https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=CkO2cgj89DU
North Dakota has been canceled, by God. Here it’s maybe mild in town, but travel around the rural areas remain dangerous. This photo outside of the stretch between Valley City and Jamestown, lots of blowing snow. We also have this from yesterday, when the blowing snow was at its brightest, farther west of me. Here is the roads. These red lines here mean that the highway is closed. The dotted red lines mean that it is no travel advised. So that’s what we’re dealing with here today. So I’ve had a lot of time to catch up on work, but we do have some nice things potentially happening. That on Tuesday, we might get to the other side of 50 degrees and it’d be sunny, so some of the stuff will actually melt. We have not seen that kind of weather since November. Might even be late October, I’m not sure. All of that to say that I’ve gotten a little bit of time to do an extra stream today. So you should have access to the links. I don’t have much desire to talk to myself, so if you all want to hop on on, we could do something. Talk about something interesting besides just the weather. Yes, yesterday we were supposed to have our chrism mass, gathering all the priests of the diocese, and that ended up getting postponed to another day. So happy day there. And we still were able to have a regular mass here though, with I don’t know, about a dozen people still showed up. No matter what the roads are, there will always be somebody showing up to mass if somebody is offering mass there. mentioned that he liked the thumbnail. I did not actually take that photo. I’m not really a photo taker because of my hipster dumb phone doesn’t have a camera on it. I rely on other people. I have no idea where that photo for the thumbnail is from. Maybe someday I’ll find out. I put the links out, didn’t I? Yeah, the links are out. Somebody come on and argue with me about something. Thank you, Jacob. Thank you. Yeah, just, I, well, you know, it’s, you thought about whether or not you could, you never thought about whether you should. That’s a, that’s something we didn’t think about there, putting all that power into somebody’s hands, but not really into somebody’s hands, putting it into anybody’s hands. Bad news. So this is a, this is a light phone, like phone. And here are my apps. No social media, no email. There’s a few other apps that I could install, but I don’t care much for them. The podcasts and the music apps, they’re just kind of so, so I’d rather I’ve got an old MP3 player that I use if I ever need to carry something around that. Matt Fred is a Protestant at heart. Change my mind. I think you, the one making the arguments, need to be the one to make the accusations and I’ll respond to the accusations as I can. All these streams happen right in the middle of my workday. Where are all the evening streams for us MST people? Well, it’s happening in the middle of my workday too, but North Dakota is canceled, so I don’t have any work to do until 630 tonight. But I also, on my channel and on this channel, I stream every Sunday night at 730 Central. I’ve been pretty consistent on that for like six months now. So you can come in on that too. What would make Matt Fred a Protestant? Jordan, you got to answer that question for me. I mean, he’s a layman, right? So one of the things about being a priest is that you’ve got to live up to that priestly standard. When you’re a layperson, you’re free. Hello, Cassidy. Hi, can you hear me? I can hear you just fine. You got that fancy microphone, I’d better be able to hear you. I’m not sure. I think it’s connected, but I’m not 100% sure. Alrighty. How are you? Life’s good. How are you? Yeah, pretty good. You’ve got Emma here too. You’re busy, huh? Hello. What sorts of things are keeping you busy? Festival planning, work. Getting settled in a new country, you know. Yeah, I’ve done that before actually. When I was an elementary school kid, my dad got assigned to Norway for the Air Force. So we had a two year Norwegian adventure, but he was the one who was doing all the work. It’s very dark there in the winters, isn’t it? It was wild. Yeah. It’s like the sun just kind of peaks over the horizon, it just goes back down again. It’s like, even when it is up, it’s a sunset. It’s not a sunny day. So, you’re not that far from Norway though. Oh, you’ve muted yourself now. Oh, there she goes. Okay. Hello, Emma. Hello. How are you doing? Can you hear me all right? Oh yeah, you’re coming through just fine. I’m good. Yeah, Holy Week is probably going to be kind of busy, although I’m sure not as busy as for you. You know, we have a lot of great volunteers here. I’ve got a, I’ve definitely got some work to do, but it’ll mostly, so we’ve got, first off, we’ve got three priests here, which means we split the Triduum liturgies up. So I only have to worry about the Easter Vigil, meaning those other two liturgies are somebody else’s main problem, which means that on Saturday and Sunday, I’m going to be really busy. But other than that, there’s just like some preparation work that I could do more or less efficiently. I think if I was the head guy, I would be a little, a little busier than that. So what’s keeping you busy though? I go to a heathen school that doesn’t care about the Triduum. So, yeah, so I’m probably going to skip class on Monday because we’re probably going to travel for Easter and see a friend. So what was it that you were studying again? Classics. Classics. Okay. Shake my head. Classics with the heathens. Classics with the heathens. Are they at least, are they at least good at Greek and Latin? Mostly yeah. Okay. Now, Andrew, you said you were having a busy week too, didn’t you? Oh yeah. And what are you doing here? Well I have to be on my computer to do my work anyways. Okay. But yeah, we have a couple papers that are due today and the final jury or presentation for the project we’ve been working on tomorrow. So yeah, it was going to be Monday actually, but they extended it. Oh, okay. Do you get next Monday off? Not that I’m aware of. Is Easter Monday like a really big holy day or something? No, but you should get a day off. You don’t get a day off for Easter Sunday, right? Because it’s Sunday. You already have a day off. It’s Sunday, yeah. But a lot of places, I think, isn’t it a federal holiday too, the day after Easter? Probably. I don’t know. I know the high school next door to us has good Friday off, but I don’t know about Easter Monday. Yeah, not that I’m aware of. But I don’t get either. I mean, we just have studio that day, so I don’t know what we’ll be doing because usually we work on the current project. So maybe we’ll just hang out and talk about how great Easter was in the studio. Okay. Well, you could do worse than that. I mean, I guess I never went to a non-Catholic university, so I’m not used to people not taking these holidays here. Cassidy’s back. Cassidy’s back. Sorry, I don’t know what happened. I’m excelling, huh? No, I don’t hear too bad an echo. Good. Fantastic acoustics. I don’t know. It just shut me off and I couldn’t talk anymore. So I’m back. We’ll blame agile development and clean coding for that. Sounds good. Sorry, I’ve been talking to Mark too much. He puts all these programming ideas into my head. Alrighty. Did you guys catch any of Gavin’s Just Chatting stream yesterday? Interesting questions regarding winsome versus antithesis, threat detection versus opportunity exploration. I think I caught like 20 minutes of it and it turned out to be one of those streams that I wasn’t interested in. So I kind of tuned out. Any of you watch it? No, I’ve been a bit disconnected to actually watching some of the streams. Yeah, imagine having something more important going on. It’s possible. It’s possible. I think so. Yeah. It seems like the only way to run, let’s say we’ll talk about, I did catch enough of it to know that there was a particular personality that was debated as to whether or not they should have a place at the table because of, you know, are they coming here to actually contribute in good faith or are they a destructive influence and therefore for the good of the whole need to be excluded. And it seems like the only way to handle that is to actually have people who are empowered to make a judgment call. There isn’t like any kind of system, any kind of an algorithm, any kind of like if, then programming way of doing it. You just have to say whoever’s running this space gets to determine who contributes. That makes sense. Maybe having a little bit of oversight, but ultimately all of these judgments have to be human judgments. There’s no way to just come up with a perfect system. Well, it’s so relational, right? Like a lot of these conversations that comes from like how do we get better at, how do you say it? Like building a relationship where you can learn how to trust each other and have that back and forth because there’s some people you could have a back and forth with and yeah, maybe it wouldn’t be a good faith conversation, but maybe someone who has a better long-term relationship with them or they trust them more. They have a different way of engaging with them that they can pull things out that wouldn’t be if it was someone who they saw as more contentious. It’s not so cut and dry. People trusting each other. Yeah, people trust it, but it’s hard to do that over the internet. Sure. But I think that’s what Esther was, especially at the beginning. It was like grounding it in personal story so that we could build that trust, so that we could have those conversations when you’re faced with someone who thinks something very differently than you do. You could still hold on to their humanity and like have that back and forth. But once you’ve summoned these bodies, you have to be able to, you’ve got responsibility for what they do. And that’s bearing responsibility is never fun. I think it’s what it actually is, is it’s the apps from the Cathedral of St. John Latter-day in Rome. So you can look at that. I think we sometimes mistake that only a few types of conversations can be good or fruitful. Yeah, I mean, a lot of people, I didn’t watch the stream, but a lot of people were saying nice things about Jacob and Hensie really like going at each other in a pretty contentious stream a few days ago. And I mean, part of the reason why I think it also has to be a personal judgment is that different people have different tolerances for conflict and different goals in whatever space they are in. And if they don’t really want to get in the ring with Jacob, they shouldn’t be made to, you know? Well, and vice versa, like if Jacob doesn’t want to get into the ring with someone or be in a certain space. I doubt that ever happens. Well, I mean, he left the discord. He had reasons. Yeah, yeah, that wasn’t because he was afraid of conflict. That was him making a statement about things. I suppose you’d be a little more sensitive to that than other people. Well, I mean, I respect this decision. I think that’s totally fine. No one should have to associate with anything they don’t want to for what for anyone. Right. That’s part of, I think, recognition of having these conversations, too. You have to understand what you feel comfortable associating with. And you have to deal with why you’re doing that on your own terms. But I don’t know, like every conversation is a bit different because like there’s always different rules on the table and there’s always different sort of tolerances of what someone how someone wants to play. And you’re like reading that from each other because I mean, I can be I can be pretty aggressive. I’ve been in very heated back and forth debates with people where if you’re on the outside, they’d be like, how do they hate each other? It’s like, no, we’re like we’re respecting the rules and like we understand the game we’re playing. And then after we’re done with our match, we move on and there’s no hard feelings. But there’s that there’s that understanding of what we’re doing. But if you’re not because it’s because you both actually know where the boundaries are. Yeah. Well, at least we’re willing to like test them. And, you know, if we cross it, not, you know, mark each other off, you know, but like, yeah, we yeah, we’ve done it enough to know where some of the boundaries are. Right. Right. Because if you’re with a stranger, you don’t know where the boundaries are. Right. Like I could just set you off suddenly on something that you’re deeply passionate about. And it’s like, oh, dang, I didn’t know you were, you know, that into 17th century literature. I had no idea this was going to happen. That was probably me all weekend because I was at a classics conference and classical. I’m really interested in classical education and trying to figure out like the modern classical education movement. And it’s like, you know, pluses and minuses. So a couple of times people mentioned it and I probably got way more invested than they expected. That can happen. Yeah, no. Yeah, so it seems it all has to be all has to be done in a human way. Something like conversational martial arts, like, you know, where you can argue yourself up the ranks and get a belt. I mean, it is, but it’s all it’s all informal. Right. At least in this space, it’s all informal. This isn’t it isn’t hierarchical. There isn’t somebody calling the shots. But if you go out there and make yourself interesting to the right people, you’ll get invited onto a bigger channel. And you’ll just keep on getting up, up and up and up. Yeah. Yeah, it’s interesting. I’ve been sort of looking back at Peterson, mostly because of how influential he’s been in this little corner. And Joe Rogan, he was talking with Joe Rogan once and he was comparing what Jordan Peterson does to the guy who made Brazilian Jiu Jitsu very famous. And how, like all these fighters were trying to figure out what’s the best martial art. And this guy just went out and was beating all these guys and then created this like movement towards Brazilian Jiu Jitsu. And that’s what he thinks Jordan Peterson does, where all these people come with him, who come at him with an animosity or like, yeah, it’s that. They try and take them out. Yes, they can’t. They can’t. And so we’re all looking at it like what’s going on here. And I think what Estuary is doing is trying to take the best parts of what Peterson does and apply that and try to see how those techniques, those rules help us to have better conversation. Yeah. Question is, what do you do with somebody who doesn’t want to do that? Depends. You ban them. Ban them right away. Exactly. If you’re coming out on the football field with a tennis racket, you’re going to look pretty stupid. You’ll get banned. You got to play the game. I think that’s why I think it’s interesting that Estuary does have different spaces, that we have these different just chatting talks. And whoever’s hosting them has a different set of rules and expectations. And the conversation flows accordingly. So if you want more of that aggressive nature, yeah, you probably should join Jacob’s channel and find it out. You know, like what I do, I try to be more flowy. And sort of like pull out stories, which is a different it takes a different skill set than what Jacob can offer to bring that feistiness. Yeah. They’re not neither, neither inherently bad. They just play different roles and draw different types of people. Yeah. Well, I don’t think you’ve got a very good totalitarian impulse, Cassidy. Very disappointing. But but actually very useful, too, because this is something that I’ve been thinking about recently is that the body of Christ has to have different members in order to be complete. Right. So there are some people who should go out to university and learn all sorts of really cool theological ideas and explore those spaces. Right. But it’s like not everybody needs to have that level of education. Some people need to take care of their kids and wipe noses and and keep a lot of these much more humble things running. Then some people need to be absolutely consecrated to prayer, like the monks. And then, you know, some people go out and our evangelization, you just got to have all these different places. And I think any properly functional body needs to model that where you’ve got all these different functions and different people in the place where they belong. And so if we’re going to be together, I’m not convinced that we’ve actually created a body here, but we’re occupying the same space anyway. We’ve got to have that same amount of diversity there. So so Luke’s Luke’s talking about not winning in these tussles. And then, for example, do you win an argument with your wife? That’s not winning. Dr. Peterson made the same points there. Which is why something I admire about Paul, Pastor Paul, is that whenever somebody comes in and says, you