His Feet: Drawing Closer to Christ with the Women of the New Testament (2021)​, and A Beginner’s Guide to the Traditional Latin Mass (2019), and two books for young adults, Two Fallen Worlds, Lost, and Two Fallen Worlds, Found.

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