Open Mic： Architorture, Aquinas and Biology, Latin Mass and Guitars (iwczjHI-FsE)

https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iwczjHI-FsE

Hydraulic Good evening. And for some of you, happy second Sunday after Easter. And for others, happy feast of the epiphany. Andrew, if I am correct, and occasionally I am, you actually are in one of the ecclesiastical provinces in the United States that celebrates the feast of the epiphany on the 6th of January. Is that correct? Part of the what? There’s some ecclesiastical provinces. So in the ordinary form, there’s a few places in the United States that would still celebrate epiphany on January 6th. Oh, well, I don’t know if it’s like a diocese thing or what, but I mean, we just had Latin Mass on the 6th, so that’s probably why. Oh, okay. So you don’t know the difference. You were only at the Latin Mass. Well, actually, this Sunday, we also had epiphany. So okay. Okay. We got the best of both worlds, I guess. But you celebrate Ascension Thursday on Thursday, right? When’s that? 40 days after Easter. Yeah. Yes. Holy Thursday? No, Ascension Thursday. Oh, I don’t know if I’ve been to Ascension Thursday. Oh, well, you’ll get there. All right. Now I know. We’ll figure this out sometime after Easter. Yeah. Yeah. It’s a good thing I know all about all that to answer your questions. Well, I thought, yeah, I don’t know. I thought the Ecclesiastical provinces in New Jersey, that’s like just a grouping of diocese, different diocese together. Yeah, it used to be one diocese. Now it’s several. Yeah. I had thought that they did some of the more traditional things out there, but what do I know? Right. I guess it depends which church you go to. There’s a wide range. Okay. Okay. Well, that’s not supposed to be varying from parish to parish. Do you mean there’s certain customs according to each diocese that they do different things? So in the United States, I think every diocese in the United States would transfer the feast of Corpus Christi from a Thursday to a Sunday. Okay. That’s every diocese in the United States. In the traditional calendar, it would always be what, the second Thursday after Pentecost or something, something like that. Yeah. Is that required? So that’s the way it was in the old country, but in the United States, they got permission to move it. And then in most of the United States, Ascension Thursday gets transferred to the next Sunday. And I thought the place that you’re in did that, didn’t do that, didn’t do that. Because it’s Nebraska and New Jersey that don’t. Yeah, I guess I’ll find out. Yeah, yeah, you’ll find out. You’ll find out. Anyway, these are the sorts of things by old country. Do you mean Italy? I mean all of Europe. All of Europe. Old continent. Yeah. Hello, Chad. Is he going to robot out on us? Hey there. Hey, how’s life? Probably robot for a little bit. Hey, good. Probably robot a little bit through here, so I’m just listening at the moment. I can’t talk for that. Okay. All right, good to see you. Life’s good. Life’s good. I got a very bad night’s sleep last night because I lost my supper. I don’t know what it was. No other symptoms. Yeah, anyway. Hidden in your fridge somewhere? I lost supper the way it came. Oh, I see. The front door. The front door. Yeah, the front door. So that meant for a very poor night’s sleep. But I was still able to save mass this morning. I just took it easy on the coffee. Anyway, I have no idea why it happens. I must have eaten something bad, but we won’t dwell on that. Okay. I’m looking forward to supper, man. My wife’s making soup. All right. Now, did you get a bunch of snow this week, Chad? Pork. No. No. There’s a… I know my buddies down in Sioux Falls. They all got a ton of snow. And we didn’t. It was nice to have that stuff go south of us. Yeah. Luke Thompson got a bunch of it. I thought, well, we’re surely going to get it. But we didn’t. It rained. It did rain. So there was that. All righty. All righty. All righty. Yeah. Good to see you guys. All righty. You take care, Chad. Did you want to stay in the chat or did you want to just listen from the sidelines? Is it roboting pretty bad? No. You’re doing all right. You just said you couldn’t talk that much. Oh, no. I guess I can roll out. I just want to drop in and say hi and see how you’re doing. Yeah. I know a lot of my parishioners are going to be very sad today because the North Dakota state bison lost the national championship pretty hard to South Dakota today. So anyway, that’s why you don’t put your trust in sports teams because they can disappoint you. Yeah. Probably what the Packers are going to do. They’re going to disappoint you again. Yeah. I’m not really that big of a fan, so it doesn’t really bother me. But boy, they are a bunch of Packer-loving people around here. There are. There are. Yeah. Wearing their jerseys to church and everything. Yeah. It was even mentioned by the pastor today. Okay. A word or two won’t hurt anything if it becomes more than that. You’re taking there. You’re focused on the wrong thing. So, Jacob, this was the middle of the night. And by the time I woke up, I was feeling good enough to be able to celebrate Mass without having to worry about that. So thankfully, I didn’t have to worry about that. I was healthy enough by the time Mass came around. Awesome. I’m going to meet Laura and her family this weekend. Oh, really? Yeah. We’re going to go over. My wife and I are going to go and have dinner over there, which is cool. That’s exciting. Next weekend? Wait, maybe it is next weekend. I mean, if it was this weekend, wouldn’t it be like tonight? Well, isn’t Sunday the beginning of the week, technically? Yeah, I guess. Well, then is Saturday the weekend? I think Friday we’re going over. I think the 20th. Maybe my dates are off. 20th is a Friday. But that would be two weeks from now. Ah, yeah. It’s soon though. It’s coming up in the future. That’ll be a lot of fun. I happen to meet a couple of BOM people up here in Fargo a week after Christmas. Travis is one of them. He posts a lot. And then another guy who just like was barely in, but he’s super into Lord of Spirits podcast and had nobody to talk about it with. Ah, okay. So yeah, yeah, it’s fun when you could do these things in real life. For sure. Like, go ahead, Chad. Oh, I was just saying, I started writing handwritten letters, snail mail. I’m willing to do it with whoever would like because I think it’d be a good practice. I got some letters. Yeah, that’s cool. It’s fantastic. All righty. I got to get in on this action, Chad. I’m going to DM you my address right now. Perfect. Thank you. No, I’m, excuse me. I really like the idea of being able to practice anything I can that’s outside of the digital realm with people that I hope to have relationships with. So that’s one way we can do it without having to drive 2000 miles. That’s true. Yeah. There you go. Nice. All right, man. I don’t know what we’ll talk about, but I hope that I just love the, there’s something about it that is sacramental. You can say sacramental if you want to. You’re putting it into a semi-permanent medium. Yeah, it’s different. The experience that I have, the phenomenological experience that I have with it is different than just typing or just talking to a camera or anything like that. It’s a totally different type of experience. Yeah. Yeah, I love that. Sounding like a John Brevaki nerd here. You’re using a different kind of procedural knowledge to write with a pen than you are to type. That’s true. That’s true. And you’re more physically engaged with the act of writing than just tiki-taki on your fingers there. Yeah, I guess so. It slows it down. Anyways, it feels more thoughtful all around. My spelling and all that is really terrible, so I don’t have auto-correct to save me. All of that stuff, it’s something about that I really love. I’ve been trying to encourage anyone I can to do it because it could be one of those things that could get lost forever. I don’t think that it’s entirely possible, but I don’t think it’s not entirely possible either. Yeah. I don’t know if it would be lost, but I know in the past, like maybe 100 or 200 years ago, it was harder to send letters, so maybe it could just get harder, but I don’t know if it would stop. Sure. I send out Christmas cards every year. Andrew was a happy recipient of one. Yeah, that’s true. I missed it because I didn’t get the address into you soon enough. I still have the Christmas cards sitting around, so you might get a Christmas card. In the old calendar, Christmas lasted until February 2nd, so we’ve got time. I remember we were talking about what people were putting on their Christmas cards to send to people, and then when I got yours, I was like, oh yes, I remember seeing this. Good picture. People who stopped learning to write cursive. Well, that was not the case at St. Anne’s School in Sumter, South Carolina. They made me learn how to write cursive, and it’s barely legible. I actually, they did teach me in my elementary school, and I didn’t go to like a Catholic school or anything. I went to a public school, but I forgot like any of the letters that aren’t in my signature, so the other day I started practicing them again, and it’s not that hard to pick up, I don’t think. As long as you go slow. You know, I found- My handwriting is the equivalent of Oh no. He muted himself. Well, I’ll go on with what I was going to say. Now, what was that? Oh, about halfway through college seminary, my first four years, I acquired a laptop, and I tried taking notes on that, but I found that when I typed up notes during class, I didn’t actually remember what I was typing, and I was also much more likely to write in typing, and I was also much more likely to browse the internet, so that didn’t last very long, but I’d fill up these notebooks with notes, and then it was just kind of like a flashback. I brought a notebook up to the Thunder Bay Conference, and I probably filled three or four pages of notes with John Brevecky’s initial address, because I knew he was going to give it like a college lecture style, and I’d be able to take really useful notes on that. Nice. But the other things, like the other three, I didn’t bother to take notes, and then when they were just talking, it’s like- Yeah. But it’s just, yeah, you remember it better when you write it down properly. Yeah, I think so. Yeah. I think it might be easier, too, to just record it, but then I guess writing it down, you actually get little, like, compress all that stuff into something useful that you can just look at quickly, I guess. I was practicing relevance realization by the very act of choosing which information I put down on the paper. Oh, yeah. A lot of the ghost of John Brevecky is haunting this conversation here. Yeah, it sounds like it. Wait, I mean, he’s not dead, though, right? No, no, he’s not, thankfully. Not that I know of, but- Okay. He, hmm, he still, you know, what, colonized our minds to the point where I can casually- Look at this. We lost Chad. It’s okay. Me too, me too. I actually, I was like, when I was first ordained a priest, I was thinking about writing people letters more frequently, and so I actually bought some nice stationery, and I never actually wrote any letters with it, so it’s sitting there, ready to go. All right. Nice. Well, now you have a perfect opportunity. Yes, yes. Get to write my buddy Chad. Well, how’s- And- Are you back in school now? No, not for like another two weeks. Oh, my. I think. Well, it’s 10 days. Do they have one of those like January- I know colleges in Minnesota have a J-term where they you’ve got like a optional three-week semester where you could take, you know, six credits. Is that something they do where you’re at too? Oh, yeah. They have those kinds of classes. I’m not sure what they were, but I’m pretty sure none of them would be able to fill anything that I need for graduation, so. So you’re just taking it off. Yeah. Are you just bumming around at your parents’ house or you got a job too? Well, kind of. I mean, I’m pretty much kind of employed as a church musician now. Okay. Hey, that’s- I mean, not really, but- But you do get to get around to a lot of masses and I’m sure the priest and the choir director are very happy to have you. Oh, yeah. And I mean too that I’m like getting paid for sometimes too, so that’s nice. So yeah, I’ve done so many masses now that they’re like, hey, why don’t we start paying you some stuff? Yeah. Hey, that’s good. That’s good. Yeah. It’s good because it takes up a good deal of my schedule and our architecture professor was like, you should like quit your job if you’re going to take this course and like quit any sports you’re playing and break up with your girlfriend because you need to focus