know, I’m going to be a pastor. And I think that’s why something I admire about Paul, Pastor Paul, is that whenever somebody comes in with a hot point, he’s like, yes, yes, interesting. And even if it’s something that he might disagree with, he’s just he’s going to it’s like jujitsu, right? I mean, I don’t I don’t actually practice it or know all that much about it. You kind of take the blow and then move its momentum towards your own purposes there. I mean, it’s interesting because I think a lot of what’s happening on the discord and maybe it’s different in the public spaces and different with Peterson, but it doesn’t feel like we’re all in a game to win. It seems like we’re more trying to compare notes and trying to understand each other. And so the idea of like winning and losing in a conversation like it, it has its place, but it also feels not quite right in the frame of what it feels like happening here. It feels like more than a game where we win or lose. It’s like Legos. Yeah, it’s pick up basketball. To pick up basketball game like you want to win. But if you don’t win, you don’t lose anything. Just your just your self respect. It’s not even, you know, it’s like, like, I’m joking. We did pick up basketball in the game in the seminary, in the seminary, right? And the highest priority was having the teams properly balanced. Right, so that we could so it’s like, you know, we knew who the great basketball players were. They worked me and they got to be the captains and then they would sort out who would be on which team so that we could have the closest game possible. Which is different than a winner take all sort of thing, because the point wasn’t to win a trophy or, you know, because nobody cared that we played basketball except us. It was to pursue excellence in basketball. That’s like driven almost from the love of the game. Yeah, we were. You want best teams possible that that balance out each other that create a sort of dance, if you will. Never been to a basketball dance myself. It’s it’s it’s it’s like a competitive dance. That’s what it is. You know. Yeah. Alrighty, well we fixed it. Go out and do likewise. Yeah. I want to go back to Luke Thompson’s question, get some of Emma’s thoughts here that he’s never found a legitimately classical school. They’re always classical in name and theory but less so in practice. And because I was a Catholic school kid. What is classical education, and why is it so hard. It’s very hard to define. Especially right now, because it’s undergoing something of a, it’s been undergoing something of a Renaissance, and especially since coven that’s been like changing, especially with all the, you know, the rising concerns about like progressivism in schools and stuff like that so oftentimes lately, classical becomes a catchword for conservative with no real thought to classical theory of education or classical practices. Which just complicates the whole situation right. As far as, and here’s the thing I can’t even answer Luke’s question very well because what do you mean by classical practice. Already Luke, you’re gonna have to type in an answer there. But, um, it would classical just mean going past the pressure model. That’s a large part of it. That’s a large part of it, especially initially. But also there’s this, I think it’s kind of gimmicky. But there’s this idea from Dorothy Sayers in the 30s of the three stages of a child’s development mapping onto the three. The three disciplines of the Trivium. So grammar, logic and rhetoric. And so some schools will do this like, like grades zero to four are the grammar stage grades, like, five to eight are the, um, the logic stage and grades nine to 12 for the rhetoric stage. So often, that’s what people mean by classical though that sort of, I think, dying out now. Yeah, that seems a little rigid. It is very rigid. And the more I like look into all of this, the weirder it is. Interesting, interesting. Because, um, I mean, I don’t think that would work at all to have the rigid segmentation of the education, because I don’t have to learn things just once. Right. Yeah, I got to learn things over and over again so I took a modern philosophy class when I was seminary and. You know, the first time around, I didn’t get a manual content all right, like I could, I got a decent grade, because, like, I could repeat the arguments basically, and I could like, say that this is what the words made, but it wasn’t until I like read a summary of And then, yeah, so. Yeah, and then children develop it, you know, different speeds so then like frog marching them through this sort of strict setup. Which is the exact problem with the Prussian assembly line model. Yeah. Right, because it because it’s it’s like, it’s like you’re making widgets, and like each step of the way you you put something in or you cut something off and then you get the finished product. Okay, yeah. Yeah. And then some people use classical to just mean this school teaches Latin. And then some people use classical like they’ll expand it out to include like a great books program or like the Charlotte Mason method which is extremely popular with homeschoolers, especially. So there’s a lot of overlap between Charlotte Mason which is focused on like reading good books and learning from them. And like other classical models. Hi, Luke. Hey, what’s up. Are you getting canceled in Minnesota today, or was that that’s last weekend. Yeah, it was more last weekend it’s a windy and cold today, but it’s not drifting snow. Okay. That’s, that’s you. Lucky ducks and North Dakota. Yep. Yep. So, Emma, so you’re. Yeah, I love talking about classical because getting into classical education was like my. I say it’s when my brain turned on. I started looking into it when my oldest son, a couple years from my oldest son started school. And went fairly deep into it so I love the topic. It’s a really interesting topic. And it feels really like, I don’t know, to me it feels very important and relevant right now. Yeah, well just what it means. What it means to educate in general one of the, one of my favorite things about classical. And like I said I’m not. I haven’t really ever run across a good one but. Was they, they were describing theoretically you’re teaching people how to think not what to think, which is why it’s not ideological. Which is very hard to do because then you have to ask the question what is it to think. Yeah, which gets, which is really deep waters and and I don’t know maybe part of it is my. Maybe part of it is my cynicism of people that are not philosophically inclined because I just thought you know I was going to run into all these people running these schools that were like philosopher kings and they’re not. And it’s really what I often when you were saying it tends to get co-opted by conservative types I think that’s true and part of that is I was really involved with. With the classical school system kind of associate with Douglas Wilson. I don’t know that one. So he started the Association of Classical Christian Schools the ACCS. And he wrote a book called, I mean he talks about Dorothy Sayers and recovering classical education but that’s one of his books is one of the first books that I read getting me into it. And I don’t know Douglas Wilson’s he’s a perfect example he’s a great I don’t know I love it I have a love-hate relationship with Douglas Wilson. Because he’s a brilliant guy. He’s a he’s a excellent writer he’s like he’s one of the most. Fun to read Christian writers. That I know of I don’t follow his blog anymore but he’s just very Chestertonian he looks up to Chesterton a lot. Ironically because Chesterton didn’t like Calvinist. But. Yeah it tends to be and I always found in those things I mean it’s. Wilson has a little bit more nuance to him like he’s he’s political I don’t know how deep I don’t want to take this he’s political in certain ways but he’s not really but he’s a weird kind of culture warrior being a. I don’t know reformed post millennial. Pastor guy. These okay post millennial. Means Jesus comes again and we all rain on earth is that what it means. Yeah. Okay. His viewpoint I think is essentially. Christ would cut the post millennial so Christ would come. After how does this work it’s been a while so I thought about after the thousand year rain essentially it’s like the world is getting better and better and better. And then eventually it just becomes the kingdom on earth. Okay. Okay. All of these like seriously those categories drive me crazy. I just know that I’m nice. I just know that I’m an a millennial and apparently that’s boring. Well, and then which one is it pre millennial that are the rapture types. Yep. Okay. I can never keep track of any of this either. Those tend to be the dispensationalist left behind books, you know, rapture things all the stuff I was growing up with that gives me PTSD and I was just like terrified of being decapitated for not taking the mark of the beast. Yeah. Well, good times it could still happen. It could still happen. There. I mean, it’s great videos very healthy videos to show like eight and nine year olds. Yeah, I’ll give them Lord of the Rings or something. That’s what I was watching at that time. Thank you. Speaking of what we’re going to show to eight and nine year olds. It seems like the central point that Catholic or classical education should be able to get back to is what an education is and it’s not just uploading information, you know, through the socket into the brain, just like the matrix. But it really is actually like an education of the whole person. Sure, you, you’re, you’re, you’re forming the person to desire what is truly good and worthwhile, rather than just implementing implementing a training regime, basically. And if we’re going to take all of this, you know, Jordan Peterson, John Pervaike stuff seriously about relevance realization and perceptual filters. And it’s like, what you love is what you’re going to care about is what you’re going to notice is what you’re going to act upon. And so if classical education doesn’t mean that, but it just means that we’re going to take our current Prussian model and put different information into it and have that be our assembly line, then let’s go ahead and not bother with it. Well, another part of the problem though is that this, I feel like this idea of education having guaranteed results is more of the Prussian model. So like, you can do your best. But part of, I think a key part of an actual classical education model is this idea that children are born persons. And so you have to like form them with the understanding that they already have some of their own, you know, personality tastes, whatever. And you might not be able to succeed with every single child. But like, just the combination of like situation, personality, you know, whatever’s going on with their home. Like, I feel like classical schools because they have to advertise in and get people to come in this world of schools that give guaranteed results or claim to. And this is with the classical education model to the point where it almost inevitably deforms it. Because then they’re trying to claim that they can absolutely like accomplish this, making your children love the good, true and beautiful. It’s the parents who need the classical education. That’s really true because a lot of times it’ll, I mean, I know of specific classical schools that I could name where they essentially become super elitist prep schools. Catholic schools can turn into that as well. Yeah, which is like, is that, you know, that’s the goal. And that’s kind of the, I feel like it’s very connected to the broader discussion, classical education in the little corner, because it’s… Luke, I got to stop you right there. We got a rule here that we do not name what we’re doing here. Oh, oh, OK. There are no names to it. It’s a father, er, extreme rule here. We don’t name these things. Oh, OK. You don’t name a body that can’t contain a name. How do you determine if it can contain a name? You just look at the way it behaves. We have an aggregate here. We don’t have a thing. OK. Sorry, Luke. That was an interruption. No, that’s… You were actually going to say something interesting. Well, theoretically. So, it kind of, I think it depends on these larger spirits and principalities and perhaps even bodies that we are participating in, and whether or not you can just kind of a la carte selectively implement different programs within a body when the body does not… The body is going to reject the program, essentially. So, like, in other ways, is… I mean, and it’s basically what Emma was just saying, or you riffing off of her. It was, a lot of times, the parents need the classical education, and I often found that people starting the schools need the classical education. I tried to start a classical school, and so I was interacting with a bunch of other people and teams that were doing the school, and I was just like, you don’t… Essentially, a classical school, what you’re doing, if you’re teaching people how to think, and not what to think, and really doing person making, you have to be completely outside of the realm of what I would call control or mammon. You don’t know what that’s going to look like. I mean, you can’t really. It’s not something that you can… It’s not a game. It’s not something that you can model. You can’t be a better engineer than an industrial engineer. Yes. Right, because a farmer can put the seed in, he can plow the fields, he can fertilize it, he’s got to wait for the rain to grow, and he’s got to count on those seeds growing up. Yeah. It’s not in his control. I don’t know that many cultures or bodies or groups are truly willing to do that. I think they think they’re willing to do that, but then they try to… This is where I say Christ becomes anti-Christ. They take a good thing and it becomes a very bad thing because they’re adopting the name but losing the spirit. They’re submitting to the law rather than the spirit. So I don’t know. If I could go backwards, I would just do Waldorf schools. That’s me. That’s not a very efficient way of organizing things. Yeah, I don’t know much about Waldorf schools actually. What if your teacher’s not all that good at math? How are they going to learn math? They can sew a basket or bake some sourdough bread. When are you ever going to need to do that? Do we need to go back to the moon again, Father? I guess not. As the great Dostoevsky said, math will save the world. So did Blaise Pascal, the mathematician, all the mathematics that he’s known for. Yeah. Oh, Andrew. I didn’t mean to chase Andrew away. He’s one of my most popular customers. I don’t know what I pushed, but yeah. When did you get mod privileges here? I have mod privileges. If you took yourself out of the conversation, I think you did. Oh, well, that’s cool. Maybe if you just show up enough, you’ve just given them. Oh, nice. Oh, that’s weird. Alrighty. Yeah, no, there’s a song I think about every time I hear this song, Luke, I think about you because it’s called Machine Messiah by Yes. You ever heard that one? I haven’t, but. Yeah, it’s when John Anderson wasn’t in the band. And so their lyrics actually made sense, instead of just being pretty. And it’s got like this idea of like this being with the electric ecosystem and the all seeing eye, and everybody ends up bowing down worshipping before it. So anyway, I think you’d like it. But if you’re living in the middle of this machine Messiah, how do you opt out? Yeah. Because it seems like. There was a so I don’t know. So on Grill Country, it just released this morning, Nate and Sherry spoke with Paul Kingsnorth. And it was a great conversation. I mean, it’s one of my it’s one of my favorite Kingsnorth conversations. But that’s probably just because I know Nate and Sherry really well. And I’m I’m kind of averse to talking to the high status academic people because I don’t know them. I’d rather talk to you guys. So Nate and Sherry being there are was good. But they were riffing on Kingsnorth had recently spoken with John Hears, who has a little podcast. And they were talking about a set of system. And then they ended up talking a lot about a set of system. And I think I don’t know my. Though I would say that the only thing that I really know, the only way to fight the machine is to. Is to say no, because the machine works in. Consumerism and it’s fed by the passions and it’s fed by this this hope and infinite progress and affluence and gluttony. And and the way to fight that is to opt out is to not participate in it. But how do you not participate in. Fasting. It’s your dumb thinking about getting one of those. That’s a light phone, right? Yeah. So maybe you should think about a different option. Texting is just a pain in the butt, because like this this bad boy is small. Yeah. And so your screen is small. I have small little