Questions from the Unsettled Mind

Mary’s first response to an archangel is not terror. It is thought — she is troubled by the greeting itself, before Gabriel has said anything of substance. That means she already knew what was coming.

In this episode:

• What people in Scripture actually do when an angel appears, and the two things angels always have to say first

• Why Mary is not shaken by the angel but by “Hail”, a greeting fit for royalty

• Genesis 3 and the enmity between the woman and the serpent, her offspring striking at the head and the serpent at the heel

• Why the demons rage specifically at what women are and do, and what every birth does to their project

• Isaiah 7 and Isaiah 9: a virgin conceiving, Immanuel, and a son on David’s throne

• Putting it together from where Mary stands — Jewish, of the tribe of Judah, a virgin, and being hailed

• Isaiah 53, and why the woman who had treasured that text is the one who stays at the cross

Mentioned: Genesis 3:15 · Isaiah 7 · Isaiah 9 · Isaiah 53 · Luke 1 · the Annunciation

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Co-Redemptrix, Queen of Heaven, Mother of God: no person outside the papacy rankles Protestants more. What do Catholics actually mean by those titles, and what does the text itself say?

In this episode:

• Why Catholics do not worship Mary, and where the highest titles given to any human person come from

• What participating in redemption does and does not mean, since only Jesus is the lamb of God

• Theotokos at the Council of Ephesus, and why the title says nothing about God having an origin

• Gabriel’s royal greeting at the Annunciation, and why it is entirely inappropriate for a peasant girl

• Elizabeth’s Spirit-induced prophecy, the Magnificat, and “all ages will call me blessed”

• At the cross, Jesus giving his mother to John, and why the Church reads that as motherhood of the whole Church

• Why Jesus calls his own mother “Woman” at the wedding at Cana

Mentioned: the Council of Ephesus · theotokos · the Magnificat · the wedding at Cana

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

The Christmas story does not begin with the Annunciation. It begins with an infertile couple, Elizabeth and Zechariah — which is where an Advent question about childlessness belongs.

In this episode:

• The CDC estimate: nearly 20% of American couples, slightly above the worldwide rate of about 18%

• Why the emotional, familial and marital losses are real, and why there is nothing wrong with feeling them intensely

• How an injury of this size can crack a marriage, and why couples should not try to carry it alone

• Procreation read more widely: bringing forth something good and beautiful from within yourselves

• A caution about the sexual glue — not letting the project of making a baby displace making love

• Adoption, and how gruelling the American road to it usually is

• Hope as the engine of love, and the signs that God has not forgotten childless couples

Mentioned: Elizabeth and Zechariah · the theological virtue of hope

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Congress keeps being briefed by whistleblowers about recovered craft, and researchers think Disclosure is close. If it comes, what would the Church actually have to say about intelligent creatures who are not human?

In this episode:

• Why abundant life in a universe this size should not surprise us, nor that some of it is personal

• Whether such species would be theists, and whether God may already have intervened in their worlds

• What the bishops and the Pope would have to weigh about baptising them if he had not

• The moral baseline — treat them as persons, do not open fire on an unfamiliar form — and what changes if some prove hostile

• The worry that Disclosure would shatter the world order, and the conceit about being at the centre of the universe

• Whether the Incarnation could have an analogue proper to another nature, or happened once and only here

• Romans 8:19-21 read more widely: creation awaiting the revelation of the children of God

Mentioned: C. S. Lewis · Romans 8:19-21

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

People expect a call — a voice, a sign, something unmistakable. The religious orders that actually select candidates for the priesthood use nothing of the kind.

In this episode:

• Why the non-marital vocation is rare, and why people assume God must therefore single someone out for it

• How the great holy orders screen candidates, using the same criteria St Paul set out

• The triple test of constitution, competence and qualification, with desire as the precondition

• Why your constitution is not random genetics, and what follows if God designed it

• The elaborate schemes people build for turning their own feelings and desires into the voice of God

• Moses and the burning bush: why God authenticates a mission with public signs when he wants it known

• The man born blind, and why nobody could have read God’s purpose in it beforehand

Mentioned: St Paul · Moses and the burning bush · the man born blind

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. Also, for a more in-depth discussion of this question, see Faith, also available at Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

You pray for tuition money and a cheque arrives. Or a job arrives instead. One looks miraculous and one looks ordinary — but how would you actually tell, and does the difference matter?