completely on this. So if I’m going to spend all that time there, it’s nice to have that too. Yeah. Wow. And it’s just an undergraduate degree you’re going for right now, right? Yeah. Apparently it gets harder in graduate school. My professor’s like, if you think this is a lot of work now, it gets- it ramps up. It gets more. As time goes on. How much math do you have to do as an architect? I don’t know. I think I have all of the undergraduate math requirements so far, but I do think you need to know calculus later on. The interesting thing is early on, they focus more on like theory and design and form. So they’re focusing more on how you can manipulate spaces with different forms and positive and negative spaces and walls and planes and pillars and stuff, how you arrange them and how that will shape spaces. And then they also teach us some theory about how people will react to environments and the way you make a space and thinking about the daily needs of people and how are people going to go about the environment like that. And so we learn a lot about analyzing a site to see what’s already going on there and then how we’re going to manipulate the site we’re given to enhance that. And then there’s some classes as well on construction materials and that sort of thing. It’s just basic learning each of the materials. Maybe I haven’t taken the class yet so I don’t really know what it is, but I imagine from what people have said, it’s like learning about different kinds of stuff you can put on walls or different kinds of woods and stuff and how strong they are, that sort of thing. And I guess maybe, I don’t know if it’s next year or in a five-year school after an undergraduate, maybe then there’s a lot more math and a lot more making sure the building actually stands up. Because actually in the first studio class, it’s meant to be so abstract, playing around with spaces and stuff that we’re told like don’t ever use the word structure. Don’t even talk about support or anything because you should never use any of the pieces we give you as support in the structure. Instead, everything we give you has to have a purpose in the form of the building and the patterns you’re creating and the response that you’re trying to create in people. And so that was something I learned pretty early on. I was like, oh, I tried to put this thing as a pillar here and so I could hold up the structure and the professor’s like, no, no, no structure, no support. Don’t ever say those words. I’m like, oh, well, okay, that’s interesting. This is much different than I thought before. That’ll come when you actually need to design a building that stands up. Yeah. But it’s probably too much to think about right now. And you need to get the big picture before you start diving into all of the little details that are going to make you want to pull your hair out. Oh yeah, exactly. If we just started with construction materials and all the calculus or math required to set up a building that’s going to stand and everything and then think about the abstraction of organizing the space, I think it would just be too much all at once. So I think it is a good idea to be able to set aside all that other stuff that we’re going to learn anyways. Because it’s easier just to focus on this abstract creative stuff. And then later down the line, you can just write down all those notes and all those types of materials and stuff that’s in the world and all the math equations you need. You can just memorize those. So that’s all information. And there’s some thinking involved in that. But I think there’s a lot more in what they taught us this semester that it’s good to have it first and separated from everything else. Plus if they do the easy fun stuff at the beginning, they’ll get more money out of you. And then when people start flaking out, when all the really hard math and material stuff comes, they’ve already got that money in the bank. I mean, you say that, but it’s not that easy. Okay. It’s not like that. It’s not really that easy right now. It’s not that easy. You’re the one who’s in architecture school and I’m not. So I’ll just take your word for it. It might be because of the professors that we have, but they’re constantly telling us about what top tier schools are like and what graduate schools are like and the kinds of challenges you’ll face there. And they just tell so many nightmare stories about people they’ve known or stuff that they’ve gone through in school. And they’re like, if you don’t care about this, you’re not going to make it through. It’s not going to work. And there’s people in the class who are just like, you know, not reading the textbook and stuff. They’re just moseying along and they’re straight out of high school and that’s kind of how high school works. So it’s understandable, I guess sometimes, but you know, they’re not going to survive because if they won’t do that there, then when it actually gets more tough, it’s just, it’s, yeah, it’s not going to work. And they don’t actually ask much the professors, they ask us to read the textbook we have to learn the vocabulary and stuff. Got some showers. Yeah, I can understand that. I was wondering why we don’t have that in our building. We do have a microwave and a fridge actually. So yeah, but yeah, it does take a lot of work. And the professors definitely make it very obvious how much more difficult is going to be down the line. And when they do critiques, they’re also very, they’re not like horrible and then insulting and all that, but they’re very honest about what the future will look like for people. So like, if somebody is not knowing the vocab, if they’re not reading the textbook and stuff, they’ll be like, you know, you got to do this. This isn’t, this isn’t going to work. If we can’t have a conversation, it’s then there’s no point to doing this. Like when we sit down for the juries and we present our project and they critique stuff and you know, hey, maybe you should have moved that plane over there. Maybe you should not use that overhead base plate, you know, that sort of thing. Then if you don’t know the words, you can’t talk about it. And then if you can’t talk about it, you’re not getting anything done. It’s not going to work as a as a design team. So and then the other thing is if people are not doing the work in the studio and they’re not talking to professors about what their concepts are and what they’re trying to get done and sort of discussing with them how they’re going to go about accomplishing their project. If that happens and they haven’t discussed anything with their professors, usually some students will come up with something at the very end and throw it all together. And then when they bring it to the studio, the professors are like, okay, so this is the first time I’m seeing this. And that’s no good. I’ve seen somebody in the last class where they said this is the first time I’m seeing this. And another professor said, yeah, if that happens again, you’ll just get a zero. You’ll just fail. Like you can’t do that. You can’t avoid the professors that you’re paying to teach you and throw something together at the end. So they’re pretty good about like, I think, having healthy chastisement for to prepare people for the future. There’s a lot of students in the graduate schools, the third year students who have graduated last year, who sometimes come back to 3D print stuff and laser cut in the studio at Brookdale. And when we talk to them, they’re like, oh, yeah, they totally over prepared us for this. Like a lot of the other students like don’t know how to use like all these different kinds of software and stuff. And we’re like, so over prepared with all this knowledge and work ethic and stuff. So I think what undergraduate should be like. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think at other schools, maybe it is the case that they just do the easy stuff first and just kind of push them through. But at ours, definitely not. Yeah. Interesting. Interesting. Yeah. Hello, Ted. I’m not sure we’ve ever talked before. No, father. I’m here at Paul VanderKlaas recommendation. Oh, hello, Tim. What’s on your mind? Well, okay, so I’m trying to track something down. I let’s see, I think it was a conversation between Paul VanderKlaas and John Verveke on his new series on after Socrates. And Verveke had some throwaway comment about reading St. Thomas Aquinas primarily as a neoplatonist looking at Aristotle sort of synthesizing Aristotle. And so I’d love to comment on there if anyone knew where I could track something down on that. And Paul VanderKlaas suggested that I talk to you. So I was curious if you had any insight on where I could look to it just Yeah, yeah, I don’t have a I don’t have like a book that I could just throw you. I know that. Do you buy that? Do you buy that? That is a I mean, first, I guess. Okay, so I’ll tell you what my my my we all we had a professor in in seminary and he was it was like you were talking to Thomas Aquinas. At least that’s what we said, as far as we could tell. And he said that one of the most exciting recent areas until mystic scholarship was the rediscovery of Aquinas, primarily as a neoplatonist and not as so. So Dr. Hipp said it and we’re just like and I was just like, well, it must be true that because he wouldn’t say it if he did. I think I think maybe a key concept that I think is health important is one of the definitions that Aquinas has for God is is the pure act of existence itself. Right. And the Latin phrase there is ipsum, essay, subsystem. And so this word essay in Latin, E S S E, is the infinitive for form of to be basically. Yeah. So so and he identifies God as being itself, right? Just this pure, unlimited existence. And then all other creatures, our to be our essay comes from God and participates in his reality, but in a more constrained and finite way. Yeah. My sister gave me a book, a couple of books, and I didn’t really read through them all that much, but I think this was a French writer. One of them is called The Dearest Fresh and Steeped Down Things, but they’re I want to say he’s back in like the 90s, but he talks about being being as a contingent act for everything else. Is that a related concept there? Yeah. Yeah. Because you receive it, you would receive it from God. It’s not something that you and so. Yeah. But that idea of God is like, as the as the like foundation of being that was he arguing that that’s a that’s a very platonic idea or a neoplatonic idea? Yeah. So I’m I’m I’m I’m at a parish. I’m not up to date on all the scholarship, but when I remember what I was taught in seminary and and try and hook my hat on this idea of Aquinas as a neoplatonist, that’s what I think of. It’s like, oh, yeah, you know, God has is being and we share in being. It’s kind of a kind of a form of emanation right there. So so, yeah, I know that JPMarceau and Vervecky were reading through The One and the Many by Father Norris Clark. And that was a book that I had as in my metaphysics class like. At least six years ago, so I don’t remember how much it would touch on this, but but that was that was definitely a part of the conversation there. And I’m sorry, I can’t be more helpful at. No, I mean, this is this is cool. This is getting me this is getting me some starting places. Those by Father who? Norris Clark. Norris Clark. I mean, the One and the Many, that sounds pretty, you know, neoplatonic already. Yeah, yeah. Interesting. And yeah, so he’s a he’s a reliable Aquinas scholar. Maybe you could find something by him on that. Excellent. Yeah, interesting. OK, well, cool. Yeah, I’ve been trying to take a look at least the way it had always been presented to me is that, you know, you had the you had the platonic Middle Ages and then you have the rediscovery of the writings of Aristotle, sort of Peter Adelard time. And then you have St. Thomas Aquinas coming along and doing the great synthesis of Christian thought and and Aristotelian thought. Then you even have this little like that famous painting where there’s all the various philosophers and thinkers and you have like in the middle of you have Aristotle and Plato and like Aristotle, Plato’s pointing up and Aristotle’s pointing down. Yeah, but then we fail. Yeah. OK, yeah. And then when Ricky said that, I thought, well, hold on, if the world is completely saturated and neoplatonism and Aristotle shows up, you think, oh, here are these here are these two opposing views. But if you eventually get out of a world of Platonism completely and you look back at it, you’re like, oh, hey, maybe Aristotle was something living in the platonic worldview. And so I’ve been trying to figure out is that is that really is there really sort of that antithesis between them or is that