hands, so it might be OK. I don’t have particularly large fans. And if if I had a dollar for every time I put in five L’s when I was meeting the backspace, I would go buy myself a really nice steak dinner at a New York steakhouse and one for Luke, too. Oh, wow. After after after the Great Lent, of course. Yes, of course. I actually have a steakhouse in New York I want to go to. I don’t get a dollar for every time I hit L when I go to backspace. So unfortunately, unfortunately, I can’t monetize that. Well, I mean, to get back to the question, I feel like part of it is what Peter Peterson has been talking about. It’s like live a better story. But, you know, then there’s a question, well, how do we do that? And yeah, I think it takes a lot of watching and like living and making mistakes and finding ways to learn from them. But like, yeah, you’re when you’re when you’re living a better story. The slowly but surely it feels like the other story becomes less interesting. It’s like you don’t you don’t even really feel like you have to say no, because it’s just not what like to fight to say no, because it’s just not even appealing anymore. Yeah, it’s a bit of the consider the lilies. It’s a there’s this little parable or story of the of this. I don’t know what I think it’s the Mexican fishermen or something. There’s probably lots of versions, but some American, you know, successful American entrepreneur goes and visit this Mexican fisherman in his village. And this Mexican fisherman, you know, he just he sleeps in late and he goes out fishing with some friends and comes home and eats a lunch with his wife, you know, and takes a nap. And he’ll go back out at the end of the day. And he comes home and he, you know, cook some of the fish and sits around a fire and sing some songs and drink some wine with his friends. And then, you know, that’s just his regular pattern. And this American is just like, you know, we could really streamline this and, you know, and we could like get you where you have a few boats. And I know these ways that we can store and keep the fish and we can get a few boats going and then you can, you know, you could get that going and then you get somebody to manage it and you could franchise it. And and the fisherman just looks at him and he says, you know, why would I want to do that? And the American looks at him. He’s like, well, then you wouldn’t have to fish like this all the time and you could do what you want. And he’s just like. And then he says, like, well, what would you want to do? And he’s like, well, I’d like to be able to sleep in late, go fishing with my friends, come home, eat with my wife, take a nap, go back out, spend the evenings with my friends. And it’s actually really cool. There’s a great Dalai Lama quote, too, about how like I don’t know that it’s specifically about Americans, but it’s just like modern. Somebody asked him what confused him most. He said something like modern man. He he trades in like his peace and health and whatever for money so that he can use his money to buy peace and health. And he says it much better than me. You know, he’s the Dalai Lama, but but you get you get the point. It’s it’s a weird thing. I don’t know. It’s just less. It’s just kind of kind of a it’s like you have a parasitic participation in it where it takes away from you far more than it could possibly give. Yeah. And it doesn’t feed anything except itself. Yeah, and I think I think the only way to stop it, too, is a sense of them, because like even so to make it very practical and real, like even this, like I to be honest, like it’s it’s very easy for me to impulsively, even as I’m working and doing other things and I’m multitasking. Right. I pop on YouTube and I see, oh, look, Father Eric is live streaming. Well, listen to that for a while. And then, you know, I’m an agent of the machine and I don’t know you as well. But like, I’ve known Father Eric a long time. I’ve been casting a really long time. Like, I don’t know, we’ve known each other for years. And so I’m like, well, that’s great. So I know you guys and I want to and I participate, start listening. And then all of a sudden you start talking about classical education. I’m like, well, then I’m like, you know, then I want to join in. And it’s and Sherry made a great point in the grill country video, though. The thing about a lot of this technology is like is you can you can keep it on you and you carry it around you with with you everywhere. You know, like this phone that I’m holding, like it’s what it essentially is. If you if someone if an alien anthropologist who didn’t know our technology or anything looked at this, they would be like, well, that’s a great point. If an alien anthropologist who didn’t know our technology or anything looked at this, they would be like, well, that’s a parasite attached to your body that’s drawing your attention and your energy. And and I think truly the only way to fight that, because that can become just your your rhythm and your pattern and your habit. You have to fast. There’s got to be days where you either like lock up your phone, you get a dumb phone or there’s like days I’m not going to be on my phone. I’m not going to go on the Internet because otherwise you just you will. You know, it’s like any habit. Yeah, that’s what I find really interesting about Shabbat and in like the Jewish tradition where it’s literally no technology at all. No computers, no cars, nothing. And it’s like, you know, in some ways, in a modern frame, you think, oh, that’s so extreme. Yet in another sense, like, wow, that’s really nice. Why don’t I do that? That’s really nice to just like completely disconnect from those things. Yeah. We’ve tried. My wife is Institute Screen Free Sundays and my kids don’t like it. I know that I don’t really like it either. That’s why you’re not on my live stream. Yeah, kind of. They just and they just. Yeah, you as well. But. Return to Amish. Speaking of the pluses and minuses of technology and continual access, say a prayer for my younger sister because she’s getting induced with her baby right now. OK, what’s what’s your younger sister’s name? Isabel. OK, well, we’re going to pray right now in the name of the Father, the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. Father, I ask you to send your blessing upon Isabel. I ask you to give her a safe and healthy delivery to her child, to welcome one new child into your name and to welcome that child into your holy church, to become a member of the kingdom of your kingdom. We ask all this through our Savior Christ our Lord. Amen. Amen. Father, Son, Holy Spirit. Amen. Thank you. Cassidy, you did decide to cross backwards. I’m orthodox. Yeah, yeah, yeah. She’s screeched flip everything too. It keeps confusing me. Didn’t miss a beat, Father. I just wanted to poke you. That’s all. Sorry, the Catholics didn’t win me over, unfortunately. Yeah, well, if we’d stop shooting ourselves in the foot, that would be great. Yeah, right. Just got to cultivate good things and hope for good things. As an orthodox, I was, okay, we’ve got, once again on the internet, the orthodox are punching above their weight class. That’s interesting. I’m very new to orthodoxy. So there’s still a lot to absorb in. It feels like assimilating to a totally different culture. And I came from a type of Protestant that was a bit antagonistic to traditional forms, Catholicism. Okay. Not that I have any animosity to Catholicism, but that’s sort of, there was a bit of that where I came from. So yeah, the traditional part of the practice in orthodoxy is, it’s been an interesting journey, especially with my family and sort of letting them in on that part of my life. I haven’t lost any relationships over that, have you? No, no, no. Luckily, just the dinner table debates. No disowning or anything. Just sort of a disconnect and understanding. I think it’s helpful that my sister married a Catholic. He doesn’t practice as fully as he’d like to anymore. I think he still does some Catholic things, but marrying my sister, he had a weird sort of situation where he came back to faith with Protestantism and then went back to Catholicism as he got more into it and kind of felt at home. And so he sort of feels like a, how would you say it, sort of like a respect for both traditions. So he goes to Protestant church, but I think he really loves the tradition and misses some of the mass. But that sort of broke down the categories of, because he was still practicing and going to mass every week when he met my sister. So that was a conversation. And then, yeah, and then me being Orthodox. I think it’s somewhat easier because they have a recognition that they don’t know what Orthodoxy is. It’s more foreign. Yes, that’s like, I don’t really know about Orthodoxy, but this is why I don’t like it. Okay, that’s fine. But yeah, there’s some of that, like, because of the tradition and because of the form is reminiscent to Catholicism. There’s certainly that tension, but it’s gotten a lot better. And it was never awful, but certainly there was a skepticism. I’m becoming Orthodox. Yeah, yeah. Well, I think the first time I told my mom, I was like, I think I’m going to become more Orthodox. She’s like, what cult are you joining? And it was somewhat of a joke, but like, yeah, it was sort of like, what is this? And it was pretty like a lot of silence, some comments here and there for a while, but they’re like, just let her do her thing. And then I said, okay, I’m getting chrismated. And that’s when the conversations really started. Okay, what about child baptism? What about this? What about that? Like, I’m happy to explain as best as I can for you, but I’m not an expert in this. And I got I got some advice from Shelley, actually. Her priest sort of she had she had a similar sort of like tension when she became Orthodox. And her priest told her, it’s not your job to defend orthodoxy. It’s your job to become Orthodox. And so that I kind of hold on to that and was like, okay, I don’t have to be this defender of orthodoxy. I just have to learn what it is and practice it. And like, you know, I thought it was more true than the story was given any other story it was given before. So like, I kind of was like, where am I going to go? I’m tied to this thing. Yeah, yeah. But yeah, it’s the longer I’ve been in it, though, I think the more they’ve sort of like gotten calm. At least I’m still Christian, right? Right. Right. Yeah. I’m still Christian. I shouldn’t become a Buddhist. You haven’t moved to a compound in Wyoming. You know, you still have regular contact. You’re still praying Jesus name. All sorts of things are still correct. No, I just cross myself and I’ve got Mary in my icon corner. Oh, yeah, that that’s probably the sticking point right there is all those images. Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, it’s a thing. It is a thing. It is a thing. Yeah. Yeah, we’ve got a little statue corner in our bedroom. And I think part of why it’s in our bedroom is so that it does not confront my mother-in-law right in the face every time she comes to visit. Is your is your husband a convert then? He is. This is his third Easter. He math is hard. He converted a few months before we got married, and that was almost two years ago. So third. Yeah. P.I.K. wants me to not knock Wyoming compounds so much. They are all bad. I think I think if you’re going to have a family, you should have private property. If you want to live like a monk, you should live at a monastery, you know, so take that vow of poverty. Go out to the monastery for that. But otherwise, anyway, that’s not actually a problem that we’re dealing with right now. So no, it’s interesting. I feel like the caricature of what icons is like in a Protestant frame just isn’t what I’ve come to understand icons to be. And so, yeah, it’s sort of like there’s this tension that it’s like it doesn’t it doesn’t have to be this way. But I understand why it exists. Right. Like you certainly can see the downfalls of what that could mean. And like it certainly has a certain look to it. But, yeah, when you when you really try to understand it, all of a sudden you go, oh, OK, at least I did. So, Cassidy, I know it’s not your job to defend orthodoxy, but I’m always curious of what’s happening out east. So I’ve got a question for you. OK. Lord have mercy. And if you say I don’t know the answer, talk to a priest. Perfectly acceptable answer. OK, but have you ever heard the divine Eucharistic liturgy described as a sacrifice? Um, yes. I don’t know if I have like the full comprehension of like how to explain that, but I have heard that. Right. So that’s that’s language that that comes up in catechism class or the liturgy or somewhere that this is. Yeah, so it’s it’s interesting in orthodox catechism is not it’s not the same for every individual. Right. Like we don’t have like a manual like we all go through this. It’s really like the individual and the priest like working together. So, I mean, I’ve heard, you know, I’ve heard I’ve heard that being addressed. But again, it’s one of those things that I don’t have clear in my head of like exactly how it would be. So don’t don’t take any of my understandings of it. OK, OK. I’m not going to take I’m not going to confuse you with an ecumenical counsel. Don’t worry about that. Yeah, because that’s a point that at least I’ve heard some Protestants make coming into the Catholic Church along with like Mary and the way we we venerate the saints is that once you understand that the the ultimate act of worship of Latria towards God is the holy sacrifice of the mass, which if you read the liturgical texts in the Western tradition are very much oriented towards the father. Right. So we’re participating in Christ’s worship of his father. And then all of a sudden, all of this bowing, all of this incensing, which we have, I think, to a lesser extent in the Western tradition. Now it has a place where it’s like, oh, that’s how you distinguish between these two. You know, I would never write a Eucharistic prayer. For starters, I would never write a Eucharistic prayer. And if I was going to, I would not write one to Mary, like where the sacrifice is being offered to me. There’s just like. That would just be absolute blasphemy. So, oh, oh, here we go. We have an authority here. That’s even the young make exactly the point you just made. Yes, this is where I’ve heard. This is probably where I’ve heard some of the sacrifice talk. My husband is very into Lord spirits and I find them very interesting too. I just haven’t. He’s listening to every episode. So I helped listen to it in the car. So I think that’s where I picked up pieces. But again, I don’t feel the confidence of like, OK, I fully comprehend that. It goes back to Didache, Justin Martyr. Yep. All of these traditions that we would share in common. Yeah. OK, so very good. Yes. Yeah. So it’s that’s once you get in. Once you get on the inside, it looks different than it might look on the outside. Yeah. Well, unlike this idea that icons are these windows into heaven. Right. And they’re they’re showing us what it what it looks like when we participate in the divine. Right. And like how that can transform us. Like it’s like, oh, that’s kind of beautiful, isn’t it? And like the idea that we all as humans are icons in a sense. And like we’re working to have that proper participation with divine and like be, you know, participate with God in the like creation and life and all those things. It’s I don’t know. I think it I think it opens the door to get more space to understanding those things. Yeah. Yeah. Well, that’s I mean, honestly, I feel like my own preaching, my own prayer, my own life of Christianity has been has been enriched by encountering Orthodox folks, at least online, not a whole ton of them here in Fargo. But, you know, it’s like from my very Romanist perspective, there are certain elements of the schism that are currently very beneficial right now. And part of that is, as I think we’ve been taken over by an anti-traditional spirit, or at least not entirely taken over, but that’s caused serious damage. And looking out to the Eastern Orthodox and seeing their reverence for the tradition, which I want to like imitate there. I look at that and say, you know, praise God that they’re not. I mean, they might be to a certain extent, but not the way that the Catholic Church faced in the 60s and the 70s when we were throwing out our entire traditional wholesale. It was it was like this madness is gripping people. And it’s like, well, there was a part of the world where this was not practiced. So I can actually look to that and see, oh, we’ve got something that’s even more traditional than I had thought. You know, because when I was a kid, I thought that all the 70s music was traditional. That was what was handed on to me. I can’t tell the difference in 