RCIA Foundations

The finale opens by gathering up the summer: the pagan voices the series kept hearing — the oracle at Delphi, Apollo and Athena — and the dark verdict of Christians who were being killed in those gods’ names. It returns especially to last week’s two biblical witnesses, the Magi and Melchizedek, and to the question they force: was any of paganism legitimate? Then the courtroom assembles. Justin had predicted his own prosecution in print, naming Crescens, a Cynic philosopher who denounced the Christians to the crowd without troubling to examine them. And the judge was Junius Rusticus — not a bureaucrat with a philosophy hobby but a Stoic of rank, the teacher Marcus Aurelius thanks by name in the opening pages of the Meditations. Socrates was condemned by a democracy that did not understand philosophy. Justin would be condemned by philosophy itself, seated on the tribunal.Then the class performs the trial, every part taken, from the court protocol that survives. Justin answers the prefect with a creed; asked where the Christians meet, he says their God “is not circumscribed by place” — the doctrine of Jacob’s Well, restated to the prefect of Rome by a man who grew up within sight of it; and he gives his address, a rented room above a bathhouse, open to anyone who climbed the stairs, with no fee and no prerequisites. Then Rusticus works down the line of the accused: a woman, a slave of Caesar’s household who says he has been freed by Christ, a refugee from Phrygia, believers raised in the faith by their parents. Justin had written a decade earlier that no one ever trusted Socrates enough to die for his doctrine, but Christ was believed by artisans and the uneducated. That morning he heard it as a roll call beside him in the dock. And then the exchange the whole summer has been building toward: asked whether he merely supposes he will ascend to heaven, Justin declines the hedge Socrates held so honestly — “I do not suppose it, but I know.” Not a better argument, the session argues, but a different kind of cause: not a conclusion reached by reason but an event, a dead man returned.The session closes by reading what these people actually did on Sunday — Justin’s description to the emperor of readings, homily, prayers and the Eucharist, the earliest account of the Mass we have, recognizably the class’s own Sunday across eighteen and a half centuries — and by closing the docket of the series’ three trials. And it ends where the transcript’s sociology points: on ordinary people. Socrates was a stonecutter, Paul made tents, Jesus was a carpenter, and the six who stood by Justin met above a bath. You are not marked as a Christian by being strange, but by your love.

The session opens by going back to the old man on the seashore from Class 1, and reading him beside the road to Emmaus: a stranger falls in with seekers, expounds their own canon to its limit, sets a heart burning, and vanishes before he can be thanked. One road ends at the table, the other at prayer — and both doors, as the class works out, open only from the far side. Then the question the room wants to ask: is the old man Socrates? Literally no, he is a Christian elder. Typologically he is something better — Socrates on the far side of the introduction, the method finally in possession of an answer.The doctrine itself is the payoff of a word planted five weeks earlier. The Athenian philosophers sneered at Paul as a spermologos, a seed-picker; Justin, apparently without knowing it was an insult, turns it into a metaphysic — the logos spermatikos, the seminal Word sown in every human mind. Hence his boldest sentence: those who lived reasonably were Christians before Christ, Socrates and Heraclitus among them. But the seed is not the harvest, which is why the schools contradict each other. From there the class works through the keystone passage where Paul's altar, Plato's Timaeus and Socrates' trial all meet in one paragraph, and Justin's devastating sociological correction — no one trusted in Socrates so as to die for this doctrine; through his lawyerly amendment of the Myth of Er, at exactly the joints the class exposed in the Paul sessions; and through the argument he got historically wrong, whose collapse leaves only his better idea standing.Then Justin goes into the dock himself. His demonology hands the entire religious world outside the covenant to the enemy — and the session takes the census he never took. Scripture grants him demons but refuses him only; the pagan pantheons look like human projections cast on a real population of spirits; and for every ministry heaven performs there is a spirit bent on deforming that same ministry under the same name. Worse for his architecture, the counterexamples were in his own handwriting: he quotes a pagan oracle among the prophets without noticing; he reads the Magi — the clearest case in Scripture of God addressing pagans through pagan means, and then directly, in the same channel he uses for Joseph — as war booty freed from a demon; and Melchizedek, a Gentile priest certified by Scripture without call or conversion, is one of his favorite texts, deployed for everything except the question sitting on the page. That last one carries the session's largest claim: the Messiah's kingship descends through Judah, and his priesthood through a Gentile order — so the both/and is not diplomacy but design, ratified in the Person himself. And with the census finally taken, the class can do what Justin never did: audit the sign that guarded Socrates for seventy years, and ask which column its record belongs in.