something that there’s also a development of? Yeah, yeah, I I tend to think of them as as being more similar than they are dissimilar. Problem is, is we don’t have access to Aristotle’s original writings. We don’t have access to his dialogues. We just have access to his lecture notes. So we might not even be getting like the full complete picture of what he thought. There might have been, you know, some great dialogue between him and Plato that we that we don’t have access to or something like that. But I also, you know, I’ve I’ve read a decent, decent percentage of the summa, and I’m not, you know, a credentialed expert or anything. But I feel like the way that Thomas Aquinas uses Aristotle is more like he gets some really useful tools and some really useful modules that he puts into this neoplatonic system to to just increase the precision, increase the depth of the text. Increase the depth, gives new ways of framing issues, that sort of thing, that it wasn’t a complete like bulldozing of everything that he had been taught by Albert the Great and Peter the Lombard and those sorts. So that’s interesting. Is there any chance of you read the book that got published about three years ago? Vestige of Eden, Image of Eternity by Dr. Daniel Thoma. Okay, so that was that was my first real exposure to domestic thought. Having previously been a Protestant Christian and from my biology, my background in biology, he’s a microbiology professor somewhere in Minnesota. And he just wrote this book on, hey, let’s see what happens if we take domestic thought and take it really seriously. And then we’ll look at all the data that we’ve generated in the scientific field in the last, you know, 200 years and also take that really seriously and see if we can come up with anything. And it just like it completely melted my brain. I don’t know how to put it. Yeah, yeah. It was but but it’s interesting that you put it in terms of sort of a tool, a toolkit, because yeah, it ended up being a lot more like, listen, here are these things that we can inherit from this sort of to mystic Aristotelian view of the world and use these tools as ways of not only as an alternative, but as actually a fundamentally more satisfying way of looking at what we’ve discovered about material reality around us. But again, it didn’t have like this sort of internal sense of cohesion other than the Christian doctrine in it. So that was it. Yeah. Anyway, that just really struck me when you described it more as a tool set rather than as some sort of maybe, you know, holistic set of, you know, here you go. Here’s here. Here’s how things are structured. So yeah, yeah. Wow. Fascinating read. I bet I bet. So wow. So you you you studied as a biologist then? Yeah. And now you’re just kind of getting into theology? Well, no, I mean, those have always been, you know, twin currents in my life. And I think that I don’t know that there’s been there. Well, I mean, maybe that was part of what was so impactful. That really felt like the first time where the two streams ran together. So yeah. It I mean, I’ve been working through some of that stuff, you know, and maybe in the two years prior, there’s I’d come across some interesting like, I don’t know if you’re familiar with the sort of heterodox biology that that views life as being, which to you would be obvious as being to logic being ends driven rather than being means driven. Yeah, that’s what Aristotle said. Right. Yeah, except, you know, it takes some like rebel professor writing, you know, writing in the New Atlantis for me to come across this even after, you know, how many years of in the in the field. And it’s like, okay, this just, you know, because you can’t even you can’t even talk about DNA with talking about intentionality. Right. You’re down at the molecular level where it should be like raw laws of physics. And we’re talking about proofreading and intention and means to and is for and it’s like, it’s like, okay, you know, all the way down. It’s you know, it’s it’s tell us all the way down. So, you know, some of the ground had been set for me to read that and say, wow, hey, this is what I’ve been looking for, for, for years and years and years. So, well, I would just say, isn’t electrons and protons and that stuff not intentionality? But are you talking about, like the jump from sort of chemistry to biology is a jump from non intentionality to intentionality, maybe? Yes. I mean, that’s a great question. That’s well, first of all, I mean, part of the problem is, is we’re alive and we’re not, you know, subatomic particles. So like, we don’t get to see what it’s like to be inside them. You know, see, as you saw that in Ant-Man 2. Right. Yeah. But, you know, like, even assuming that that’s the case, there seems to be this sort of like downward propagation of tell us where you’re talking about this. There’s like a purpose in bedded in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the physical form of say proteins, which should be just a mere, you know, collection of these atoms operating together and purely either deterministic or stochastic ways. But then what you end up with is like right proteins, proper proteins that like go about doing things. And then we, you know, maybe that’s all an illusion, but like, we simply don’t have another way of talking about it. People talk about that even when it’s utterly inconsistent with all the other things that they would say that’s about that. And then you’ve got weird stuff like pre-ons where there are these misfolded proteins that then propagate this misfolded structure throughout a person’s body. And, you know, then you end up with like mad cow disease or laughing disease or something when it builds up in your brain. But it’s like, man, that’s going on at the protein level. And so it’s like, is that purpose like propagating down from the biological level or is it something that’s just inherent in that substrate? And then, you know, to go back to Aristotle, this is where the hierarchy of being to Thomas, you know, the hierarchy of being starts to like make a lot of sense here. Like, is a protein alive or dead? It’s like, well, when you draw these lines there, that’s really, you start to get into these weird waters. But then when you look at my, at least my understanding of the Thomistic hierarchy of being, it’s like there are varying degrees of how internal the action of a thing is. And protein and viruses live somewhere between the total externality of say, a protein, a proton that’s just knocking around and a living being that’s fairly internal in its activity. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, yeah. And then it all it could all. Yeah. So when you talk about intentionality propagating down, is that like inside my body, I’ve got all of these smaller systems on a cellular level, on a tissue level, on organ systems level. And it all comes together in this one being that is me. Okay. Yeah. Okay. So that what you’re touching on right there is exactly another one of those just total shifts that I had approaching biology from a Thomistic standpoint, because the narrative that you get again is it’s totally bottom up. And I love and I do love the neoplatonic language of emanation and emergence. It’s all emergence. You know, that’s the idea. And particularly with like DNA and you look at the language around like the human genome project, it’s fascinating. Like we’re going to uncover what people mean by decoding the genome. And it’s like, well, we actually know very little relative to what you’d think we would have discovered even with there’s a this year, DeepMind came up with an algorithm that can detect that can determine the protein folding patterns of like every protein ever. And we still don’t really know what they do. And you’re like, okay, that’s kind of weird. And then you look at so I took several courses in developmental biology. What’s fascinating is there’s these signaling factors that like and you start out and you’re like, okay, so you got this fertilized egg of like a sea urchin and it sets up a front pole and a bottom pole. Like, okay, that makes sense. We got a protein gradient across that. That makes sense. You’re like, okay. And then it’s like, and then that protein gradient in four different concentration all creates these different activation pathways in the DNA. And you’re like, all right, I’m starting to lose it a little bit. And it’s like, and we’re going to follow one of those things. And it explodes into this like 50 different up regulation and down regulations. And the DNA and not just protein expression, but also the way the DNA is folded and all this stuff. And so it just immediately devolves into what looks like chaos. But then when you look at it from the top down, it makes perfect sense, right? Because you have you have a logos that was the adult, the two adults, and they between them, they generate another being that has an ordering principle to it. And it, it uses the DNA, right? It can’t in some sense, can’t really get past the potentiality inherent in that DNA, but it is actualizing its existence, not bottom up from the DNA, but actually using it. And so there’s all of these recursive patterns of, you know, when people you’ll hear people talk about like epigenetics and things like that. Well, that’s the environment of the cell determining the of the organism, determining the way the DNA is used. And so it’s like, that was another one of those just like, oh, this makes so much more sense. We’re trying to figure out, well, how can I get from DNA all the way up to a complete organisms? Like, well, you can’t the DNA is something that is in dialogue with the logos. There’s this moving up and down from the sort of the, I think it’s the form. I think it’s the form of the creatures that write down to the, its material substrate being the DNA. And you have this information embedded in that and the form of the logos of the creature that, you know, that sort of causal locus, I think is what Toma calls it, is pulling stuff out of that material substrate and using it to its expresses existence. And to me, that’s like one massively more intellectually satisfying and be far more interesting. And it’s just, and it’s just true. Like it just immediately strikes me as like, okay, now we’re actually talking about life. I think the problem you run into with scientists is that you’re not going to be able to put that form under a microscope because it’s an immaterial principle. Right. Right. Although again, you know, this is one of the just, all this stuff is fascinating, you know, but again, Toma brings up the whole idea. I don’t know if it’s Aristotle or Thomas or both of them, that all of our knowledge is through our senses. And then you say, so it’s like, oh, well, you know, science deals and, you know, the extreme and the far off and the tiny. And it’s like, well, all the wherever doing is just figuring out some way to get that in front of our eyeballs. And so like the telescope and the microscope and all of this, it’s like, it’s all about just eventually getting it to the intellect, which is, I mean, to me, that again, that’s fascinating. And it like really humanizes science as well and in a really beautiful way. And I think there’s this whole discussion of like, how can science remain human? And I think Jordan Peterson and Matt Ridley had had some interesting conversation, had an interesting conversation about that recently and some other things. It’s the whole old classical project of I don’t know, there’s like, I have sympathy for like the 19th century scientists who are like, we’re just going to look at the world and figure it out because we’re people and the world makes sense. And it’s like those were innocent times. So are you are you currently working as a researcher? No, I farm and I run heavy equipment. Also a big fan of farmers. I like eating. If you’ve got these big combines, you can just sit there and listen to podcasts, right? Where it’s like harvest season. No, I do pigs. We raise pigs for our family and some community members around us and, you know, butcher them and you would. A little more hands on. Yeah, Father, you might actually be interested in there’s a Catholic guy out in Oklahoma, Brandon Sheard. He runs the farmstead meat Smith. He’s got some very interesting. He’s a brilliant guy. He’s about 10 years older than me. And he’s just got some, his podcasts have got some really thoughtful stuff on sort of the interaction between Catholic theology and sort of boots on the ground, family scale agriculture. Mm hmm. I like I like Brandon a lot. Okay, well, it was Brandon Sheard farmstead meat Smith is his sort of handle. Meat Smith. I like that too. He is a meat Smith. He is actually he may be he would never ever tell you this, but he may be one of the best butchers in the Western Hemisphere. He’s really good. Like he, you know, he carves up an animal and they I mean, it looks it’s there’s beauty there. Just just, you know, yeah, Brandon’s like, but you’re almost isn’t the right word for it, huh? Exactly. Well, you know, now we’ve got all these connotations about to butcher something is to mess it up. And it’s like, so he’s a he’s a meat Smith. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Ah, I suppose. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. So did you did you go to school for biology then? Yeah, I made it. I made it part of the way into a master’s program and found out that I was in completely incapable of managing like long term unstructured projects in front of computers. That is my words. Those pigs, they have a very immediate demands on your time and attention. Yes, yes, there are. I mean, my brain goes enough places that I need. I need at least part most of the day to have something that grounds me and provides that, you know, that focused attention. And, you know, at some point I may, you know, deal with enough of my vices that I’ll be able to do something like that again. But for now, it’s like it’s necessary for my soul that I did I not be part of the academy. So, okay, good. Well, I hope I hope our conversations here don’t contribute to any vices of yours. We’ll just be a healthy little outlet here. Exactly. It’s all to be good so far. So that’s amazing. So did you grow up on a farm? No, out in the country. But, you know, that was something that I wanted to do. I realized I wanted to do later. And we’ve kind of moved in and out of, you know, how much that’s like my what I do full time and how much I do other things, you know. So it’s funny when you, you know, when you’re strong and young and are also like have some at least minor moral formation, people just want to hire you to do absolutely everything for them. Okay. So, yeah. Good help is hard to find. Yes. Yeah, I get it. It’s like you start doing this and it’s like job offers on like a monthly basis. Wow. Wow. Well, it’s better than the alternative, I guess. Yeah. Now, how did you come across Paul VanderKlay’s YouTube channel? Oh, goodness. Okay. I think probably Jordan Peterson. Yeah, I think probably Jordan Peterson and Jonathan Peugeot and probably the algorithms served him up to me at that point. So there you go. Live in an algorithmic world. Yeah. Yeah. Well, hey, I’m here on the Jordan Peterson to VanderKlay pipeline too, you know. That’s the only reason I’m doing this podcast tonight. So, yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, I’ve been just complete. I’ve been sort of on and off with them. And recently on is I feel like the three of them have kind of started to circle around this just fascinating resolution to modernism and postmodernism. And I’m frankly, I just have my attention. It’s got totally got my attention. Okay. So here’s something that I’ve found interesting. Are you familiar with Gerard Manley Hopkins? A little bit. So, you know, the Jesuit priest in the mid 1800s. But so he wrote poetry and then it got published posthumously. Yeah. So I’ve been a huge fan of his poetry for seven or eight years now. And how did this come together? Okay. I was at a Lebrie Institute, the Lebrie Institute up in Massachusetts. And one of the people there had done a lecture on Gerard Manley Hopkins pulling from a scholarly work called World is Word, the Theological, Philosophical Theology of Gerard Manley Hopkins. And I mean, I’ve read most of it. And it’s really good. You know, again, like I don’t really I haven’t read any other Hopkins scholarship. So I have no, you know, you know, authors obviously write about everything they’re saying as opposed to all the other scholars. So like I’m picking their word for it. But he so sort of core to his poetry is this idea of the these two ideas of the in scape and the in stress. I don’t know if you ever heard of in scape. I know. Yeah. Yeah. So basically, apparently, the guys at Oxford, like St. Cardinal John Henry Newman and those other guys, one of the things they’re dealing with was this problem of if we’re talking to each other and we mean different things by the same words, then how is there any communication? Right. And so, you know, it sort of started out with this like, well, they mean the same thing. And so we can talk or they mean different things and we’re not talking. And Hopkins proposal was essentially this idea is really something he worked out in his poetry, which was like an in scape is it’s all of the all of the various ways that you could approach a thing. And I think he meant a thing and, you know, in the broadest sense, so ideas, spirits, people, objects, you know, any of so. So then with the idea of it sort of being analogous to a landscape, right? Like you can stand on one part in a landscape. I can stand in another part. We look at it. It’s the same landscape, but we’re seeing different things because different times of day, different seasons, et cetera, et cetera. And so that was the in scape. And there’s a really strong case that his poetry was well, because he said this because he says that the in scape is the soul of art. And so all of his poetry is a sort of attempt to convey in scapes. And then but then his idea of in stress is a lot more vague. He doesn’t really talk about it. All this is, I think, just from his journals and letters. So he never like wrote this out anywhere. But the idea of the in stress is something more like the volitional assertion that there is a unity to the in stress. That’s the in scape. So like there’s all this multiple list right here. We are the the many and the one. He’s dealing with the same problem. It’s like we all look at this. We have this one tree. It’s it goes from an oak, an acorn all the way up to a huge oak and then to a dining table. And you see it at different seasons. And you got Andrew got married under it and I had a branch fall and break my arm under it. And so we’ve got all these things housed at the same thing. And the idea of the in stress is the sort of act of the world that says, yes, these all belong to the same itness. And anyway, it’s interesting that he would locate that in the will. Yes, that’s absolutely needing to me. Yeah, because and but but it does that does kind of you see on maps. Do you see how maps onto what these guys are talking about? No, I don’t. You’re going to have to draw the connections to me. Okay, great. Well, so so it to me, it seems like it’s his own resolution to like combinatorial explosion or the the the functional infinity of possible perception. And so the in stress is sort of this it right because Peterson is always talking about how you know, you could you could pay attention to an infinite number of things you could you could spend your entire life painting a hyper realistic portrait of this a square foot of flooring, you know, Peugeot it’s you know, what are we going to give our attention to out of all the things for vacay, it’s relevance realization. And and to my mind, the in scape is essentially saying is a way of sort of bounding that within a concept. And so Peterson says, Hey, you know, there’s an infinite variety of experiences of this room. And I think, Germany, Hopkins talking to him and say, Yeah, that’s the in scape of the room. But not just the sense, you know, the sense information coming in, but also all of the, you know, emotional associations and intellectual interaction within all of that, that’s also part of what you could give your attention to that room. And so I think the in scape is essentially this is history, pre articulation of combinatorial explosion, or relevance realization, because you do pay attention to part of it. And then the interest is sort of that, that resolution to postmodernism, which is, hey, yes, we are able to pay attention to all of these different aspects of these things. And yet, art, we give our attention, I think this might be partially why it’s located in the will, we give our attention to the fact that there is a unity of this thing. And then, and then you can connect to it, right, then you can think about it. And so I’m thinking of thinking of Peterson talking about how your your cognition is organized around goals and things that you’re doing. Okay, yes. Yeah. And then I’m also thinking about, like, you know, Jonathan Peugeot and the glass, and it’s like, well, what is the glass? It’s what are you going to use it for? Are you going to use it for, you know, holding liquid? Or are you going to use it for propping up a table? And the different features of the glass become relevant to you depending on what it is. But I I’m wondering if will, I mean, like will is kind of right, but it’s also kind of desire to. And it’s not like those are two completely separate things. Um, maybe will just doesn’t have the right connotations in 21st century America where it seems more violence. But there’s also, well, like a willingness to. So, so, so, so I mean, one clarification is I don’t think Hopkins locates it in the will. If I remember, it was the author of world as word. So I wanted to make that distinction first. And then secondly, you know, I could look up the relevant passage, but I think it’s, it’s will in the sense that it is. It is something that the observer does. It’s, it’s, it’s a, it is, well, it gets almost an act of faith. It’s an act of faith that there is a, an, an, itness behind all this. And so, I mean, Hopkins was pulling a whole bunch from John Don Scotiabus who have no exposure to it all. And there’s the sort of, he had some term for the, like the, the nature that only of a thing that only God sees that holds it together. I don’t know if that’s the essence or not. I’m not terribly up to date on SCOTUS either. So, okay. Anyway, so we’re both in the dark there, but, but essentially it is the acknowledgement of that sort of hidden unifying principle that God gives being to that we can’t see. And so in that sense, it’s an act of faith. And so, yeah, I don’t know if that really does connect with the sort of that utilitarianism that they’re all those guys are talking about, right? That the, I’d say pragmatism rather than utilitarianism, but yeah, that’s a good distinction. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That sort of pragmatism of we perceive things because we see how we could use them. I don’t think that’s what Hopkins is talking about. It may not have been the issue that he was dealing with then. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I mean, he, he predated the, the American pragmatists anyway. So by a while, but it’s like, yeah, you can come at things pragmatically and you could also come at them from a more contemplative point of view. Yes. Yeah. That would mean if Hopkins was anything, he was contemplative. So that’s right. Yeah. I mean, and a contemplator of nature, even most, almost more than super nature, which is very interesting, but yeah, I mean, his, his whole in escape in stress seems very much to be not, well, how do I figure out how to act? But maybe something more like, how do I, how do I find communion? I think that might be a much better way of looking at it, not only with what, with creation with God and then with other people. If I’m isolated in my words, if I can’t communicate, if everything’s equivocal, there’s no univocity in the universe, then, then I’m all alone, you know, and he clearly dealt with loneliness, with aloneness. If you’ve ever read, you know, and it was the poems from his darker years, it’s like, wow, man, you’re going through some, you know, some personal hell right there. Yeah. Yeah. So, and so maybe, maybe for your author, um, maybe putting love at the center of things and not, you know, um, yeah, not like a grabbing and possessive sort of love, but, um, a love that can just delight in the, the goodness and the beauty of, of something outside of you. Right. I think it’s that outside of you-ness, right? Cause it’s that it is that, that faith that, you know, that there is something on the other side of all your perception. There really is, like there really truly is, and you’re not left in this sort of Descartesian solipsism. Now, there’s an interesting, there’s an interesting thing about love and knowledge. Uh, the will and the intellect and Thomas Aquinas is that the intellect pulls things up to the level of the human, but it can’t really go any higher than that. So, you know, when I, when I look at the things at my desk, I could use them towards human ends. I understand them in a human way. And so, yeah, uh, you’re, you’re, you’re crisp ran out, Andrew. Um, so I’m going to mute you unless you’re speaking. Okay. Okay. Alrighty. Uh, whereas, um, the will goes outside of yourself, instead of bringing things in, it goes outside of yourself and connects you to the object that you’re willing. Right. And so this means that, um, in, in time for Thomas Aquinas, uh, your will can attain to God. Right. And this is, this is the context that comes up in, in a way that your intellect can’t because your intellect, you know, breaks God into pieces and brings them down to your level, but your will can, can go and, and unite your soul, uh, with God, uh, through, uh, his grace condescending coming down to you and lifting you up. That’s absolutely necessary. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, that’s, I mean, that’s. And so I’m thinking of that will, the will goes out and unites you to the object of your contemplation. Right. Right. Sort of not exactly beyond appearances, but through them. And you know, yeah, which, I mean, again, going back to think, going back to Thomism, right? How are, how’s this stuff coming to us? It’s, you know, it’s through our bodies, you know, it’s through, it’s through this stuff here. Yeah. So proper instrument to the human soul. Right. Again, you know, growing up and in sort of this depravity about these things, finally realizing what a soul, you know, to some degree, what a soul was. It’s like, wow, this makes sense. Oh my goodness. That’s, that’s fascinating. Yeah. So you’re a diocesan priest. I’m a diocesan priest. I’ve been ordained for about two and a half years now and I serve in the diocese of Fargo, North Dakota. Oh, wonderful. Wow. That’s cool. Yeah. It’s, it’s, I don’t know what the temperature is out there, but it’s, it’s, it’s disgusting, right? Because it’s like, oh yeah, it’s, you know, it’s two degrees outside right now, but there’s no wind. So it actually feels pretty good. Oh my goodness. Oh my goodness. Yeah, that’s no, we’re down in, we’re down in the South here. So we don’t, I’m, I’m going to South Carolina to visit my friend Mark here in a couple of weeks. So I’m looking forward. I am looking forward to, to potentially, you know, maybe a nice 65 or 70 degree day, a little bit, a little bit of sunshine. Yeah. Christmas last year, our, our sun almost got a sunburn in Arkansas. So we get, we get those, it was cold this Christmas, but I mean, you just never know down here. It’s like, it’s just back and forth. We had it, we had it, I think a 70 degree temperature swing in two days a little while ago. So. That’s pretty intense. You’ll, you’ll be able to thaw out for a little bit, I think. Okay. All right. Yeah. I’m hoping so. I sure I’m hoping so. It’s good to have this. It’s good to have you here, Ted. You just, you know, I’ve had people come in on my stream and misbehave. Yeah. I always get a little bit nervous, but, but you’ve been very well behaved. And more. So I’m glad you’re here. Yeah, no, that’s, that’s, I mean, really, this is great in terms of, and you, the cool thing is, you know, you could give me one, one author and just sort of, you get that whole cascade out into all of these, all of these different pathways. And, and it’s also just helpful hearing you say that, you know, I’m just, I’m trying to, it’s not, you don’t just have to have a book that lays things out, like just hearing someone say, you know, here’s how I’ve been, here’s how I’ve understood it. Here’s how I’ve been taught, especially when you’re making claims, something like Aristotle’s operating fundamentally in a platonic worldview. It’s like, well, I mean, you, there’s no, just like, you can’t just go back and be like, oh, here’s the three lines and, you know, some, some, you know, some part of Aristotle’s, you know, some Aristotelian texts. So that’s, it’s great. I mean, like I, I’ll say that I have some I’ll say that I have some motivated reasoning there because I, you know, obviously I’ve fallen in love with Thomas’s writings and, and the way that he views the world, but there’s also a lot in Neoplatonism that I find really appealing. And I would rather not have to say no to one of them. So as far as I’m concerned, I don’t think you have to. That’s excellent. Yeah. Jacob, you’re not the one I’m worrying about. Jacob, are you the one that Paul Vanderklaas is always talking to? Yes. Yes. Yes. They, they talk a bit. Yeah, I like Jacob. Jacob’s a good guy. He visited me in North Dakota in the summer, but you know, he went out of his way. So that’s wonderful. Yeah. Yeah. That’s, that shows some real friendship or something to go to North Dakota to see someone. So yeah, well he was, he, I wasn’t the only person he visited, but he did go out of his way to, to make a stop. He does his crazy road trips because, because you know, these, these internet conversations are cool, but there’s nothing like real life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, so funny story about internet conversations in real life. Brandon shared the meat Smith. So I, I came across him learning butchery and then he ended up being my, my baptismal sponsor when we entered the church this year. So there you go. Internet turning into real world. Yeah. Yeah. How about that? Jacob, I could do that for you. So this stuff does more, you know. Yeah. Is that the, is that the Orthodox crew? Yep. Yep. The Father Stephen D Young and some other people I haven’t, that’s kind of, you know, I have a limited bandwidth to the amount of podcasts I can consume. Cause a lot of, a lot of my work requires my full attention and not just half of it. But when I go jogging, I, I do, I do put on podcasts. So I’m thinking I might get a few of those to go running with or from, cause it sounds pretty intense. Okay. Father, I just had a curiosity. Do you, do you, do you just do the new right or do you also ever do the old right of the Eastern, the Eastern rights? So yeah, I’m a Roman, I’m a Roman priest. I will on occasion be able to do extraordinary form of the mass. So I was actually, maybe before you started listening on Friday, I got to, I got to do a, a solemn, a solemn mass and I assisted as a deacon for that, vested as a deacon for the feast of the epiphany on its traditional dates. But the majority of my ministry is in the, is in the ordinary form of the mass. So, so I’m just kind of a multi-threat coming in. A lot of times of my day off, I’ll say the mass from the extraordinary form of the mass. Right for your private. Yeah. When you’re just fulfilling your obligations. Yeah. Yeah. That’s all sense. We’re done an FSSP land around here. So, okay. Yeah. We get to, we get to do that. Although it’s a, it’s like an hour and a half drive for us. So. Ooh, okay. That’s right. I drive for 40 minutes for pretty much any mass that I go to. Oh man. So, yeah. Well, Laura is asking someone on BOM is wondering what the ceiling for Mary and devotion is. So you look what Arius said about Christ and then we can say that about Mary. Did you get that from St. John Cardinal John Henry Newman? Yes, I did. That is just such an amazing passage. Wow. Yeah. Yeah. I preachers steal from each other all the time. I’ve put a little bit of Paul VanderKlay and a little bit of Jonathan Bejeaux, even though he’s not a preacher, into my, in my homilies sometimes. Nobody minds. Hey, that’s copy. Nobody says that. The Catholic mikvahs are way too small and never heated. I think he’s talking about holy water fonts. And yeah, if you look at the designs of ancient churches, they were always big enough to get into. So you may have a point there, Andrew, when you’re designing your great cathedrals, you’re going to have a living baptismal font there and it will be heated and it will be heated. So we can do full immersion baptisms. Oh, oh, I see. Wait. So it’s not supposed to be cold when you do full immersion. I have no idea. I’m not sure. It just needs to be water. And also, Jacob, when you visited St. John’s, was that not big enough for you? And it was heated. So there was at least one. And that was the place that you visited me at. You just weren’t paying attention. Yeah. So what is a mikvah? Oh, that’s a Jewish ceremonial bath. Oh, okay. Yeah. So baptismal font would kind of pick up that and run with it into Catholic town. I see. Okay. Yeah, sure. I’ll make sure it’s all heated and stuff. MDMH99. I’ve heard about this. I have no idea any of the details. I want you to know that I was probably one of the first 30 people to sign up for the Thunder Bay Conference. So yeah, once I hear something, I would. I’ve heard it’s going to be in California. I think Pejon Twerveke said that there’s going to be in California, but nothing else other than that. So. All right. The big mikvah here in Los Angeles has three pools. One of them is like 140 degrees. Well, the thing about getting baptized, Jacob, is we only do that once. We don’t have to do it however often a pious Jew would. So. How long do they have to stay in it? It’s like a hot tub. I don’t know. I do not perform Jewish ceremonial washings. You’re asking for a holy water hot tub? Holy water hot tub. Well, that was like the baptismal font at my old parish. Really? It was probably like a square shape, but oriented like a diamond. It might have been five feet across like four or five feet deep, and it was warm water. Did it have jets all around it? Very quiet jets. Okay. It was built very well, right? And the pastor who had been there, he was the one who was in charge of the remodeling project. He’s very detail oriented, wants things done well, and that holy water font, I think, was genuinely done very well. It didn’t leak. The water circulation was very quiet. It had like an ultra-violent light to sterilize it so we wouldn’t get nasty things going in there. And the ultra-violet light and the holy water would get along just fine. It wouldn’t be like- Both cleansing. Yeah, both cleansing. Doesn’t de-holify the water or whatever? Yeah, it won’t take the Holy Spirit out of the water. All right. So apparently, very pious has siddim go every day. Oh, okay. Yeah. And we don’t, you know, it’s just- It’s like daily mass. Cross yourself with that. Yeah. Yeah, it’s like daily mass, yeah. Yeah, imagine having to wear your swimming trunks to daily mass, huh? Speaking of baptismal bonds, I don’t know if you all are familiar with it. There’s a part in The Divine Comedy where Dante is defending himself against a charge of sacrilege. And in like the footnotes, he apparently like some kid had gotten stuck head first in a baptismal font in a church, and he came and bashed the side of this marble baptismal font to get the kid out. And people then went around saying that Dante had vandalized the church. And so he like stuck this in his poem to be like, hey guys, listen, really I had a good reason. This kid was going to die. Yeah. So I guess if you design, Andrew, if you design a baptismal font, make sure it’s not too narrow so the kids can’t get stuck head down in it. Yeah, yeah, good idea. Or like, you know, an emergency like hammer next to it, you know, break in case of emergency kind of thing. Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it should just be big enough for anyone, right? Yeah. Because adults can get baptized too. Adults do get baptized. Yeah. Yeah. I guess they have men’s mikveh and women’s vikveh. Wait, what? Oh, is that why they have three? I suppose. Yeah. Oh, they don’t wear clothes. Interesting. Yeah. And I don’t imagine that extremely hardcore pious Jews would be nudists. So they’ve got one ladies and one for the gentleman. Do they do multiple people at a time? I guess. I don’t know. I mean, it’s like it’s a different world. Yeah. It’s a lot going on there. I just kind of peek into it via Jacob and Hesie and Joseph. And it’s just like, oh, man, there’s too much stuff. There’s too much stuff. I can’t handle it all. Yeah. Oh, so you got baptized recently, huh? Me? Yeah. Yeah. Well, conditionally baptized. Okay. Yeah. We were Protestants before that. Okay. Yeah. Our priest just wanted to make sure. Yeah, I get that. I’ve got nothing against. He was like really apologetic for it. I was like, no, listen, I completely understand. Like, there isn’t like, I’m not worried about it. I got baptized in the Buffalo River at the age of five by my dad. Like, we can do this. Don’t worry about it. So yeah, it was funny. Our three oldest kids all beat us into the church. So because we were still going through catechism and our priest was like, I think you guys are serious about this. So we’re going to go ahead and get your kids baptized. And then when we’re done, we’ll get you in. So yeah, yes. But yeah, like many priests, he’s totally overrun with work. And so we kind of have to keep pestering him to get into the church. And I was talking with my friend and I was like, is this okay? Like, is it okay for me to badger? And he’s like, listen, the kingdom of heaven is taken by violent men. And I was like, okay, I can’t keep badgering about it. Yeah, especially Arkansas, you know, I don’t think of that as like deeply Catholic country and they might just be kind of spread thin down there. Well, it’s funny. So Father McCambridge, he was our, the FSS priest at the parish that we go to, he said that when he got put here, he thought, oh my goodness, how am I going to, you know, how am I going to evangelize and all this? He goes, turns out it was like shooting fish in a barrel, you know, and then they moved to a bigger church building a month after we started attending. So, okay. Yeah. There’s some hunger for it down there, huh? You know, especially the more, you know, the more traditional forms of Catholicism, I think, well, there’s a lot of reasons why, but you know, there’s also only, you know, there’s only two traditional parishes in the state. And so they’re pulling from a fairly large area. And so it’s not too surprising that they’re just completely jam packed. And so, but yeah, no, I mean, it is interesting, you know, that’s just like in terms of perception, you look at somewhere, you’re like Arkansas, like that doesn’t seem like it’s Catholic, but actually, so we live north of the Arkansas river, south of the Arkansas river on the west half of the state. There’s a whole string of towns that are all from German Catholic immigrants. Every single one’s got this little church that was built a hundred and fifty years ago. There’s a Benedictine monastery that’s been there for since nineteen, eighteen forty something, I think. Subiaco in Subiaco, Arkansas. Yeah. So country monks.org if you’re, if you’re interested. But yeah, so, you know, I wouldn’t have thought of Arkansas as Catholic at all, but then, you know, you do have this little, this little band, there was some small railroad that went in. They went in German, they wanted German workers and the Germans said, we’re not going to come unless you bring a priest. And so the railroad company finagled a priest out there. And then, you know, they made little settlements and popped up all the little churches. And so there’s a couple of really, really beautiful ones down here. There’s this little church called St. Mary’s in Altus, Arkansas, that is the entire thing. Floor to ceiling, including the organ is hand painted, I believe by one rector, just gourd, you know, so it’s all it’s all in Latin and German and just beautiful. There’s an exquisite painting of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary right up above the altar. You know, everything else is dark paneled wood and just hasn’t been changed. There’s, you know, all these old, the old guard that’s out there that just takes care of their little church and love it to death. And yeah. So anyway, you know, there you go. That’s sort of one of those, what does Paul Van Der Kley talk about a high resolution model? There’s your high resolution model for Catholicism in Arkansas. There is there’s some home. There’s a little bit. There’s these little these little pockets in there. So interesting. Yeah. Wow. I mean, that reminds me of where my dad grew up, Stearns County, Minnesota, the same, you know, they all they didn’t settle with the railway. They settled as farmers, but German Catholic immigrants and every town’s got a beautiful little church there. I don’t have quite as much detail the picture of it because I’m not there. But I remember going to my great aunt’s funeral at Seven Dollars Church in Albany, Minnesota, and just a lovely little church. And we had this old Benedictine priest, and he used a lot of incense and I liked him a lot. And he remembered my great uncle who was a Benedictine priest. So at the same at the same St. John’s University, St. John’s Abbey, St. John’s University. Is that where they made the St. John’s Bible by any chance? Yep. I would love to see that. You’ll just have to come up. Get away from the pigs. Yeah, go up and I would love to have a long sit down conversation with Dr. Toma at the University of Minnesota, whatever Minnesota University that is. That name is super familiar. What’s his name? Daniel Toma. T-O-M-A. There’s man, there’s I’ve looked on the internet. He’s no like recorded lectures, like a couple of papers, academic papers, and then like this book. That’s it. So. All righty. The name is, I went to a seminary with a Jacob Toma. And he’s a priest at the Diocese of Kalamazoo now. I don’t think there’s any relation, but you’d like talking to him too. He was he was good with the Thomas Aquinas. Excellent. Oh my. Wow. So how many kids you have? We just had our fourth. Number four. Yeah, back in November. So it’s a, they’re, they’re an absolute delight. Really. You really, really like them a lot. They’re all very little still. Yeah. What’s the oldest? Four. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. You fit right in. It’s so true though. It’s hilarious. Like we show, you know, we’re just like, I was actually talking with my wife about this the other day. We’re talking about some friends of ours and we’re like, is that number seven or eight? And I looked at her, I was like, I can’t believe we found somewhere where like, that’s a normal thing to be like, oh yeah. It’s like, are they on seven or eight? I can’t remember. They’re really funny because we had our baby, our last baby, like eight, five days late and they had theirs like three weeks early. And so we hadn’t seen either of them and we ended up naming them almost the exact same thing. And then the funny thing is we did it because you know, we’re based on, on the saints day. And they did it because they knew no one who had a child with that name. It was like, well, like sorry to ruin that for you. Yeah. We named her girl Felicita and they named their girl Felicity. And it was like, come on, man. Yeah. North African martyrs. Yes. Yeah. Well, she was born on St. Felix’s day. So, the one who started the order of redeemers that would go to North Africa and get this, the, the prisoners from the moors, I was reading about that. Yeah. And he, like two of the, two of the brothers went down and came back with like 139 captives or something. And I’m like, that should be a movie. Like the two Spanish, you know, the two Spanish monks that go down to Morocco and come back with over a hundred, you know, captives. It’s like that. That’s a story right there. Are there going to be any strong female characters in there? Ah, yes. The blessed mother green light. But she’s like all of the stories, man. No, wait, wait, this is the whole cinematic universe. This would be perfect. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The Catholic cinematic universe. Let’s make it happen. Oh my goodness. Oh, wow. Yeah. Catholic movies don’t always go so good. I remember having to watch one about St. Damien of Molokai and high school. I went to a Catholic high school and, uh, and it was just not great film. I mean, biopics are a hard genre to write already. And it was just, it was just, you know, and I was on board, you know, I was the pious kid at high school. Um, so I just couldn’t get into it. Yeah. Well, at some point, Peugeot, I’m sure is going to start, is it going to like, you know, bankroll a feature length movie on some super obscure desert father and it’s going to be awesome. So just wait for that father. It’ll come. Yeah. It’ll be a preschool. It’ll be a preschool Saint too. So it’ll be okay. Yeah. Yeah. Well, St. Maximus, you know, you might be able to get something cool about him. Um, too much of it would be in the divine dark. You’d be like, what’s going on? I can’t see you’re at the top of the mountain. There’s nothing to see here. Life of St. Athanasius would be a controversial too. Well, I don’t know about, I don’t know, but I just know all of this. I’m just waiting for us to be able to chant his entire creed. Like that’s, that’s going to be, that’s the goal. I want to sing the entire Athanasian creed at a high mass, but not yet. Has that ever happened? It used to, apparently. Oh yeah. Like three or four times in the liturgical year, apparently it was like you pull out the Athanasian creed. I’m like, I guess you probably did it in the place of the, the Nicene. I don’t know, but yeah, I mean, they went through all of the, you know, the son is not the father. It takes a, it takes a solid four minutes just to recite it. I don’t know what chanting it would be like. Yeah. Oh wow. We’re working on it. We’re working on it, Jacob. We’re working on it. One, one live stream at a time. Just send me the sheet music. I can do that for you. Yeah. Well, you know, St. Athanasius didn’t actually write it. Oh, okay. No, no, it, it, it almost certainly wasn’t written by him. I, I think he’d like it. Well, I’m pretty sure the Nicene creed wasn’t written by Nicene either. So, you know. You’re right. All right. Well, Paul, Eric, thanks so much, man. I, I really appreciate the, the input and you’ll have a wonderful rest of your evening. You take care Ted hop on whenever you like. Yeah, it’s been, it’s been nice. Thank you guys. Very good. Oh, I can’t find any music for it. I keep on getting, um, music for either the movie creed or the band creed, but I can’t get the, the ubi kumquay creed. Athanasian. I don’t, I don’t know if I’ve seen it before actually. Oh, wow. Oh, okay. Yeah, that’s a long one. Yeah. Let’s see. I might be able to find it. Yeah. Did you find a creed clear water? Is that what you have on your screen? No, no, I found, you know, creed, you know, like, can you take me Oh, I see. I’m coming back at you. Wow. Um, I can’t find the, uh, yeah. Yeah. Well, I don’t see any square notes anywhere. Yeah, we’ll, uh, we’ll figure it out. Yeah. Well, that was certainly interesting. And, uh, I am feeling the lack of sleep from last night. Oh, except we’ve got Mark. Oh, you just changed my mind, Mark. I don’t think we’ve ever seen each other face to face. Oh, I got you. I got the stream on my bed. How’s it going? Life’s good. How are you? I’m tired, man. Just got probably more tired than I am. You just moved like a month ago, right? Like a month ago, right? Yeah. Well, you can see my wife’s craft areas coming together over there. Very good. Very good. Like there’s a wall of Ikea just being built between me and her. That’s awesome. That’s awesome. Well, what brings you on tonight, Mark? Oh, well, I watched the Michael Lofton thing on the TLM, uh, going away or not. I don’t know if you saw that. No, I didn’t. Uh, well, you know, he makes, I think he had Dave Gordon on is the guy. Okay. Um, then basically I think he wrote a piece for, uh, where Peter is. Is that, is that what used to be one Peter five eight site? No, they’re rather different perspectives actually. Oh, okay. I don’t know. I washed my hands of it. Um, so like roughly his argument was that there should only be one form of the Roman right. And I was like, I don’t know. I don’t know. I actually don’t have as strong feelings of it as I thought I would considering, uh, my Latin fetishism. Uh, but I was surprised he made the comment some points about, uh, going to our lady of the suburbs, which is kind of what I did today. I went to the church right down the road and they had bongos. Yeah. You’re like, you got the face. Yeah. You’re not, you’re very unlikely to describe anything I haven’t personally witnessed. So, um, I mean, when I was, when I was in Catholic grade school, right, Mrs. Coin, she was all about the bongo drums and the African melodies and rhythms, you know? And so, you know, I, I thought it was fun, but, um, maybe not the direction I would go with a bunch of white people in North Dakota. Um, oh man, it’s like confession. Uh, father won’t be surprised. Yeah. Oh God. Yeah. I don’t know. I mean, the thing that struck me is my wife was sick today, so she didn’t come with me. She’s not Catholic, but she’s kind of going on the way actually getting stronger and stronger. So I just went with my son and I had like a crazy strong experience at the mass. Like I just couldn’t stop crying. And I was surprised and I’m thinking to myself, I’m, I’m at a clown mass and this is just going really well and I don’t know why. So I don’t know. It just got me thinking. Well, God is good. That’s, uh, it is true. Good right there. Um, yeah. So, I mean, I’ve been to, uh, sorry, go ahead. Go ahead. Andrew. I was going to say I arrived recently last month into a mass in men, another mass actually in Manhattan, they had thespers and adoration and they had like guitar music and, you know, really touchy feely singing and stuff. And I mean, I was like, oh, you know, how am I going to pray like this? I don’t know. We’ll see. But it was actually fine. So, you know, yeah, that stuff, you know, it, I guess I can work in some ways. I don’t, I