1997. Oh, yeah. Schism provides the contrast, which I think is is very helpful. Yeah. So it’s an interesting point. So I think I think what the schism like each side has had its own like issues to deal with. And maybe if that hadn’t happened, we would have like balanced each other out and avoided this problem. But that’s not where we are now. Well, I will I will make a little complaint to sometimes I hear Western Christianity used together as a as a as a target that you’re aiming at from the east. And every time I’ve heard one of these, I think, well, that actually applies to some, but not Thomas Aquinas. That was actually this is a big, really interesting, wholly underappreciated story in 20th century Catholicism is. So from about like 1500 till almost exactly 1987, the dominant conservative way of doing moral theology in the Catholic Church was under the rubric of obligation. That we’re going to put everything under the Ten Commandments. We’re going to put everything under obligation. So you get these these massive distortions where it’s like, well, how often do you have to do an act of love for God in order to fulfill the law? And it’s like, by the time your aunt’s asking that question, you’ve been wrong for a while now. And it wasn’t until like the mid 80s that Father Surveille Pincares, a French Dominican, pointed out that these manuals that had been considered traditional for centuries at this point weren’t actually reflecting the older tradition of scripture. The fathers of the church and how it was best summarized by Thomas Aquinas. Right. And once he like laid that case out there, changed the way that the more traditional element in the church did its moral theology. So what we need more of, as far as I’m concerned, is a little bit of traditional jujitsu to say, actually, this is more traditional. That’s my soapbox. You found you found my soapbox. I like that soapbox. Yeah. Well, I mean, I came from very like. I came from the Protestant circle where it’s like the edge of Protestantism, right? It’s so modern. It’s so fragmented that like, you know, it doesn’t even want to claim a name or a denomination. And, yeah, I. I don’t want to be too harsh on it because, like, I got a lot of good from from being in that I found a love for God through those things. I don’t really understand why it exists, but I guess I looked at the history of the church and it was like fragmentation after fragmentation after fragmentation, especially with after the Protestant Reformation that is like, well, maybe we should stop reforming and just return. Orthodoxy being the oldest stream, you know, citation. I guess it just well I think the stories and the structure made more sense to me than anything else that I had seen. So it was it was hard to deny. Yeah, that’s yeah, I think that love for tradition came from the realization that. Some some sorts of Protestantism have cut themselves off from the history of the thing it came from that, you know, they they were slowly losing water and it was it was like they had so much energy to try to stay relevant that I didn’t I don’t think it’s sustainable. And so there is something sort of like timeless about a more traditional service, whether you’re talking about Protestant streams or Catholic or Orthodox, that I think as time goes on and you know we deal through more construction deconstruction and people start reconstructing and trying to find spirituality. I do think there’s going to be more revival in those types of traditions than the things that came out of the Jesus movement. Yeah, with Asbury. Explain that with the Asbury revival. And apparently it’s been like spreading and catching fire. Yeah, that’s the prayer. Yeah, man, you really are Orthodox now, aren’t you? Listen, I’ve been trying to disconnect from the internet, not very successfully. Yeah, I mean, again, I think. I think. How do I want to describe this. In Orthodoxy, we don’t like to say where God isn’t we try to look to where God is and trust that right. So I don’t want to say that God isn’t in those other things and even being a Protestant and spending almost 30 years of my life in that tradition and like dedicating my life to that I don’t want to say I never experienced God in that. And but what I found is that especially in some of these sort of revival movements, these very Pentecostal movements, it’s like they’re playing with fire, but there’s no real rules or structure how to do it. And so sometimes you make a nice campfire and you’re toasting marshmallows and you’re you’re singing kumbaya. You know, and then sometimes you burn down a forest fire and sometimes you have a big spark and then it comes down. And where I think the traditional churches have a better sense is like they’ve created more of a fireplace to take that spark and a fire that people find in those churches and make it sustainable for a lifetime. That can support a family and that can that can be more properly handled. Right. And so it’s not that I think that that isn’t going to have some relevance, particularly in the near future. I just think as time goes on and I’m already seeing it like not only in the church that I was in in Arizona, but the church here in the Netherlands. We have so many people in their mid 20s to 30s coming to orthodoxy. Why is that? Like that’s that’s kind of strange, especially in a generation and particularly in like Europe. People’s secular country. Yes, yes. And so, yeah, you’re sort of seeing that and you would think that the traditional ones would be the ones that they would not come to because it’s stuffy. It’s this, it’s that. But no, I think I think people have seen like and that’s why a lot of people are deconstructing from evangelicalism, right? They felt the pain. They’ve seen the they’ve seen the problems with it. And a lot of times you just throw everything out. And I don’t, you know, like, who knows what it’s going to look like as time goes on. But, you know, you look at what Jacob has seen and it’s like most of these people are spiritual, but not religious. And so how long can you be spiritual, but not religious till you feel like, oh, I need something to ground this and structure me. And I just it just seems like the more traditional churches are going to have the better chance in the span of history to provide that support than the churches that are constantly changing in the face of culture to be relevant and to make people comfortable. It takes so much energy. I get so well attended, like, you know, I understand the why. And I participated in that why for so many years. Being in youth programs and working with college kids and, you know, participating in those systems. But yeah, they’ve it takes a lot of energy and they definitely got certain downsides. Yeah, I mean, I definitely agree. I think also like these more traditional churches tend to have slower moving things. So in the long run, there will be more of a revival, but it will never make the news. Not not in the way that like an Ashbury revival would write like where it’s all like, because because we talk about, oh, they’ve got all these people praying and it’s a days and days and days. And then, you know, when that’s over, what stays right? What, what, what is sustainable, what is consistent. And meanwhile, the most long term and sustainable way to change the church is to get married and have kids change the world. Right. Because you’re literally like you have this opportunity to create the future with God. Yeah, I sure hope I didn’t offend Emma by. But it’s like, yeah, like nobody’s nobody’s going to bring a news crew out to have a baby unless your name is Beyonce or something, you know. But that’s actually what changes the world right there is, is trying to raise up kids. We didn’t offend you, did we, Emma? No, my laptop just started dying. Okay, all righty. So, so yeah, it’s like this, this slow change of people settling down long term committing to a, a relationship. Oh, oh, hush, you hush. I have thousands of children right now. So that’s what actually changes the world right there. Not all these these flash in the pants, but just cooperating in God’s ways of doing things. Well, right. And outside of that, you know, it’s like a, a long term commitment to something bigger than yourself. Right. So at marriage and Manassas is something two sides of that coin. Where, you know, you’re not going to have the wife, the kids, but you’re you’re giving yourself to something higher and you’re you’re operating in a way that someone who is married doesn’t have the ability to because of the different structures. And so there’s these different places for those things. That’s where I think maybe to tell us is an orthodoxy might have a little bit of an edge also, because there’s a place for singles, where it’s not quite as easy to know what that place is and Protestantism. I think when I was when I was Protestant, there was several years where I was considering Manassas ism, but not in those terms in the recognition of like, maybe I shouldn’t get married. Maybe it’s better if I stay single and dedicate myself to something bigger than myself. And when you do that as Protestant, there’s no, there’s not a lot of path. And when you talk about that and say, well, you know, I want to get married, but maybe that’s not the right thing for me to do. The response is often, well, most people do get married and marriage is a good thing. It’s like, great, but that’s that doesn’t answer the question of me. What about St. Paul? Right, right. Yes. Hey, yeah, it’s a it’s a. It’s a serious question that. Yeah, I think Protestantism has. Yeah, made marriage into somewhat of an idol, which, you know, you look at some of those late medieval attitudes towards celibacy of marriage. That was kind of like a needed correction. It’s like, oh, if you’re a loser, you get married, you know, like half the half the priests weren’t even keeping their vows anyway so the whole thing was just a mess. You know, it was all just a mess. The chimney, like we were talking about this fireplace analogy it’s like the bishops were not sweeping the chimneys the way they needed to. Right. And that’s why the whole thing burnt down. Yeah, proper maintenance. Yeah. And that’s dirty, unpleasant work but somebody’s got to do it. Yeah, but I don’t know it’s yeah it’s interesting and I think I think the marriage crisis conversation super important because we get so much. We get so many conflicting stories right and in modern culture and in cinema, marriage is degraded every time. And we think that doesn’t affect us. Oh, but it does so deeply, especially because you shroud these things in beauty. And you end the story. Before we see any of like the complications and the consequences. So there’s this like glamorization without the recognition of the responsibility that comes with the things we participate in like the James Bond movies. And that story never go anywhere. Right. That’s the male version. That’s what I look at. But it’s like, it’s the same cycle over and over again I stealing that from what James Weldon PVK is French. Yeah, but it’s like, yeah, that story never goes anywhere. Well, it’s interesting because you have, I think what movies tell us men and women want are very different from women, what men and women actually want. And you’re starting to see this, especially in the face of feminism, where some of these idolized things that were seen as glorified by men that were actually not like helpful patterns like say, say a James Bond type relationship are now being And so women are the ones, you know, having fun, no, no, you know, no husband, no connections, just, you know, complete, complete freedom and freedom. Yes. And yeah, it’s to me, to me it’s sort of funny because for for how many years and feminists fight the voyeuristic tendencies of film making and try to stop the sexualization of women and seeing us as objects. But now here we are. And now women do that too, to men. And it’s celebrated and it’s empowering. Well, I think we I think we, I think we went the wrong way on this one. I think we should be calling for more civility and less sexual objectification of people, full stop, men or women. We all need to practice the virtue of modesty a little bit more. We all need to. Everybody. It’s a virtue for humans. Yeah. But, and it’s not reducible to just a list of bullet points. Right. So, oh, you guys are, are about to trigger a lecture about Thomas Aquinas from me. Oh, perfect. That’s what I came on here for. That’s what you came on here for. She’s been planting the seeds for this the whole time. I’ve been thinking about this for like, six or seven years now. And sometimes I get to let it out. Modesty as a virtue is a part of temperance, right. It’s the ability to regulate your own pursuit of goods in a moderate way. And the way that Thomas Aquinas defines it, which he inherited from the earlier traditions, especially the Stoics actually, is that modesty is that part of temperance, whereby you moderate your pursuit of pleasure in things that are relatively easy. Right. So you need a lot of extra modesty to regulate those things that directly pertain to survival, both of the individual and the species. So you need to have a lot of strength in that specific virtues for each and every single one of those passions. But when it comes to those things that are easy, you’ve got kind of like this blanket category, which means the virtue of modesty covers a huge domain of human behavior. And so I think it’s actually I’ve thought about this is like writing a modesty talk that only gives you masculine type examples. Right. So if I’m going to be modest, I’m not going to try and make myself seem better than I actually am. I’m going to be realistic and humble about my goals and about my achievements and all these sorts of things. The way I should dress should reflect the reality of who I am. So here I am. I’m wearing my my collar. Right. That shows you who I am. And I’m wearing a sweater because it’s blizzarding outside. That’s perfectly modest dress for a man of my stature. And it also has to be individualized particularly because just as you know, what could be a perfectly balanced meal for me might be too much for Cassidy. So the way that you behave needs to be fitted to your actual station in life. So if let’s say I were to priest but I were a young man, I could be a little more, you know, a little more aggressive in trying to attract women. Right. Which is not a priority for me right now. So I just wear the same thing every day. But you would dress and behave in a different way than you would if you were a married man, if you were an old man. So there’s a little contribution from the Catholic tradition there. Sounds reasonable. Yeah. It is interesting that modesty often gets framed in the way we dress and how we look that way. It is a part of modesty. Sure, sure. But in the definition or the framing that you were talking about, that’s just so much deeper levels and what it is to be modest than that. And I think some of this problem too, it’s a reaction coming from some of the patterns that I’ve seen in sort of fundamentalist Protestant circles where modesty is very much talked about. It’s a control thing. Yes, but it’s often talked about in the frame of women. And, yeah, framing men. Well, it sort of frames men as like sort of wild beasts that can’t control themselves and women have to sort of cover themselves up to protect men and themselves. There’s certainly a complicated story with that, because it does seem like men are more visual creatures. Yeah, there was sort of that complications where it’s like at pool parties, women were told to put on the shirts and all those things, which like, sure, we’re going to have the conversation, but then you’re at a summer camp and all the boys are just taking off their shirts and playing basketball. Where’s the equal talk about modesty? Like, even even if women are more or less attracted to the physical form of men, it doesn’t mean that they’re not. It doesn’t mean that there isn’t something to be said about like, hey, modesty is a human characteristic. It’s not just a female, a female tool like people or virtue, right? Yeah. Well, and then online trad circles have sometimes have similar conversations, but with just like a weirder framing, because it’s not necessarily the like women have to cover up because men can’t control themselves. But instead it takes on this like rules of dress do not change throughout history. Therefore, Padre Pio said you can’t wear a skirt less than four inches below your knee. And that’s a mortal sin still in 2023, which was probably a perfectly reasonable rule for that part of South Italy that he grew up in. Probably. But it doesn’t seem to be now. Everything’s a mess right now. Yeah, we don’t we don’t know the rules, right? There are no rules. There are no rules for it. Seriously. Every