Born around AD 100 to a pagan family in Samaria, within sight of Jacob's Well, Justin went shopping for God among the philosophical schools, and this class follows him station by station: the Stoic who knew nothing of God and thought such instruction unnecessary, the Aristotelian who asked him to settle the fee, the Pythagorean who demanded music, astronomy and geometry first, and finally the Platonist, whose promise that the mind could ascend to look upon God — "for this is the end of Plato's philosophy" — set him alight. The summit turned out to be vacant. Then the turn: an old man on a seashore takes the young Platonist apart using Socrates' own method, corrects Plato on the immortality of the soul, points past philosophy altogether to the prophets — men who saw and announced rather than demonstrated — tells him to pray, and is never seen again. Justin's verdict on his own conversion is the sentence the session turns over: "Thus, and for this reason, I am a philosopher." He kept the philosopher's cloak, and around AD 155 wore it to Rome to file a formal petition with the emperor on behalf of the Christians — the defense of Socrates, in Socrates' own genre, quoting Socrates to the future Marcus Aurelius's face: "you can kill, but not hurt us."

One word broke the room: anastasis. This session is about why — and why that word contradicted the court’s own founding charter, in the charter’s own vocabulary, standing on the charter’s own ground.

Around AD 50 a Jewish tentmaker is stranded in Athens with time on his hands, and ends up making what may be the most consequential philosophical speech ever delivered — in the same city, on the same charge, before the same court that tried Socrates. St. Paul reveals the unknown God to the philosophers of Athens. But they are all Stoics and Epicureans. Where are the Platonists, the followers of Socrates? What are these altars to the unknown god? How does St. Paul both ratify and correct the theistic contributions of the philosophers?

The defense ends, the jury votes, and Socrates is asked what he thinks he deserves. His answer is not what his friends were hoping for. Then, waiting to be led away, he says two things no Athenian was supposed to be able to say.

Socrates is on trial for his life, and the case against him is older than the charges. We take up the two indictments, the three rumors behind them, and the method that made him famous — then watch him take the prosecutor apart with it. Join our deep dive into Socrates and his unknown God as we join him at his trial in Plato's Apology!

We come to the final episode in our Perelandra series. With Ransom having defeated the Unman and being nurtured back to health by this perfected world, he encounters the eldila, Malacandra and Perelandra, who bring him to the King and Queen on the Holy Island. There he learns of the temptation of the King and the recovery of the Queen, of a world saved by the virtue of its founding parents. Confused, still, by the Unman's assault on his imagination during their ride on the fishes, Ransom seeks clarity on the meaning of the small over against the immensities of Maleldil's creation. In answer, Malacandra and Perelandra offer him the vision of the Great Dance, how each individual and each community--because they are rooted in Maleldil himself--are the center and thus, infinitely loved and valued.

After his intellectual assault fails, the Unman shifts his strategy to assaulting the Green Lady's imagination. Ransom grows in desperation as he realizes she is being worn down. Three times he thinks, this cannot go on. Then a grisly idea occurs to him.

Weston/the Unman begins a multi-pronged attack on the Green Lady, first using two waves of argument to persuade her to live on the fixed lands. When that fails, he shifts to trying to bypass reason and infect her imagination. In spite of Ransom's help, she begins to wane, as exhaustion overwhelms her. How long can this go on? Three times Ransom says it cannot!

Weston travels to Perelandra in a newly built spaceship and proves adept at speaking Old Solar. He then apologizes to Ransom for his former behavior, explaining that he has discarded his previous materialist expansionism of the human race to the planets with its attendant liquidation of their native species. Weston explains that he now serves a new master, guided by something he calls Spirit, a force that drives us toward and ultimately fulfills us in a new human disembodied destiny! Ransom becomes increasingly concerned.

Ransom recruits Lewis to aid him in his trip to Perelandra. Ransom arrives and finds a stunning world of oceans and floating islands. While there he meets a Green Lady who speaks Old Solar, the language of the unfallen Field of Arbol, what we call the Solar System.

Discussion of the nature and significance of the Sacrament of the Holy Eucharist

Introduction to C. S. Lewis' Space Trilogy and overview of major elements of the first book, Out of the Silent Planet.

Jesus had a remarkable way with people.  He spoke to their most intimate questions in their deep need for God—whether they knew them or not.  In Encounters with Jesus, we peer into a few of his most memorable encounters as described by St. John the Apostle in his Gospel.  An important religious leader, Nicodemus seeks out Jesus in the dead of night, fearful for what anyone spotting him might think!   But he is driven by a question that he does not ask but Jesus nevertheless answers.

Jesus had a remarkable way with people.  He spoke to their most intimate questions in their deep need for God—whether they knew them or not.  In Encounters with Jesus, we peer into a few of his most memorable encounters as described by St. John the Apostle in his Gospel. Other than the blessed Virgin, Pontius Pilate is the only mortal human being named directly in the Nicene Creed, and for good reason, as it is on his authority that Jesus Christ was crucified.  But during his interrogation of Jesus, Pilate finds him enigmatic and not a little frightening.  Who is this man?  What is he really up to?  But while Pilate worries about his reputation before the Emperor, Jesus offers Pilate what he really needs, salvation.