In this episode:

• Creation itself as the first gift, and why thanks is owed whether or not a second miracle was worked

• The $8,000 tuition case in two versions: the unexpected cheque from someone who did not know, and the resident advisor post

• Stage four cancer, where a natural solution is unlikely enough that intervention looks like the only explanation

• What it does not mean about God’s love when the healing does not come

• The objection that non-intervention treats us as things rather than as children and spouse

• The opposite complaint: that intervening at all raises hopes that are sometimes disappointed

• Daniel’s three friends at the furnace, confident God can rescue them and not presuming that he will

Mentioned: the three friends of Daniel and the fiery furnace

Many of these questions are collected in Questions from the Unsettled Mind and More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, both available on Amazon. Also, for a more in-depth discussion of this particular question, see Faith, also available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

It is easy to see why an infinite being would be all-knowing and all-powerful. Why good? Looking around at the trouble in this life, a cosmic jinni is not an obviously silly hypothesis.

In this episode:

• St Thomas’s four claims: God is good, is the highest good, is the good of every good, and is his own good

• How omnipotence and omniscience entail each other, and the harder step across to omnibenevolence

• Two fathers, one who tends toward his son’s good and one who wrecks it, and what that shows about goodness and being

• The privation theory: evil as absence, like darkness or cold, a leech on a nature rather than a thing of its own

• Star Wars and the dark side: why Manichaeism collapses, and why Luke does not fall when he finally gets angry for his sister

• The prostitute as a test case, every good on offer robbed of its fullness

• Why Socrates, Plato and Aristotle thought it obvious that happiness is not relative to the individual

Mentioned: St Thomas Aquinas · Aristotle · the privation theory of evil · Manichaeism · Star Wars

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

Jesus called himself the Son of God, which leaves three options: he was mad, he was lying, or he was telling the truth. And if the third, how does an infinite mind fit inside a human one?

In this episode:

• St John’s prologue: the Word who is with God, is God, makes all things, and then becomes flesh

• Why “insane” fails as an explanation, and why “lying schemer” fails against the goodness of what he taught

• Philippians 2:6-8 and self-emptying: the Son cutting off his own access to divine wisdom except where the Father permitted it

• Aristotle’s rational animal, and what a soul is — an immaterial personal component fitted to inform matter

• Why there were not two people inside Jesus, and why the Creed says born of a woman rather than through a woman

• Gnosticism’s claim that spirit is good and matter evil, and why it treats human nature as a prison

• The error of the Little Mermaid, and the religious systems whose real goal is to stop being human

Mentioned: John 1 · Philippians 2:6-8 · Aristotle · the Nicene Creed · Gnosticism

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

People say “I lied” about everything from betraying a spouse to hiding a Christmas present. The word covers cases that could not be more morally different, so which deliberate falsehoods are actually wrong?

In this episode:

• Why “murder” and “stealing” already carry moral condemnation, while killing and taking property sometimes do not

• Three falsehoods that look like lies and are not: the spouse buying a surprise gift, the actor playing Julius Caesar, the undercover DEA officer

• The same marriage, two deceptions: the hidden present set beside the concealed $650 fishing trip

• Consent as the hinge, and how to tell when someone has given up his right to the truth

• Government secrecy justified by the citizen’s own consent, and why oversight and accountability are the condition of it

• The couple who believe they may cover for one another when an outside party comes asking

• John Locke’s doctrine of rights forfeiture, carried from self-defense across to undercover investigation

Mentioned: John Locke · the doctrine of rights forfeiture · Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.

What colour is God? Does he smell of citrus or of hickory smoke? The questions are absurd, and that is exactly the difficulty: nearly all our knowledge arrives through the senses, and God has no surface to inspect.

In this episode:

• Reasoning from caused things to something uncaused, and from necessary existence to omnipotence, omniscience and goodness

• Why thanksgiving is our first mode of relating to God, and the clue that the world is full of beauty only human beings notice

• The family as the first estate: Adam naming the animals, noticing the pairs, and being lonely even with God standing right there

• Why family is a pedagogue, and how spousal and parental love build the virtues that fit us for the love of God

• The state as the second estate, from meeting fellow countrymen abroad to disaster relief that never stops to check party or creed

• Why monarchy is the nature of the ultimate political order, despite American nervousness about kings

• The Church as the third estate and the first transnational one, and the seven sacraments as a spiritual life cycle parallel to the natural one

Mentioned: Genesis 1-2 · Romans 8 · the seven sacraments

This question also appears in More Questions from the Unsettled Mind, available on Amazon. More at jeffreytiel.com.