man did what was right in his own eyes. Yeah. But yeah, there’s a lot of. Yeah, it’s just weird and confusing. But yeah, I think there’s a lot of that those questions because it’s weird and confusing. It’s like, OK, well, how do we take personal responsibility in that fact and make the best choices in those things? And for some people, that means they have this sense that they’ve got to wear the skirt down to the floor and all of those things. And, you know, it’s it’s complicated. That’s what I do. Yes. Sometimes I wear a cassock. I’m not doing anything. I won’t ask. I’m asking you. I won’t do myself. Yeah. No, like, you know, and I I’m grateful for like being given the virtue of modesty. Right. Like, you know, despite the sort of extremes that that came from and the negative things that came and kind of look aside and say, well, it’s a heck of a lot better than other things that I could have been given. Yeah, but there’s like you. I think I can recognize like the pain that has stemmed from that. And I can recognize why there is this cultural revolt to it. But I think it’s sort of misguided anger. And I don’t think we recognize the consequences of what that is going to do, not just for our generation, but the generations to follow. Well, and going back to what you were talking about, Father Eric, I wonder if we would do better to sort of focus on other kinds of immodesty and avoiding those. And maybe the cultural shift in dress would sort of come from that, like. Like pretending to be holy, you are or like lying about yourself on the Internet or like. I don’t know. It seems like our culture has a problem with all the different kinds of modesty and the Christians are focusing on one. I mean, I would think all of the temperance would be the place where I would start. Right. Yeah, let’s take a look at how much time you’re spending in front of a screen. I say to a bunch of people who are literally sitting in front of a screen right now, how much an hour and 40 minutes so far, hour and 40 minutes so far. At least I have an excuse. I’m running this thing and I kind of have to be here. But how much how much are you eating? How are you relating to members of the opposite sex? Depending on your state in life, your thoughts. What are you doing with your thoughts? What kind of cultivation are you doing with your thoughts? How much time are you spending in prayer? And, you know, Thomas Aquinas does helpfully say that this is easier than controlling the major passions of your life. That’s why I can all go out and pray. And so once you start lining those things up properly, you’ll probably just have a sense of when you are, you know, you’ll cultivate the right passions or the right relationship and the truth where you won’t have to think about it so much. You’ll you’ll, you know, maybe you’ll say something out of line and like, that was braggadocious right there. Or you’ll you’ll look at, I behaved in this way in public and I realized I was just putting somebody else down to make myself look better. And then it’ll also it’ll also measure its way out to to the clothing as well. It’s interesting the younger women in our parish choose to willingly veil but the older ones do not. No one told them. Their husbands are not enforcing it either. It’s right there. I was just about to bring that up and like wonder about that. It’s a it’s a pattern I’ve seen too. Well, and I fail. I do too. Well, it’s funny because I it was like the first or first or second time or something. I went to work like the Orthodox Church and the first time I went to Orthodox Church. It was like, but like I saw someone came up to me and they were they were like, I’m going to go to the church. And like there was something so beautiful about it. And like I came from there was a church that I was a part of when we were younger where there was divisions that came up because the pastor was talking about how to be a good person. And I was like, I’m going to go to the church. And like I came from there was a church that I was a part of when we were younger where there was divisions that came up because the pastor was talking about having women cover their wear head coverings and he eventually became men and light. And it was the way he went about it was pretty unhealthy, I would say. But there was that tension, right, like I grew up with that tension of like wearing the head coverings oppressive so it was so weird for me to be all of a sudden struck by the beauty of this thing. And no one forces me to but like and even in the church and the Greek traditions, they actually don’t cover their head but the Russian tradition. So yeah and that’s that’s the tradition I was brought in and I attend mostly now. Yeah, but there’s there’s something about going in and like taking that step to like signify you’re going into a place of prayer and like having that sort of like, I don’t know that like that humbling act of like covering yourself that I don’t know it feels somewhat important. But yeah, all the younger people started covering their heads and now some of the older women have started doing it too. It’s been an interesting pattern to see and yeah no one’s forcing them or telling them to do it. It’s just this like choice that’s coming in and I wonder if it is some of that realization of like we’ve, we’ve, we’ve grown up in such an immodest society that like this, those like little places that we’ve been to and then we’ve been to little places to capture like modesty in those ways. We find them beautiful. I don’t know it’s hard to it’s hard to say. Yeah, it’s almost like, like being modest and rebellious and kind of hipster hipster thing so it becomes kind of, but you want it to actually be reflected of the truth and not just. I’m doing this because nobody else’s. Yeah, it’s funny I have a friend she, she’s not Orthodox yet but she’s on the path to I think she’s getting chrismated, a posca. But she before she became Orthodox, she had a lot of like piercings and tattoos. And she, she completely covers them now. And she’s like, she’s always wears shirts to her sleeves and you know I was talking to her about it and she was like for me it feels like I tried to put all these tattoos and I tried to put all these things on me to become an individual to become myself. And then after Orthodoxy I realized I was, I was moving away from myself by doing all those things and by by covering, I, I, you know I have this, like, a little bit of a chance to remember, like the thing I was always meant to be. And like, I thought that was so interesting and fascinating and her perspective on that and not like her will no one told her, I’ll cover your tattoos, but like she had this instinct within her to say hey, like, going into Christianity it’s making me more who I always was and I want to find ways to recapture that and she’s doing that through modesty. It’s so fascinating. It is. And then it’s that point where she started aligning her desires and her passions internally. And then from that, we’ll talk about that faith that connection to God. And it lines itself up naturally without having to force it like your pastor, when you were a kid, like trying to force that from the top down, without having, you know, the real truth as to why, why such a thing might be important doesn’t end up working. But when it, when the, the, the metanoia happens from the inside out, everything works. Works well. It’s funny because I think Ferdy was telling me that he was listening to Lord of Spirits and Father Stephen DeYoung was saying the reason why Paul was asking men to keep their hair short was because in that time to have long hair would signify that you were interested in, you know, homosexual relations. And then to have your hair uncovered was a signaling that, you know, you were open for business, if you will. And so it was that. Yeah, only respectable women went out with their hair uncovered. Right. And so it was this, this framing of like, hey, we, we do things differently as Christians. We don’t want to be signaling those things because we, because we want to signal modesty. We want to signal things. So obviously that’s not the case anymore. But like if someone walks out with their hair uncovered, like, it’s not a, it’s not a signal for that. But it, you know, there’s certain parallels we can take to say, well, what, what is that signal in our society? Should we find ways to, you know, signal modesty and not, not in a way that’s pretentious or, you know, trying to be precocious about modesty, but at that recognition of like, hey, you know, this is, this is the path we think it, that leads to true humanity and like, how do we best participate in that? And even just that framing of like signals is similar, but I feel like crucially different from the modesty conversation of like, like X amount of flesh on covered triggers men or something like that. Like, I feel like they often will end up with the same sort of rules, if you will. But the approach is entirely different. Yeah. I mean, it also depends on climate, I think, too. Like I grew up in the desert. If you were long sleeves and long pants all the time, you’d die. Not literally, but it would be very hot, right? And so there’s a different, there’s a different culture on the West Coast of like, what is appropriate dress than something on the East Coast, particularly in the winter. And so yeah, there’s that there’s that conversation too of how much does those norms, how much is it affected by whether you know practicality of the life we have to live. I mean, there are some people who don’t think women should wear pants. I don’t know. And it’s like, well, why do we wear pants now? Well, probably a lot of it is because we do a lot of jobs that men do now as well. And so there’s a usefulness in having women wear pants. But like fashion trends have changed quite drastically. And well, unfortunately, there is a lot of like the sex industry that drives those changes. Fifth Avenue. Yeah. Or what was it the square in San Francisco? That’s the big shopping mall. Well, why was it the shopping mall? Because it was the hub for the brothels back in the day. And yeah, those fashion designers pushed the fashion always got pushed by those sort of extremes. Sort of an interesting correlation that I don’t think we think about very often. Yeah. And that makes it more difficult to untangle to. But like St. Paul wouldn’t have conceived of anybody wearing pants. Pants were for barbarian northerners. There are some great Roman writings about these crazy barbarians who ride horses all the time and wear pants. And very strange and no one civilized would do that. Well, they’ve got a point. Just kidding. No, it’s it’s interesting. The way these things correlate and like what they what they signal for us. I got stuff going on in the chat. I have to attend to. I should. That’s the hard part of these conversations. You want to be like involved, but then there’s all these texts going on. Where all these chats are coming from. Yeah. And it’s I’ve got to monitor two different YouTube chats. It’s streaming on Randos United because you kept pulling up chats. And I was like, where are all these chats coming from? Yeah. Yeah. The dual stream dual stream. So it’s streaming or does because I like to have the chats open so that I can see things. But yeah. Oh, speaking of modesty and what was it? Estuary. My church or at least one of them nearby is thinking of starting some street evangelization stuff. So what does that look like? What does that mean? That’s what I’m trying to figure out. I’ve talked with the priest briefly about it, but we don’t really have too many details. It’s more like something we just they just thought of to do. And now they’re working out the details. So hopefully it can be something where it can be fruitful for religious or philosophical conversation. Yeah. I mean, there are some people who get converted by that. Yeah. I’ve asked the Paul’s told some of those stories before. It just went out there and they encountered somebody like that’s what they needed. And it brought them in. So it’s it’s it’s it tends to be a bit of a. Bit of a casting a wide like a shotgun approach. You know, we’re just going to send this out as far as we can and hopefully it’ll hit something. But it might hit something. Yeah, that’s though. You think you’d want to do that, Andrew? I think so. It does depend on like how it’s done, of course. But I think I would want to do that. You certainly learn from it. Yeah. Yeah. Have you done it before, Cassidy? Has an evangelical. Sure. That counts. Yeah. In different forms, too, like there was forms where you go and sort of do it in service, where it’s like, oh, you know, feeding the homeless or. Trying to trying to find ways in the community. And then we actually did it once, too. We were working with some organization in L.A. and going into like a skip row. And we just went to houses and asked people to pray for them. And then, yeah, they’re spending a lot of time. So you go on college campuses, talk to college kids, ask some questions. And then, yeah, there’s like the type where you go out and you start a barbecue and invite people to eat food and you’re not necessarily talking about religion. You’re just making friends, bringing people in, those sort of things. Yeah. There’s a lot of complication with it. Yeah, I bet. A lot of good, some bad, some in between. Yeah. Well, I mean, if you’re actually putting yourself out there, that’s that’s going to be what you’re dealing with is that it’s not necessarily just going to go nice and smooth, you know, you’re going to you’re going to have to deal with. You’re going to have to deal with people. That’s what I’m trying to say. You’re going to get all that complication in there. But yeah, but a lot less people are aggressive than you would think. I never got anybody who’s really angry. And the one time I did, you know, we were able to kind of like talk to her and it wasn’t even aggression. It was sort of like skepticism. Because like, yeah, I mean, like one of the ways they like. And again, I don’t I can’t say advocate for for some of the formulas of evangelicalism, but like you submit to it and try to understand, like what it was, at least when I was like on these missions or whatever. So one of the ways to try to get you to like start cold conversations like, oh, compliment somebody’s clothes or whatever. And then they have you kind of like ask certain questions and whatever. So we were on our way back to finish everything. We weren’t looking for more conversations, but the person I was with was like, oh, I love that girl’s pants. I was like, oh, you should tell her. And she goes, oh, I love your pants. And she sort of stopped and goes. We were like, and she’s like, is this like a line? We were like, what? No, no, we would never do that. Well, somebody was like, she was like, somebody earlier complimented my pants and they started hugging me. Oh, God. I’m like, and I was like, listen, we are with them, but you just really liked your pants. And we were like, we’re going back and we were able to look at a big group conversation and it actually turned out sort of nice. But I think also it helped that I was there because I was a little skeptical of the sort of like cookie cutter way of things were going. And I tended, I think this was even before I knew Estuary was a thing or Paul or whatever. But I kind of operated in that spirit anyways, where I just I like talking to people about religion and questions. And I didn’t have that like need to be like, oh, I want to get like I want to bring them to Christianity. It’s like I clearly it clearly worked for me. And I thought it was like true for others. But I don’t know, I just didn’t see conversion as something that that was my goal as a Christian. Like, there’s certainly a calling to be spreading the good news. But that can be in so many different things. And it’s what you just you imitate the sewer. You throw it out there. Doesn’t it? Just the sewer went out to sew. Some of it didn’t go well. Some of it went well. That’s good enough. Yeah. Well, it’s interesting. Like you get these ideas of like who would be susceptible or like open to Christianity. Right. And often the people who are sort of like open and willing to have conversations are sometimes the last people you think you would. And sometimes the answers you get from people like they’re heartbreaking. You just see like the disconnect that we have in humanity and we just see like the way in which people operate and see these questions. And like, I don’t know, I just think there that there’s certainly a lot of complications and like trying to create a formula to like spread the gospel. But like participating in those things brought me like a lot of beautiful moments, too. And it taught me a lot of like a deeper understanding of like, OK, what’s going on in the full