Jesus had a remarkable way with people.  He spoke to their most intimate questions in their deep need for God—whether they knew them or not.  In Encounters with Jesus, we peer into a few of his most memorable encounters as described by St. John the Apostle. Desperate to save their brother, Jesus’ dear friends, Mary and Martha write to him to come quickly to their home and heal Lazarus.  But Jesus delays leaving for two days, until he arrives to discover that Lazarus has already died.  Martha is frustrated with Jesus’s timing, while Mary is grievously heartbroken.  Overcome by their loss, Jesus joins them in their suffering before showing them a taste of what eternal life really is.

Jesus had a remarkable way with people.  He spoke to their most intimate questions in their deep need for God—whether they knew them or not.  In Encounters with Jesus, we peer into a few of his most memorable encounters as described by St. John the Apostle. Hungry from his journey through Samaria, in our first episode, Jesus stops by a well while his disciples head into town for food.  He encounters a woman from whom he asks a drink of water, but in exchange, he offers her the living water of eternal life.

Who is this Jesus? The ancient Christian arguments for Jesus' identity as fully God and fully man depend on the validity of the apostolic eyewitnesses who wrote their memoirs about him. But contemporary critics maintain that these documents, termed "Gospels" by the early Christians, are much more likely to have been written some 400 years after the events. And, further, that rival "gospels" that portray an otherworldly gnostic Jesus were dismissed by the Church based on arbitrary reasoning. Brant Pitre engages these criticisms decisively in his The Case for Jesus.

Our second and series finale class on St. Augustine's City of God!

This is the first of two episodes on St. Augustine from The City of God, Book XIX.

We move on to the Stoic philosopher, Epictetus, for this episode!

Aristotle, Class 3, the last half hour of the class on Aristotle's review of the best candidates for the best life (devoted to pleasure, honor, or contemplation) cut out. He opts for contemplation. We discussed the rationale for this, since his conception of God is more idea than person, since he couldn't figure out how to get perfection into imperfect personal pagan gods. Thus, the greatest activity is contemplation since the greatest thing is an idea.

Our St. Mary 2025 Summer Philosophical Readings Series, Aristotle Class Two

Our 2025 St. Mary Summer Philosophical Readings Series, Aristotle Class One

Till We Have Faces, Class Six, Final Class

Fifth Class on Till We Have Faces

Episode Four of Till We Have Faces

Episode Three of Till We Have Faces

Till We Have Faces, Class Two

C. S. Lewis is arguably the greatest philosopher of the twentieth century, offering a panoply of scholarly, fictional, children’s, allegorical, and polemic works that provide an extraordinary metaphysical-aesthetic vision of the human need for the divine.  His novel, Till We Have Faces, is without question his greatest work of all.  Set in an entirely pagan context, Lewis drives us through our own self-justifications to confront the fact that “we cannot know the gods face to face till we have faces.”  Don’t miss it. 

What is spiritual growth, and how do we all fit into the Body of Christ? Every single one of us is a unique presentation of the image of God, so it follows that every single one of us has an important role to play not just in the human race, not just in our families, not just in our bodies politic, not just in our professions, not just in our social clubs and friendships, but also in Christ's Body the Church.

Why do Catholics fast? What is the point? Why must feasting always follow fasting? Why is fasting intrinsically linked to prayer? How does the Fast fit into the Catholic concept of "co-suffering" with Christ and our fellow Christians? What is Lent and how does our Lenten observance of fasting, prayer, and alms-giving prepare us for the great Easter Feast?

Is the Word of God a book or a Person? How do we understand the relationship between the Church and the Bible? Can individuals authoritatively interpret the Bible on their own? What is the difference between literal and symbolic interpretation of the Scriptures? How does the enriched, multifaceted interpretive model of the Church open up the unveiling of sacramental imagery?

How do the City of God and the City of Man relate in the quest for charity?

What is God up to? What is his overall plan for human beings and the world? How does it all end? With a bang, with a whimper, or something else? Join us this week as we explore the “last things.”

Join us this week as we explore how the complementarity of the genders works through human constitutions to effect the wonder of marital love.

What role does gender play in the creation of human beings? What role does it play in human happiness? And why is one of our sacraments built around its fulfillment? Men and women, men and women, men and women! Join us this week as we explore the foundations of the sacrament of marriage.

This week we will be examining what sacraments are and why they fit perfectly into human nature. More divine genius to behold, so don’t miss it!

What is the Church? Why did Jesus institute it? What is it supposed to do? How well has it done that throughout history? Join us this week as we explore the nature and history of the Church!