know too many, uh, very pious and holy charismatic Christians for me to just say that it’s all garbage and we should throw it out. Yeah. That being said, uh, my experience has been is that it always seems to work better for me personally, when it’s in that Vespers and adoration context rather than a Eucharistic liturgy. Yeah, I agree. Yeah. You know, so when I go to those Steubenville conferences and they’re processing around with the blessed sacrament all throughout this, you know, conference center, gymnasium or whatever, and they’re just, they’re just doing that, that praise and worship music, you know, eventually it breaks through all of this hard headed, you know, German Catholic stuff and, and, and, and finds the emotions, you know? Yeah. And then it comes out like the, like, uh, you know, the geyser, you know, um, so, so, uh, and, and a lot of the people who are very much involved in it, um, do show evidence of, uh, a holy way of life. So it’s like, I don’t know if we should ban it, but, uh, if we could just find a way to like, like, I had this idea once, like if you did all of the praise and worship music before mass started, you know, cause, cause these, these, um, these masses will go on at like, let’s say, we’ll just say like Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan. It’s, it’s a personal parish for charismatic Catholics. If like they did all of the praise and worship music for like half an hour before we do praise and worship a half an hour before music ends, you know, three minutes before the liturgy starts and then the previous processes in, and then it was just all like the, the very, uh, calm regal Gregorian chant high liturgy from there. Like, I think that’s peanut butter and jelly right there. I might actually get excited about that. You can give that a go. Maybe, maybe. I think that’s a good idea. Maybe. I don’t know about you guys, but like 90% of the people show up five minutes before the mass. Right. But maybe they won’t after this, you know, that’s possibly. Yeah. But I mean, there would be, there would be definitely a crew. I think so you go to Christ the King parish in Ann Arbor, Michigan, they produce half the seminarians for the diocese of Lansing. And they’re doing diocese of Lansing is doing pretty good on vocation. So it’s like, this one parish is just like absolutely a powerhouse and people go there for an hour and a half, two hour liturgy with the praise of worship music. So people, you know, if you’ve got a strong enough program, they’re not like sitting there, you know, watching their watches. There’s not all of them. Maybe the visitors are like, what did I get into? You know, they might have that. Yeah. Yeah. I will say though, for me, uh, that kind of music usually takes something out of me. Like it’s like tiring, but the chanting and stuff, it feels like it like energizes me, you know, and I’ll just keep going with it. That would be the brilliant thing is that, uh, you wouldn’t have to be there for the praise and worship. You know, I think it could work for everybody. I think that’s a, it’s an interesting way to, to be able to have both. I think so. I mean, I guess I don’t have much experience, right? I mean, only been Catholic, what six months, they eight months. I can’t do math since the last vigil. Um, but I went to the mass two years on my own before that. And the crazy thing about this time is I felt old at the mass. There was just, I was one of the older people and I’m only 32. At this one you just went to? Yeah. Yeah. That was the crazy part too, man. I was like, I’m not going to be there for the Yeah. Yeah. That was the crazy part to me is it was, must’ve been 500 people and it was just young families and some, you know, grandparents and maybe older parents. And I’m sitting around looking around the hell’s going on here. So I, I don’t know. I’ve only been to a few of them in the city. So I live in Ottawa by the way. So, um, I have a deep suspicion that the French Catholics in Ottawa are actually in a better spot than the French Catholics over the river in Quebec and Gatineau just because they’re living in the opposite area. Right. And one of the reasons that Catholicism was so strong in Quebec was it tell, tell everybody that you were Québécois as opposed to English. Cause the English ran Quebec until the sixties. Oh, okay. Interesting. So you know all those language laws in Quebec or have you heard of them? Yes. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. So if anyone’s watching and they don’t know, basically in Quebec, every sign has to have French twice as large. Um, and they have to translate everything into French, including pasta, the word pasta, which, uh, some Italian restaurant actually got fined a few years back because it didn’t do that. Um, but anyway, all this comes apart because for many, many years, like centuries, the English after the battle of the plains of Abraham, Britain takes over Quebec, basically ran Montreal as a little business clique where you had to speak English to do business. And then when the quiet revolution happened with the rest of the province, this Quebec one nationalism kind of exploded and they just shoved everyone out. Everything had to be French. And as part of that French, the French language kind of became the rallying cry as opposed to Catholicism, um, where you don’t get that in Ontario and the rest of like New Brunswick or wherever you else you find, uh, French speaking Catholics. So I don’t know. We’ll see. I’d have to actually go over to Quebec. I mean, they have one of the best, I think, cathedrals in all of North America. It’s Notre Dame de Montreal. Yeah. Yeah. I’ve never been either. Um, but it’s like the Catholic church there, uh, has just like this self-loathing for, for being Catholic. And the weird part is, is a lot of them just, they still go get baptized. They still go get married in the church. They still do the Christmas and the Easter thing, but it’s entirely linked to Quebec identity as opposed to the Catholic faith. It’s kind of crazy to think that during World War II, they were considering moving the Vatican to Quebec. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. How fast it can all just fall apart. Um, but it’s like the Catholic church in Northern Ireland is in better shape than the rest of Ireland because exactly because they’re the, uh, they’re, it’s not, it wasn’t homogenous, you know, so they had to fight for it. Um, yeah, it’s also, wow. That seems to be our constant theme though. Like wherever the majority, um, like was hemogen, like the hegemon, that’s kind of collapsing everywhere. Protestantism in Protestant countries, Catholicism in Catholic countries for different reasons, but it just seems to be a continuous thing. Yeah. It’s like you need that, you need to have something to exercise in order to stay strong. And I think, you know, like it wasn’t always that way. I wonder how much the foreign missions would have played into that. Like that’s where they would, like, you gotta have that opponent force that you’re leaning against. And, and like Ireland, you know, back, back in like the forties and fifties, they would send tons of priests, uh, through the Holy Ghost Fathers out to Africa and everywhere. Um, and, uh, and I think there was, um, uh, just a lot of, um, what am I trying to say? Like that’s where they got their energy and their excitement from was getting stuff, um, back from the, the feedback coming from the foreign missions. Um, and then that all kind of faded. And part of it was because that they started ordaining native priests, you know, so you didn’t need to have, you know, Father O’Donnell, uh, in Guinea anymore because they had, you know, Father, uh, Robert Sarah, and he could take care of things. So, yeah. I mean, one of the things I’m looking forward to doing is at some point, uh, going with my dad and my son back to Portugal. Um, because I know the Portuguese church is in better shape than the Spanish church, even though the Spanish church isn’t horrendously bad. Um, part of that is to do that there was no, uh, cozy relationship between Salazar and the Catholic church. Uh, he was a faithful Catholic. He actually almost got assassinated at a mass. Uh, which is it, yeah, they planted a bomb outside his car right outside the mass. It went off. He dusted himself off and says, okay, we go to mass now. Um, but there was an adversary relationship between Salazar and the church where Franco very much was a creature of, you know, they were in bed together. I mean, so it ended up just being that there was no, after the Salazar, uh, era ended, there was no loss of faith in the church. But when Franco died and that was he died with him, there’s this enmity that comes out. Yeah, yeah, well, that’s a trouble with, uh, I mean, I feel for the, uh, the Spanish church in the 1930s and 40s because priests and nuns were getting butchered in the streets by Republicans, you know. Yeah. That’s exactly what happened, right? That’s that’s it was a precipitation that just spiraled out of control. Yeah, and so, you know them them throwing in their lot with the guy who wasn’t going to murder their clergy was like, well, okay, um, Mm-hmm. Yeah, it’s not pretty but it’s like there it is. Um, Yeah. It’s rough. I mean in some way we get to live in a heroic time ourselves. It just doesn’t feel that way because we’re heroically striving against mediocrity. Yeah. You know, yeah, you’re in that time where you gotta, it’s harder to be a Catholic than it was. Mm-hmm. I mean at least not under persecution, but like, you know, when you’re on the outside, like you were saying something holds you together where now apathy is quite a different beast to tackle. Yeah. On another note, I’m trying to choose a crucifix because my wife said we can put one up. In the wall? Yeah. Yeah, she said I could put one up in the hallway. I was surprised. Um, so I’ve been trying to like find one and I can’t decide what it should be. Should it be one of those like, uh, my friend got me this one from the Vatican. Just a small one. So I was like, should I just get it? Benedict medal. You get that Saint Benedict medal blessed? Uh, no, I haven’t yet. This is actually from my son. Okay. Um, he also brought me back this from Venice. Nice. Say Mark, very nice. Yeah. Wait, hold on. I just realized this is the mark that I keep seeing all the time in the Catholic chat. Yeah, your resident, uh, BOM Catholic mod, I think the only one. Yeah. That’s good. I don’t feel like the Catholics are being persecuted, but it’s nice to know we got you in there. Yeah, you know, it just got one voice. Yeah, it’s nice. Like, I don’t know. I still know what to get because I was drawn to, what was it? Some Saint Benedict one that was like quite ornate and I’m wondering to myself, is this okay? Should it be more toned down? I don’t know. Especially after listening to that Shroud of Turin episode of Matt Fradd, where I was just like feeling the pain when he was describing all the wounds on the shroud. Like, oh god. I think any crucifix is just fine. I’ve seen enough bad crucifixes to say that 90% of crucifixes are just fine. Uh, okay. Father knows best. Are you gonna, are you gonna get one of them like really bloody Spanish ones? Where Jesus’s knees are all ripped up and this is the thing I’m wondering like, do I go that way? Because I’m not sure my wife would enjoy that in our main hallway. She has a very specific style she wants for the house. Okay, but I’m like… What’s the style? Uh, it’s very kind of minimal, but she’s putting together kind of like a Portuguese color scheme with blue and white. Oh, okay. The colors of our lady. Yeah, so I was actually thinking of getting a blue crucifix or a white crucifix. Are the walls white? No, actually they’re… It’s the most common color scheme. It’s some, you know, you know like call colors stupid names like deep blue gray sky. Yeah. It’s like a gray blue. It’s the main hallway. Oh, okay. So I guess white or blue would be similarly contrasting to the wall. Yeah. And what do you think of the San Domino cross? I did look at that one. It actually doesn’t appeal to me. I mean, look, I’ll put my cards on the table. I actually don’t like a lot of that style. I don’t like the Greek in particular. Okay. All right. All right. I just wanted to make sure it was on your radar because, you know, Saint Francis was praying in front of this and then he went and rebuilt the church. No, it’s fair. It’s fair, right? Part of me is always drawn just to the one I just showed you, the Saint Benedict one. I don’t know why. And even the Irish crosses, I always thought those were very nice. Yeah, I mean, I’m not Irish, but Portugal, Ireland, you know, all across the ocean. So are you looking for a crucifix