scope of it? Like, how do I orient myself well in those things? And so I mean, I I think people should do it once in their life. It’s not it’s not for everybody, but it’s certainly a certain like if you have that belief and it’s something you feel a conviction to do like. There’s certainly there’s certainly growth that happens with it. Yeah, yeah. It’s kind of nice being a priest because I could just walk in there and just wear my collar and always get an extra look from people. And sometimes I get free dinner out of it, too. But that’s not guaranteed. But that. Yeah, yeah. I think you think you had a good attitude towards it that. Yeah, and here you are, you know, talking to Randall’s on the Internet just for the heck of it. But that I just want to talk to people, you know, you’re not worried about results. Yeah, and I think I think that’s I think that’s really easy to get sucked into is getting obsessed with the results and getting obsessed with, you know, the process and the procedures and how to do all this. But it’s like, do you know who you’re working for? Yes. Are you aware of who the Lord God Almighty is? He gets results whenever he he literally is creating everything right now. Your job is to show up and be faithful and he’ll take care of the results, however he chooses to. Yeah, that kind of goes back to our classical education conversation early to. Mm hmm. Totally. Yeah, because I had two sort of hesitancies with it. One was sort of the results aspect and the formalization and feeling like, are we creating some sort of like a capitalistic system within faith? And that was like I saw a lot of problems with that. But the other part of it was like. You go out with the goal to spread your capital T truth. But like. How do we? How do we find that way to understand if the truth we’re selling is the truth that’s worth following? And I always sort of said like, hey, we go out in pairs, right? So what if we asked to run into two Mormon missionaries? We’re both trying to like, say we have the truth, but like our beliefs are different. Like, how do we know besides just our distinct feeling? And like, how can you really know if you never have a conversation being willing to be convinced that they’re right? That was sort of that mindset that often felt like it came from where it was like, we’ve got the truth, we have to tell everybody. And it’s like, well, I’m out here because I believe that, but I also don’t want to be so prideful to think that maybe I got it wrong, but that I can’t learn from somebody, somebody else. And it gets complicated. It gets complicated. It gets complicated when very young Christians are sent out. It’s like they become saved. And then immediately it’s like, OK, go tell your testimony. It’s like. Yeah, I had that feeling with Shia LaBeouf and Bishop Barron. Did you ever see that conversation? I saw pieces of it. Yeah, I’ve seen it. It was a fabulous conversation. But it’s sort of like this guy’s been doing this for like four months now. It’s like when Kanye came out and he did that worship album and all of a sudden all of these Protestant churches and people were putting him on this pedestal and they’re playing this music and they’re letting him come and speak. And it’s like that is going to do like I think that’s going to do a disservice to him. I mean, he’s a little too wild to be up on stage in a church. Well, that’s that’s what happened with music, right? He had this incredible talent that people recognize and they fed into it and they gave into it and they gave him everything and they looked past sort of the wildness of him. And then when he became Christianity, it’s like, oh, Kanye’s his force. He’s creative. Like, what a powerful story. Let’s platform him. Like no one’s saying, hey, but sit on the bench for a little bit. Get off the center of the stage. It’ll be good for you. I don’t know. Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it’s, I don’t know. It’s like there’s a rule in most, at least in the United States, that a convert can’t enter the seminary until after he’s been Catholic for two years. It’s like you just need to settle in and do this for real for a while. I’ve met guys at the seminary. I’ve sometimes wondered if I like should that actually be four years? But we also we need priests. So I don’t think I’m going to sell that one there. But yeah, I think two is good. But that’s just me. Two is probably enough. Two is probably enough. The seminary will take care of the rest of it. I was going to say I think I would do make a better decision after having practiced Catholicism again for maybe almost two years, not counting the COVID time. But also I was raised Catholic, so I don’t know if that counts as well. Yeah, it’s a little different when you have a longer experience of something rather than popping right in. Yeah. Philebus, I think what you’re looking for is St. Paul said that a bishop shouldn’t be a recent convert. He might have even been a priest or deacon. I’d have to go digging through his pastoral epistles. I talked with a priest I’m friends with here about how popes are selected. And he was telling me that if I was selected to be pope, then I would be immediately made a priest and then immediately ordained a bishop. And then I would become pope. And there would be no time in between. And I wouldn’t go to seminary. Yeah, it’s a wonder that, you know, all the popes so far have been cardinals already. I mean, at least ever since they came up with the election system. Yeah. Yeah. Got to have people with skin in the game. There is like a slower, slower movement in like Catholicism and Orthodoxy than some versions of Protestantism. And again, it’s so hard to talk about Protestantism because there’s so many flavors. It’s a thousand things. Yes, it’s like you can’t you can’t say it. And it mean this like the same thing. It’s too broad of a word. But yeah, there is that sort of like, I don’t know, it’s like this capitalizing on the passion of a new convert. And like we’ve all seen it, I think even in like Orthodoxy or Catholicism when someone finds it and like it’s excitement and this joy and they move, move into it. And like you can see why someone would would want to encourage that. Yeah, there’s a whole part of it. It’s like, well, how do we how do we kind of teach people that like to get to the how and the what, you know? It’s sort of missing. But like I love my deacon, my deacon was saying like, yeah, we tell a lot of catechumens, like when they come to the church, don’t start a blog. That is great advice right there. Or YouTube channel. Or YouTube channel. I think it’s so apt and true. I think especially because like I mean I look at some of like online Orthodoxy and the orthoporos stuff. It’s like, it’s not the fullness of like what it is to participate in church and all those things. And so there’s some of that wisdom to be a part of the church for the while before you try to be like an expert in it. Well, maybe that’s partly a function of all these people in their 20s and 30s being the ones who are converting to because like I’m getting into my late 20s now and I’m finally hitting the point where I’m like, there’s a lot more time than I think there is. Like, you know, you always feel like you have to do everything right now before it’s like too late or like move on or something. And like, no, if this is what, especially if this is what like I’m supposed to be doing. If I do it two years from now that’s not actually that big of a difference. Yeah. I mean, I think it’s a very American sort of pattern where you have that feeling of like I don’t have time I have to do now I have to be something I have to make a name for myself. And I coming coming out of entertainment world like there’s so much emphasis of that like how do you strike it famous and how do you do that when you’re young because once you’re 30, especially for women once you’re 30 like, good luck. But, I don’t know. It’s so, it is so limited in the scope of what a beautiful life is and what a full life is and like, sometimes you do need those years to not be trying to spin your wheels to like, get to the place where, oh, all of a sudden it’ll flow, and it’ll click and whatever you’re meant to be doing to. There is a need when you’re in your early 20s to actually establish yourself as something though. Sure. Not just the potential there. But it’s, it was, I mean I found it pretty straightforward for me. Just going through again just plugging into the tradition and going through the system right. It’s like well you’re a seminarian. You’re going to go through this process, and then you’ll be a priest and then you’ll be assigned to parish and it’s like, you know, I’ve kind of had a had my life kind of laid out for me. Since the time I was 18. And that’s actually not so bad. Sure. Obedience, obedience. So Andrew and Andrew there on the bottom, they’ve got to, they’ve got to go figure things out still. Yeah, imagine going to school where professors are like you define the future. It’s like, oh gosh, what is the future. But that’s part of the problem right it’s it’s not just go and make a name for yourself it’s like, figure it out and follow your dreams. There’s, there’s a difference in that and in being open or willing to submitting to a path. Like college. Some people is that but it’s still very complicated. The thing about my interest is, since I wanted to do liturgical design and architecture. There’s a lot of rules that go with that. So, and a lot of ancient history and things to draw from so it’s not like I have to redefine the entire world like most people think they have to in this kind of field. Yeah. That would be fun. Awful. What happens if you knock your nose off. Oh, you have nobody to blame but yourself, you know, doesn’t doesn’t happen to every Marvel sculpture though. It’s a rite of passage. It’s a rite of passage. Andrew you’ve been Andrew, not K, you’ve been quiet so far, what’s on your mind. Nothing too much. I mean, heck I’m a catacuman so this whole thing pertains to me, oh catacumans being silent, you know, I think that’s been helpful is. So I’m the crazy guy that you know got up, caught up with the whole orthodox craze and what are you doing me. He’s in a college dorm. Yeah. My undergrad hat, my undergrad friend group, not the whole school had a saying, like, freshmen aren’t really people yet. And the legs. I was kind of annoyed by it as a freshman. But after that, I’ve come to realize that like, they’re not entirely wrong, because what they mean by that was like freshmen should listen more than they should talk. And you probably shouldn’t date older students in your freshman year of college. And both of those I think are by and large. Yeah, all right. I’ll remember that. It’s like, have you guys ever read Brideshead Revisited. Yes. Oh, it’s a fabulous fabulous novel, put it on this. But it’s talking about the mini series is pretty good too. I’ve only read the book. So, it’s one of those fairly faithful BBC. But it was, there was this older student giving Charles writer advice about being at Oxford. And one of the things he says is that the friends you make in the first two weeks of school are not going to be the friends you keep throughout. It was like, that’s interesting right there because I’ve seen that happen. Apparently it was true back in Oxford back in the 1920s as well. Yeah, sometimes it is sometimes it isn’t. I mean, my I actually did like assemble a friend group in my first month of undergrad and we’re still close today three years out. Well, Oxford was all men back then. So that might have had something to do with it. I also made friends at the beginning and they’re still kind of the closest people I’m with in the studio. So, all right. Maybe it’s different these days. Depends on the person. I think maybe that was Oxford. Maybe that was more about Oxford that it was. You got all these all these ambitious men trying to climb up the climb up the ladder, you know. Oh, yeah. Actually holding on to your foot and going to drag you down. You just kind of kick them off. I think the whole point of that cousin giving that advice to is he’s the big social climber. Yeah, that hasn’t to be respectable and not drag him down. That may be said more about him than it did everybody else. Maybe. But Charles writer didn’t meet Sebastian until he was a few months into college, right. I think so. I think so. Well, and he met him in a rather spectacular way. So Oxford was the MIT of the early 20th century England. I said that one. You got to watch the movie Real Genius. It’s brilliant. It’s brilliant. I watched that when I was hanging out with Mark. Andrews back. Did you want to continue your story? Yeah, the good thing about going oriental orthodox is that because everything’s like so foreign, you’re immediately hit with like a sense of humility. You know, like, yeah. Anything else? Oh, that would be real humility right there if you just stopped right there. I read that St. Francis book, which I didn’t like. So I think that’s I think it’s just St. Francis is the title and then it’s by John Burkhardt or something like that. But the reason why I don’t like it is that St. Francis is like a noted active guy, preacher, wanderer, you know, he made the friars. And I rather like reading books and whatnot, you know, so for it to be so short and for St. Francis to just say go out and do stuff, you know, I don’t like it in a good way. All righty. Mark, Mark understands real genius. He’s the one who introduced it to me. Key movie to know life and he’s actually he’s actually correct. But yeah, that MIT culture looks a little bit wild today. Early on in the movie somebody freezes the hallway. And they’re all like sledding down the stairs there. And yeah. And then it’s also got this political angle in there. It’s a low key war on the deep state movie. Interesting. So my, my high school friend who went to MIT was like the most, I don’t know, square of all my high school class. So I doubt she got involved with any of that. I don’t know. Maybe it was different back in the 80s. Right. Maybe it’s maybe it’s lost its edge spoofed out. I don’t know, or chant or whatever. There was some like extremely nerdy database that’s hosted on MIT. I want to say like database of Dungeons and Dragons rules or something like that. And I was laughing about how that seems very on brand. Nerd fun. After the fall 80s, when all of humanity peaked. Maybe, maybe that’s when MTV came out. The, the sign of the downfall of humanity. Yeah. Because once something’s peaked immediately after that it starts going down. That’s how we explain. That’s the definition of a peak. Yep. And that’s, so this this had blown my mind for a while until I understood that is that Thomas Aquinas writes the summa in the 13th century, and then everything’s downhill from that. Guys, you had the summa. Yeah. But that was the peak. It had to be part of the upward slope. Higher that comes after that. I didn’t understand that. And so after Thomas Aquinas wrote the summa, nobody wrote it. Yeah, yeah, I don’t have to go to bed soon because so I can actually go more than two hours which is my normal music and visual arts combined was a big problem indeed the focus. He’s talking about another conversation. Yeah, so anyway once I understood that it’s like oh that’s how it had to happen. Or at least in retrospect that’s how it would have to happen. Unless Thomas Aquinas had a greater disciple, unless he did, but he didn’t. He was the peak. Yeah. All right, I think I have to go because I have things I need to do this afternoon, but this was wonderful. Speaking of this all of you students, Jacob needs to be doing his homework and Jacob is disciplining himself and not chatting with randos on the internet. Yeah, I should go for him as well. But thanks for hosting this Father Eric. Yeah, I feel like this is the most delightful job in the world. That’s pretty fun. Yeah. Is everybody tuning off then. No. I think, I think the Andrews are sticking with you. The ladies are taking a bow and letting it be a men’s only conversation so everything shall shift. Yeah, man time. Here we go. Have fun, boys. Yeah. Happy Easter. Happy Easter. I’ll be streaming at 730 on Easter Sunday. So, all right, I probably won’t be there. I probably will. I think we have talked about this a little bit. Andrew, California, Andrew California that’s your name. Yeah. My last name is Tornay if you want it. It’s like French ish, you know, French ish. You just, you’re just all over the place. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And I still. It’s better now actually. Okay. Yeah. I think I’ll wait till after whatever Easter to talk to my priest about it, you know. I know we’re gearing up for, you know, Easter, but I think I’m gonna check out this other church, you know. That sounds fun. I know I won’t be doing that. I do do lies with the choir. Yeah, that’s what you got to do is you got to get people involved with something where you’re missed when you’re not there. Then you’re forced to stay. You can leave. It’s just because when I was in Wapanton, I brought in a woman who was heavily involved at the Lutheran Church there. And this this Lutheran Church, it left her she didn’t really leave it. Because it like taking the pews out and started putting in chairs, like put a coffee bar in the back. And she just, she just liked being Lutheran, you know, didn’t want to be evangelical light. And then she started seeing what we were doing. It’s, it was. Yeah. So, yeah, she she was like, it was a huge gain for the Catholic Church there because she shows up to everything, volunteers, get stuff done. That’s fantastic. Yeah. Yeah, I’ve I’ve got a friend who’s going through that same thing where the Lutheran Church is leaving him. And he comes up to me and he’s like, you know, how much of your service is in Coptic? And I’m like, oh, I’m about a third. He’s like, yeah, OK, I don’t think I can go to your place. You’ll pick up on what the what the Coptic words mean. Yeah. You just go there for a couple of years and it’ll all seem normal. That’s the point I make about the Latin Mass. It’s like, well, if you’re doing this every week, you’re going to figure out what Dominus sub digus, who transferred sub tectum, maim, setantum dig verbo, et sanabitur, arima, maya means. You’ll get. I know that. He’s only been going to go on a Latin Mass for like a year and a half. He knows what it means. Actually, a little more than a year. More than a year. Yeah. Maybe like once a week. So, yeah, it’s actually it’s funny because I didn’t have it memorized. And then at one point, my choir director, Brendan, I just kneel down to do it because that’s the part of the mass. And I pick up the paper to like find it and read it off the page. And he looks at me. He’s like, Andrew, you haven’t memorized it yet. Unbelievable. And then I’m like, oh, OK. And then and then suddenly the next week I have it memorized and I didn’t really practice or anything. So, you know, I guess it helps not to look at the paper sometimes. And it only took I think that was like six months in. So it’s actually not that hard. Yeah. Online, there’s these like Coptic, whatever learning sites and whatnot. And it’s kind of helped to like just learn the letters that way you can like read it and at least like pronounce it emphatically. Right. As you need it. I suppose it’s a little more foreign than Latin is. Yeah. Yeah. And when it comes to memorizing stuff, I know like the Gloria Patry and that sort of thing. And I know Ave Maria and Salve Regina, but only singing it. I can’t actually recite it by can recite it by like just saying it. I have to sing it because that’s how I’ve memorized it. It’s the same thing with the creed. Yeah. You know, if I if I lose it like halfway through, I’m just like, gosh, you got to say the whole thing again. You have to start at the beginning. You can’t pick it up halfway through. Exactly. It’s so weird. It’s funny. Sure. Someday we’ll actually understand neural nets and we’ll understand exactly why that works. But until then, your own machinery is unreliable. I guess so. You’re not reading things back like a computer. I watched a video about analog computers yesterday. All in macro. That stuff’s cool. Oh, yeah. You watched after a conversation. Yeah. Yeah. I was like trying to figure out. Mark’s telling me all about these analog computers and like one of the first. So what what was the key insight is that analog computers can mostly only do one thing. Right. And so it’s like a miniature model of some larger part of reality. OK. That’s interesting. So like this one was designed to chart out the tides. This was built in like the 19th century. How to how to chart out the tides in a different place and like make predictions about what the tides are going to come in and come out. Apparently, that’s a really difficult mathematical problem. And it was built like this. You just got to watch the you got to watch yourself. I’m not going to be able to do it just. OK. But what the thing is, is that you’ve got this miniature model of reality and the inputs and the outputs are not as precise. There’s a little bit of wiggle in the system. Yeah. But it also allows them to do the calculations that they do with very little energy. Very quickly. So. That’s a that’s pretty useful, I guess, if you don’t need precision. Then there you go. That’s what you do. So like some of these early computers were also supposed to be like anti aircraft guns. How to compute the. And it’s like if you’re off by three inches. And you still hit the plane. Mission accomplished. Right. We’re not all that worried. True. Or if it’s like, yeah, it’s cool stuff. It’s cool stuff. I. Yeah. And now they’re making like these. They’re actually making like microprocessors that have technically analog gates. They’re not digital and they’re going to use that for matrix, the matrix multiplications for AI neural nets. And so apparently they’re going to use a lot less electricity and move a lot faster. Does that mean I don’t have to memorize a matrix multiplication anymore? I mean, you haven’t really had to. Nobody’s ever actually been able to make you do that. You just chose to do that. Well, they have your own accord based on the conditions presented to you. But, you know, a normal computer can do those multiplications the way I didn’t fully understand that part. But the way it’s like they would, I think these would be like custom chips for whatever neural net that they’re running. So the chips would have like the neural net programmed in there. And then you’d be able to run that particular neural net extremely efficiently through these specialty chips. But they’re technically analog. They’re not digital. OK. Cool. It’s all wild. It’s amazing. The fact that any of this ever works ever is amazing. Yeah, yeah. That is true. I don’t know what I’d do with it, but that sounds pretty good. I don’t have any particular use of it either. I just I think I might have might have made a good engineer in another life. Can’t priests do like specializations like that? Couldn’t you be like a priest engineer? Yeah, except the bishop’s going to send me out for canon law. So, OK. And it’s not the early 20th century anymore where we’ve got, you know, some extra hands. You know, we’re we’re pretty short handed right now, just trying to keep everything running. But I guess I could have gone into the Jesuits and asked to be a part of the Vatican Observatory. Yeah, actually, I’m multi class right now, actually, taking levels in YouTuber and the YouTuber class. I’ll be happy. Professional YouTuber. Yeah. And amazingly enough, people are still listening. Yeah. Jacob brings up my interest in Catholic theology on icons. To my knowledge, it has it changed since the Catholic response to the seventh ecumenical council, right? Like where icons are just for teaching and I don’t know. That’s it. Seventh ecumenical council. It’s the icons one. Is that? It’s by Empress Irene. Second Council of Nicaea? Might be. Yeah. So, I mean, we consider that also a Catholic council. The last, you know, 787, we accept that one. So what about that? Yeah, the papal legates voice their approval of the red. I’ll show you what I’m looking at here. Go underneath it. Yeah. The papal legates voice their approval of the restoration of the veneration of icons in no uncertain terms. Yeah, so I don’t know where we would have any trouble with venerating icons. I mean, when I’m solemnly incensing the altar, I give incense to the crucifix and any other images of Christ in the sanctuary space, which isn’t quite as much incense as the Orthodox use, but we’re still incensing those things. And if it’s the feast day of a particular saint, their icon or their relics, if you have them, can also be incensed. So does that help answer your questions? Yeah. There was something though about the Sistine Chapel. Yeah, Michelangelo ruined Western art. What about Raphael? I don’t know. I don’t know. I’d have to look a little bit more. I object to him less. Speaking of unobjectionable men, here’s Adam. How’s it going, Father Eric? Is it early in the morning or late at night there? It’s late. It’s about half ten at night. All right. What are you doing? What are you doing, Father? You’re pulling a stream at this hour. This is this is this is way too early. Yeah. At 2am, 1am. What’s the deal? Well, well, I mean, you’ve seen the title of the stream. North Dakota’s canceled, so I’ve got to figure out something to do. OK, fair enough. Canceled by 10 inches of snow and heavy wind. Well, well, I’d ask for a confession, but we can’t do that. I don’t know the Internet. Adam’s wearing a tie a lot these days. He’s really classing it up there. Yeah, today. The reason today is I was doing a reading at Mass. So that was. Oh, gosh. Yeah. Oh, this is this is the Adam from Ireland. Yes, it is. That’s why it’s 10.30. That’s why I’m very late. My little cousins, all my little cousins are over now. So this is this is a rare opportunity. They’re inside watching. I don’t know what. Initially, it was a bad Adam Sandler film. Let’s go from one of the good ones. It was grown ups, too. So, no, I mean, from the get go, I can tell it was pretty bad. They’re at that stage when they’re kind of between its ranges from 14 to I think about 16. So, you know, there’s not really much could be done from that stage. They’re there. I know what I was like at that age and I wouldn’t want to know me. Yep. Yeah. So what were we talking about? I just jumped in. We’re talking about Sistine Chapel. Yeah. Michelangelo ruined Western art. What? No, he did. He did. I mean, so like my intro to my streams, you know what that is? That’s a the apps from the Cathedral of St. John Latter in Rome, right? That’s the cathedral for the whole world. Oh, yeah. If I were to show that to Jonathan Peugeot, he’d be like, this is a great example of iconography because it fits. It fits like all the patterns. So brought it up here before. And by golly, we’re going to we’re going to bring it up again. That’s got a Byzantine style iconography, right? Yeah. And guess what? It’s better than the Sistine Chapel. OK, that’s a nice big file. Zoom it in. We’ll zoom in a little bit more and come over here. Share screen. I do like baroque. I do. I do like the baroque style, but yeah, it’s a bit much to maintain it. All right. So here you go. You got all the stuff that you want. You’ve got the Blessed Virgin Mary on the on the right. You got St. John the Baptist on the left. You’ve got the Garden of Paradise here and the Tree of Life, which is also the Crucifixion. You’ve got the Garden of Paradise here and the Tree of Life, which is also the Cross. You’ve got Christ in the heaven leads the Holy Spirit coming down upon it. And guess what you don’t have? You don’t have a depiction of the Father anywhere because he dwells in light inaccessible. Yeah, we have we have God the Father in our church. Oh, I don’t get that. Oh, it’s like Philip said to Jesus, show us the Father and that will be enough. And you know what Jesus said to Philip? Jesus said to Philip, have you been with me so long, Philip? And still you do not know me. He who has seen me has seen the Father. Bam! We don’t need any artistic depictions of it because we got this guy right here who’s showing us the Father literally right now. Isn’t it supposed to be something like a lot of those Western depictions? Don’t they kind of get away with it by saying, oh, that’s the Ancient of Days. They’re not even trying that anymore. No. They’re not even bothering. So we’ve got this Newman Center at the North Dakota State University, right? It is an absolute awesome program. They’re getting people married out. They’re sending people to the seminary. They’re sending people to religious orders. People are getting plugged into their parishes. You know, they’re doing what it needs to. They’re building a new church because they didn’t have enough space. So they tore the old church down. They built faith-based campus housing, right? They’ve got this whole complex there where we’ve got a coffee shop, meeting rooms, great things happening. They’re building a beautiful new church for them. And they ruined it by putting a depiction of the Father right front and center. And it’s just like, oh, you guys are doing so much right. And then you just stumbled at the finish line. It’s going to be literally perfect. Well, some people look to things that look great, for examples. And then sometimes they think, hey, Michelangelo did that. Maybe it’s OK. It’s not OK. Who approved that? It would have gone up to the bishop. It’s like, I need to get myself onto that committee. I will sit through these committee meetings just to give that rant. Yeah, it seems to be a bit of an overstep to depict God the Father. Because it’s just too much. It’s just like it’s… Yeah, I don’t know. You’re going to give people the impression that the Trinity is an old man, Jesus and a bird. That’s the Trinity. Yeah. If that’s what you think the Trinity is, then you’re just so wrong. I can’t help you anymore. So anyway. Wow. This was a point I was making with Cassidy earlier. I like looking to the Orthodox for certain things because they actually have some respect for their own tradition. And I think we would be unstoppable as the Catholic Church if we actually had at least 30 percent of that. Thirty percent of that respect for tradition. So I look at this stuff and I look at what they’re doing and I’m like, that’s actually what we are. And we’ve lost that. And that’s why things aren’t going well for us. Yeah, I think it’s only so long that can really be sustained now at this stage. I think, you know, I mean, I remember actually this year is the year that we said we shared the date of Easter with the Orthodox, which I think is is important. But probably I won’t be feeling that importance because I’m going to be at my parish church. But one moment. Sorry about that. Yeah. So so have you ever have you ever heard the Orthodox Greek Orthodox chant Psalm 135? It’s called the polyaleos. It’s worth it’s worth listening to just because of the way that they do it. They have the psalm so well integrated into the liturgy. I think they do it for matins every morning for morning prayer that it’s kind of like a journey. It’s like a journey. And they have they have the like bells and not bells. It’s the closest thing I can think of in a Western musical setting is like the shaky thing is that called the tambourine, something like that. And anyways, they’ve got those and they’re and they’re shaking that rhythmically. And they’re it’s a journey. It’s Psalm 135. So you’re going from the beginning all the way through to Abraham to so creation Abraham and then Egypt and then kind of all the way to the end where it’s praising God for his greatness. And it’s like this long, long thing. But you it’s heard in the voices. And I think that just comes out of the fact that it’s so long. They just kind of have to keep keep it up for that for that length of time. And in the Latin right, you do have that, I think. But the idea of chance, I think this must have been on the last Sunday stream. I think it was Andrew was mentioning or was it was dead. Yeah, Ted mentioning the kind of physical nature, the physiological nature of chant and how that change changes things entirely. And just listening to that, that Psalm 135 chanted in Greek, you could hear it. You could feel it. So there’s definitely something to be learned from from the old tradition and Gregorian chant, which I have another thing entirely on Gregorian chant. I think I went on and bridges of meaning for a while. Yeah, on top of you, you’ve got to Gregorian chant enjoyers up here. So right. And I want like I enjoy it as well. But I wonder I wonder how it would have sounded if we went to 50, maybe not even before 1500 or 1500. I don’t know. But the the fact that for a long time it was only allowed for men to intone and chant in the church, I think, is an important thing. That’s kind of overlooked. And I I think you see that broadly in Western music. Anyways, there’s kind of when it comes to the heavenly, it always has to be a kind of high register, high pitch. And I’m like, now, when you listen to some of the Russian Orthodox stuff or not even the Russian Orthodox, the Greek stuff, there’s a lot of bass in there as well. Yeah, I would like more bass just because I have a lower singing voice. I have a singing voice. So singing high is just uncomfortable. Both have their place. That’s the thing. Right. And I think I wonder to the degree to which that’s been edged out just basically as a matter of circumstance, possibly also taste. And because we’re talking about, you know, representing God the Father and it’s like, that’s just and you don’t