or a cross or either is fine? Yeah, I’m gonna get a crucifix. Oh, okay. What is it? Catholic.com? Is that the place? Catholic Company? I’m just searching up blue and white crucifix on Google and none of them have Jesus on them. So Google doesn’t know what a crucifix is. Gotta go retrain the AI. Yeah. Like there was a nice one on the Catholic Company page just the beginning because I went first to the Catholic woodworker and I didn’t like anything in particular. It didn’t stand out to me. So, I don’t know. It’s one of those weird decisions because on the other side I have to get a dark-skinned Our Lady. Oh, yeah. For Portuguese? No, for my wife. Oh, okay. No, if I was going Portuguese it’d be Fatima. Okay. There’s a one or two, Anna B in the Catholic chat had linked me a few, but it’s actually finding one and getting them to ship it here. Right, because there isn’t that many here in Canada. You’ve seen Our Lady of Cestahova? I think that might have been one of them. Okay. Poland. I don’t know if that’s the original right there, but it’s interesting. That was on the list. There’s also the one from Brazil. Oh, okay. I can’t remember the name of it. I can’t pronounce it either. My Portuguese is horrifyingly bad. Although I had my dad teach me how to say the Fatima prayer in Portuguese, because I don’t know about you guys, but when I do the Rosary in Latin, I can’t find a Latin version of that prayer I like. Oh, which one? Oh, the Fatima prayer? Yeah. Right. I didn’t think about that. Because that’s what they first heard it in. That’s a good point. I think that’s a good idea. Well, I think you’ll figure something out. I do like those ones with the St. Benedict metal behind it. Those St. Benedict metals are a tried and true tool in an exorcist’s toolbox there. That would be good, definitely. Yeah. Father, which one do you have back there in the corner behind the white bag on your desk? The white bag is gone. Oh, it’s gone. Well, I mean, the white bag has been moved because who was it that was giving me… I don’t remember. Yeah, that one came with the office back here. Do you want me to bring it up to the camera? Yeah, sure. Oh, the crucifix. It came with the office. I think the bag is leaving with the office. It’s attached to the wall. So that’s why it came with the office. It’s not coming off. It’s earthquake proof. Oh, I see. Because we have to worry about earthquakes here in North Dakota, you know, middle of a tectonic plate. Right. Is everything hung like that? No, no, I was surprised that it was hung so securely, especially since this office will be demolished here within a few months. Oh, wow. That’s the temp office, right? Yeah, yeah. Me and Father Carmel are going to have our own offices, like, and hopefully we’ll be able to move in by like May or something, but I might be crammed into a cubicle here in a couple of months in the hallway and just be special. Do you know what your new office will look like? Something like this, but a little smaller, I think. They haven’t built it yet. The window will be where the new offices are. Oh, okay. Cool. I was just wondering if you had a new spot planned out for your bag. No, no. No, no. You know, I never watched that one. My favorite commentators weren’t all that thrilled by it. So I don’t know, I can’t give you an opinion on that. Who are your favorite commentators? Oh, boy. That’s an intimate question right there. It’s like, I plead the fifth. Yeah, yeah. I usually read Father Z’s blog every day. And I think he’s Father John Zulsdorf, Father Z. He’s a priest of the Diocese of Madison, Wisconsin. And he is a big proponent of the traditional Latin mass. And he makes a lot of sense to me, basically. I like a lot of the blogs that they’ll link on newadvent.org on their front page. They link a lot of good blogs there. I’ll dip into some of the more extreme traditional stuff. But I’ve kind of lost my appetite for it. So anyway, Father Z is about as extreme as I get. Well, he’s got skin in the game and he doesn’t run his mouth too much. That’s good. I’ll plead to having changed my mind on Matt Fred. Although sometimes I still, when I watch him, there’s something about him that just makes me like, I don’t believe you. All right. I don’t know. Something about me, something about, just feels polished to me. And for some reason that just comes off wrong. Yeah, I remember you saying you don’t really watch Matt Fred. That’s what I mean. Like I’ve definitely changed my opinion because he had a few guests that I ended up watching because of them. But I don’t know. Yeah, me too. I’ve really gotten liking Michael Loughlin, though. I definitely enjoy those. Michael Loughlin. I’m going to have to figure out who this is now. Reason and theology, I think, is this channel. I’ve heard of that. Oh yeah, I know this guy. It’s another bald guy with a beard. I thought that looks like competition to me. I’m pretty sure he’s been posted in the VOM chat a few times. Yeah, that’s me. Well, not just me, actually. Not just me. That’s not fair. More than a few. He was a valedictorian at Christendom, huh? Yeah, he’s got an interesting tale because he went, I think he started Presbyterian, became Catholic, had a horrifyingly bad experience, became Eastern Orthodox, and then became Catholic again. Like something like his wife ended up having an affair with someone in the congregation. And then the priest said they should get divorced. Right? It was some horrifying experience. He was like, I’m done. Yeah, how about that? I usually try not to give too hard a piece of advice on anything. Or the famous meme, like, or don’t. It’s like, do it or don’t. I didn’t say. You do what you want, but you have to do this. Yeah, super interesting guy. I mean, him and a few other people. I could just sit around and watch YouTube videos all day. Doesn’t doesn’t count for those prayer hours. No, it does not. And it doesn’t. It doesn’t write RCIA classes either. Might provide some fodder, but. No, thanks again for commenting on the thing I sent you a while back. I’m due to do another one on the 18th. I was send it my way. I’ll give you my thoughts. No, I think I should because I didn’t do it for the last one because I didn’t want to bother you. And I don’t think I enjoyed how it turned out. The Deacon approved, but I don’t know. It was confirmation and baptism. I did. Yeah, you’ll always be your harshest critic. So do remember that. But there is better and worse as far as presentation preparation. Confirmation is a tricky one, though. There just ain’t that much to it. That’s what I felt. I was like, I spent almost the entire time talking about baptism. And then I’m like, you know, then there’s confirmation and here’s some stuff about it. Yeah, I kind of get why the Eastern Orthodox will just get that one in. At the same time, they do baptism. Yeah, we don’t need to. We don’t need to wait on this one. We’ll just we’ll just put it in there. Why were they separated? I can’t remember right now. Yeah, it was just I mean, it’s only in the West that we’ve we’ve separated them. And somewhere along the way, and I don’t have the exact dates and the figures involved, but confirmation became associated with the office of the bishop. That he was the proper the proper minister of confirmation. And as diocese got bigger, the bishop couldn’t go to every every church to do baptisms. And so the priests eventually developed a tradition of doing the baptisms themselves and waiting for the bishop to come around to do the confirmations. So OK, OK, yeah, because I remember the reading about the bishop part, but that may consist from a logistical standpoint. And so the view of confirmation in the West came to be like a sacrament of maturity. They implemented the little the little slap in there because now you were a soldier for Christ and you needed to be able to, you know, do battle with evil. You’d reach the age of maturity. They weren’t taking the kids out, but you know. Christian soldier. This is a church militant. Yeah, yeah. That was the vibes they were they were going for. You know, maybe maybe you can answer this one for me too. So I haven’t been to obviously that many parishes, and I’ve only been to one parish outside of my city. And at the end of every mass here, we do the Saint Michael prayer. But over at this other parish in Mississauga, which is like a city next to Toronto, they do, you know, hail Holy Queen. Is that done by diocese or is that done by parish? Probably parish. There might be a diocese that asks you to do it. So Pope Leo XIII composed the Saint Michael prayer and asked that all it be done after all low masses to combat the spread of communism. And they could just say that back then. Yeah, we need that here. And so that that was a tradition that was enforced all the way up through 1970, I think. 1970 and following Roman missiles don’t say to do it. They also say not don’t say not to do it. So it’s it’s it’s fairly commonly done. You do a little Saint Michael prayer after the final blessing before processing out. So so it’s a local custom and not governed by universal law. OK, because it is one of my favorite prayers. I had no idea where it came from before this. Well, I read before this the stream, right? But when I was doing it, I’m like, oh, this is great. I love this one. My wife had to ask me to stop being so enthusiastic because she was feeling embarrassed and a little scared. That’s why that’s why God gave you a wife. I just pull you back down. Pull you back down. It’s honestly, you know, if I wasn’t married to her and I had somehow married a Catholic girl just to start, I would be so deep. Like I would probably be in like a FSSP parish. Like, and I’m not sure that’s where I should be. OK. She’s kind of like this this break being like, maybe just a little slower. Yeah, because she’s not all the way she’s thinking, but she’s been super supportive. She used to come to maybe one mass every few weeks. Now it’s every single week. Made a good resolution that she wants to learn more this year. I’m going to wash my hands of that. I don’t think I’m the person to tell her because I think if I were to tell her the sky was blue in an argument, she’d say, no, it’s red. Just want me to be right. Yeah, and I don’t hear my family’s confessions. That’s probably a good policy. Is that like an actual policy or just personal? That’s just personal and I think probably pretty widely observed. Yeah, some people do do that, I think. Do they now? I think I remember Dr. Scott Hahn when he was talking about his sons getting ordained. Then I went to confession with my son. It was kind of crazy. He called him father or something like that. Maybe I’m wrong and maybe I remember that incorrectly. Maybe Dr. Scott did that. I asked my parents not to. Life or death, absolutely. But otherwise, they have their own parish. They have their own priests and they can go there. Yeah. I’ve even heard some priests saying that when they were ordained, they said don’t tell your parents to call you father. Yeah, so my parents will do it if they’re talking about me in the third person or if it’s like a big public social thing. But at home, when I go home and have supper, they call me by my first name. I see. They don’t call you Big Mac? They don’t? No, no. That’s my internet name. It’s not my real name. Bishop Erb was moved to Rochester, Minnesota from California. Do you know why this move happened? Yeah, because the pope said so. Yeah, it depends on what you want to think about that move. You can look at it two ways, right? He’s gone from an auxiliary to the full bishop, but it’s a less prestigious area. But he doesn’t need to be in a prestigious area because he got famous on the internet. Yeah, you could just stay on the internet. Yeah, so anyway, some people look at that as a demotion. I just think it’s pretty cool that he’s in the next state over. Ultimately, it’s just nice to have good bishops in the area. I’m not going to complain about that ever. I was actually really sad I didn’t get to meet our bishop. Because of plague, we didn’t do the catechumens mass. I had a kind of truncated RCA. Well, hopefully your baptism was valid. It was none of this we baptize you business, was there? No, no, because me and my son got baptized at the same time and I heard it twice. Okay, very good, very good. Oh, Mark, I’m delighted you hopped on and we got to talk a little bit. My batteries are running a little low. I think it’s time for night then. Yeah, yes, the pope does. He’s got a whole congregation of bishops that helps him assign these. And if you want to know more about that, just Google congregation for bishops of Vatican and that’ll answer all of your questions. Thanks for tuning in. God bless you all and good night. Thanks Father. Have a good night.