do that. But in a similar way, I think there’s there’s a way in which the reason why that might be the case, let’s say, is because you need you need to look to to fathers as such within and on Earth and to get a glimpse, to get a glimpse of that. Not even not even, you know, a full picture of that. And part of that is, you know, there’s the priest sensing the altar chanting. Right. And then there’s the the scholar, the choir, which is like the kind of whole band of laity and clerics, however, however that plays out. But lady and clerics all together in arranged in echoing the great prayer of the church. And I don’t know, I just don’t I don’t see that so much anymore. I don’t know why that is. 1848 Seneca Falls. I think that might be it. Yeah. Yeah. Feminism, I believe. First convention. Destroy the family. Destroy the family. They were pretty clear. They were pretty clear. Families and oppressive structure. Yeah. Families allowed. Yeah. Families allowed going to raise the children free range. Free range children. You just send them out into the woods, let them develop their own potentiality themselves. Well, and then we can celebrate the feast of the the what is it, the free father on the 17th of March instead of St. Patrick’s Day. If who if you want is. Yeah. The what is this? So that’s I’m already mad about it. Yeah. So that’s a Roman festival that went on at the on the same day as St. Patrick’s Day. And they coincide. And so the feast of the feast of the free father is is kind of at Lieberpattern is kind of a it’s a it’s a run of the mill pagan festival. But it coincided with the young men getting rid of their boys togas. And, you know, there was parading of certain sculptures of a particular to kind of go along with that of a particular form. You have, you know, temple priestesses. Oh, yeah. And as well, the temple, the temple of the free father is run by it’s entirely women. So he’s got priestesses and no male priests. And so that coincides with St. Patrick’s Day. And it kind of conversely St. Patrick’s kind of almost the opposite of that. He is the he is the he is the father most most properly sort of looked at of, let’s say, the Irish and apostle to the Irish. But a father of of of of of of faith in there within Ireland. And he is from from the beginning of his story, he is bound in some sense. He’s he’s he’s limited and first as a slave. But then, let’s say, after after the manner of St. Paul, a slave to Christ Jesus, which is is the freest one can be in the truest sense of the word. And so I wonder, I wonder, you know, when you look at the celebrations for St. Patrick’s Day, how much that, you know, what spirit are they participating in? Because I don’t think it’s St. Patrick anymore. I think it’s it’s it’s the feast of the free father. I say Patrick could be like great bread and water. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I was hoping for it. Now I’m going to go sleep in a cave during a thunderstorm. Yeah, because you have to be able to do that as a father. It’s just something that has to be on the table. Whereas if you’re the free father, think, you know, I don’t know, big cows or something like that. It’s it’s it’s completely there’s no responsibility on the table. Yeah. Yeah. How about that? Speaking of responsibility, I will be back in a little bit because I’m going to go to confession. Don’t worry. It’ll be very quick. I don’t commit many sins. All righty. Well, we’ll add another Andrew in just to keep the good. It can’t be Andrewless. Yeah. Yeah. OK, I’ll be back. See you, Andrew. God bless. See you. Oh, man. I don’t know how much longer I’ve got. I got to go get supper and I’ve got a six thirty meeting tonight. But we’ll we’ll keep this going for a little bit here. How’s the preparations for Oh, hello, Mark. Hello. Can you all hear me? Maybe you should get your mic a little closer, but we can hear you. I know it might be messed up. Is that better? That’s a little bit louder. Yeah, I can hear. OK, I don’t know which mic gets using because I’m on the road and new laptop. All righty. Yeah. Holy Week preparations, I think, are going pretty well. We’ve got some very dedicated volunteers who take care of a lot of the details. So I don’t have to worry about each and every single one of them like I might when I’ve got my own place and everything’s a little bit smaller. Cool. Cool. Tomorrow is Monday, Thursday, so I’m going to be getting my feet washed. All righty. Very good. Yeah. So that’s that’s going to be interesting. I mean, it’s it’s always yeah, don’t don’t don’t let Mark on. We can’t we can’t be having no French Canadians, simple as. Yeah, well, that’s what does it what does it look like in your in your parish, Father, because do you do the the narrative kind of readings? For the first day? Well, for the Gospels in general, for whatever on the major days when that happens, I forget which ones. So yeah, so Palm Sunday and Good Friday do a narrative style where the priest takes the part of Jesus and you got a narrator and a voice in the crowds. Yeah, yeah, yeah, that’s the way we do it. Is that regular? I don’t know how long that’s been around. So if you go back into the day, you would have a cantor and a deacon or a priest and then you would have the choir doing the crowd parts. Oh, OK. That’s so interesting. So it was it was split up in that way. But having everybody with their missiles in front of them reading it out, that’s a little new, but it’s not like it’s so new that nobody knows where it came from. That’s cool. OK. Yeah, I never I never knew that. So you had it was a whole it was still a whole sort of thing. You were bringing in everyone to to enact what’s happening. And the traditional chants, it’s like the narrator would kind of have this middle this middle point and then Jesus would chant lower and then the voice would chant really high and then the choir was kind of in that in that fourth spot. Oh, cool. So it was. And I’ve actually I’ve done I’ve chanted the passion narrative before. I took the narrator part when I was in Detroit, my third year of seminary. We I stated Holy Week in Detroit, chanted it at the cathedral there. I really at some point I’m going to get back there. I’m going to bring chanting passion narrative to the Diocese of Fargo, because we can’t let stinking Detroit outdo us. Right. Detroit’s falling to pieces. We’re civilized here. I love it. Great. Very, very participatory. Yes, I. It’s one of those things I think you’d like, you know, having the whole crowd shout at the priest, crucify him, crucify him. Yeah, I think that would work. All right. Only if I don’t like the priest. Oh, and at the cathedral in Fargo, every so most of the Holy Weeks when I was seminary and I did all the Trinidad liturgies at the cathedral. There was always this one woman in the front who, when they were doing like the crowd parts, she’d get really into it. And so she was like, crucify him, crucify him. But then you don’t need to be that excited about it. She’s doing her part. She is calling for the blood of Christ with great enthusiasm. Great enthusiasm. Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, everything’s going well. You got a few details I got to hammer out with the choir. But otherwise, we’re going to do a couple baptisms and a lot of confirmations on the Easter vigil. So that’s that’s good to hear. Yeah, I think it’ll end up being one. Yeah, it’ll be four baptisms, but two of them are one of the catechumens, are the catechumens kids. Okay. And I was like, you can get baptized together or you can do it separately. It’s going to take like three hours. He’s like, oh, I think the kids will be fine. It’s like, hey, all righty. Let’s go for it. Great. They’re going to be the youngest people there because a lot of people, they won’t bring their kids to the Easter vigil. It takes three hours. It’s a very long. It starts at eight thirty at night. But I was able to prevail upon my pastor to do all of the readings instead of cutting them down. So we do that the same way. We do that here as well, which is maybe I shouldn’t be expecting that. But our parish priest insists on doing all of the readings as well. Yeah, same for whenever the Matthews gospel comes. It is read. Maybe not on Easter. I forget when this is what it’s going through the genealogy of Christ. He does that at four thirty on Christmas. Yeah, I think so. That’s right there. I even do the short version of that because the four thirty masses when everybody brings their kids, the kids are like crawling up the walls. And I’m like, we got to keep this fair enough. Yeah, I suppose that’s that’s why you have the abbreviated reading. Right. It’s to have that sort of flexibility. No, he he did it. I mean, he started he started in this parish. I don’t know whether it was here before. He started getting up at half six in the morning to to do morning prayer and the morning prayer. And then mass on Sunday. So he’s I can’t say that he doesn’t he isn’t he isn’t kind of putting up the goods as well because he’s also he’s also a rather large man. So that’s also that’s also I mean, that’s that’s a real that’s a real barrier as well. Getting up at half six in the morning is and then and then getting to the church, opening it up and then chanting the prayers. So yeah, full readings. I’m going to be doing the first three. The Genesis to Exodus on nice on the banks. Those are the best ones. Yeah. I’m going to have to read over them a little bit just to make sure I kind of have the procession of them. My head will be broken up by Psalms. You can you can do it in the Jerusalem Bible, too. You’re not stuck with the New American Bible. Yeah, I still have my gripes, but that’s I’ll never. Of course, it wouldn’t matter. Even if I had the translation, I like that still have problems with it. Yeah, I have no idea. And I’ve seen some readings from the New American Bible like on talking about the scene. Christ is crucified and it’s the thieves talking about his punishment. And it’s like this really long track, very specific instead of it being like, you know, the penitent thief being like he has done no wrong. It’s like, you know, this man has done this standard has done nothing worthy of crucifixion or something like that. Right. Right. And our our our punishment for our crimes is matter corresponds to our crimes or something. Yeah, it’s a little wordy. Yeah. Now, Mark, where are you traveling right now? If you can say I’m in New Hampshire. Oh, up to see family. Yeah. For Easter. Set $11 and 50 cents. Round trip. Wow. Magic credit cards. Everything with the with the airline card. And then I get a trip every every once in a while. Yeah. Yeah. You’re using the bank’s private airlines private currency. I’m amazed that all these Liberty people don’t understand that. They’re like Bitcoin. I’m like, no miles. Airline miles is a private currency. Well, or rewards points. There’s thousands of private currencies. Everyone’s whining about the dollar. I’m like, there’s ways around that. Very nice. Very nice. That’s good. That’s good. New Hampshire. That’s one of the states I haven’t made it to yet. Oh, that’s the pretty one. Is it? Yeah, they got the mountains and yeah, nice, nice tall mountain. You can climb. I got the Manadnock for which all other Manadnocks are named apparently. Yeah, it’s it’s good fishing. Four seasons. Yeah, I’ve got a feeling we’re going to skip spring this year. Go straight from winter to summer. Happened last year, too. Oh, did it? Yeah. Does that affect farming up there? Yeah, yeah, they want to get planted as soon as they can because our growing season is so short there. Short. And they’re really they’re really itching this year. It’s like, when is this snow going to melt? So they’re planning around it. They’re ready. They, you know, they’d probably be ready to go as soon as the sun is shining. Oh, yeah. Well, you’ve got to wait for the fields to dry out in order to get a big piece of equipment out there. Yeah, because if you go out there when it’s muddy, you’re just going to get stuck and nothing’s going to happen. Right. You can’t you can’t take one of those big planters out there. Everything every all the farming in my area is very big. Right. I mean, you’ve got these combines that are the size and the cost of a very nice house. Yeah. Well, that’s that’s the thing. It’s it’s I mean, here you do have that as well. But I think they share around combines. But there’s a lot. You’ve got large track to land there. So I imagine if you’re going to be using a combine, you probably do want to just try and own it or at least have it so that you have you bought it via loan essentially. Yeah. Yeah. So it’s all it’s all super big out here. And yeah, you just got to wait on the weather. So that state is more than twice the size of Ireland. Yes. His state. Just just the state. Well, you guys probably still have wolves and stuff. So like where Ireland edges you out, we are one big farm. We have moose. Even better. We don’t even have that. We have a few moose running around. You can get some mountain lions in the western part of the state, but not wolves. OK, I was using wolves as proxy for things that could possibly kill you. And again, Ireland. Every once in a while, there’s a brown bear running around. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t have we don’t not a single one. Zero. San Pellegrino is one of your private curving seas mark. Yes. Can we bribe you with those? Oh, yeah. Well, free food and San Pelle. Whatever you need. Perfect. Yes. You’re like a dog. Yeah. Like where I like whoever feeds me. Yeah. You live in a car for a while in the winter in New England and no food. And you might be like that, too. Just saying. I’m having a healthy appreciation for free food. Nice. Oh, I got good news, by the way. Might as well say it here. I’m now employed. Oh, yeah. Awesome. I got a job offer today. Little cousins were over and they. Meanwhile, my mother heard a phone call. I’m like, oh, I’m going to get a job offer today. Meanwhile, my mother heard a phone ringing and she mentioned it. I was like, what are you talking about, man? It’s fine. It’s fine. You know, I’m playing with one of the four year olds or whatever. And he’s just he’s building up a tower and smashing it down. And yeah, I know. So I got a job offer. So today has been kind of on on on naturally good. Like it’s morning. I get my baby cousins come over. I you know, my my my sort of teenage cousins come over. It’s great to see them. Yeah. And it’s just been a really relaxing but also profitable day. You do a reading. I got a job. Yeah. Yeah. The women women in the in the in the in the church were like, oh, you’re dressed very well. And it’s like, OK, great. You know, I get to talk to the people who had never even talked to you in the church before. So, you know, thank God. Thank God. Because I know there’s no accounting for that job you’re getting. Is it like a career or is it just like this is a good opportunity for now? Could be either or it’s a technician position in like kind of in semiconductors. So I’ll be working on the machines that they have there for lithography. I won’t be touching anything. Not even the people who are who are working top in the in that company touch anything. They say that the Japanese come in every couple of months and maybe like touch the machine once. And we’re there to kind of in the meantime, make sure everything’s running OK. So it could be could be a long term thing. Could could not be. But it’s good to have something where I where I can say I was employed for a certain level, a certain amount of time by this company for this for this period rather than just saying, hey, I was a research position. I had a research position at a university. Because you mentioned in the interview, yes. So, by the way, I know you’re used to stuff in university now, but you know, you know, you’ve got to be kind of used to being in a job. But it’s like, OK, I’m ready for that. I wanted to put across that I wasn’t completely useless. I’ll show it a little bit of enthusiasm can go a long way. Yeah, I am experiencing some enthusiasm myself right now. Enthusiasm for supper. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So I’ve went three hours, Mark. That’s nice and long for me. I did. I did eight and a half on Friday. And I’m not even aspiring to that. I got a live stream that has a thousand views, not the last Friday, but the Friday before. Got a thousand views between the three channels. We are down to six people watching. You get it. You got to catch up, Father Eric. No, I don’t. That’s the beautiful thing is that we’re different people. With different goals, with different goals. And right now, my goal is supper. So, Mark, Adam, glad you guys jumped on. Andrew, always good to see you. But I think we’re going to wrap this up. So God bless you all. God bless you, Father Eric. See you all.