10/25/2026

Sunday, October 25, 2026

1954 US President Dwight D. Eisenhower offered aid to the Prime Minister of South Vietnam, Ngô Đình Diệm

1962 US Ambassador to the UN Adlai Stevenson demanded that the USSR UN representative answer regarding Cuban missile bases, saying, "I am prepared to wait for my answer until hell freezes over"

1963 Anti-Kennedy "WANTED FOR TREASON" pamphlets were scattered in Dallas

2020 Pope Francis announced the appointment of 13 new cardinals, including the 1st African American, Wilton Daniel Gregory

2021 Elon Musk made $25 billion in one day, pushing his estimated worth to $255.2 billion, likely making him the richest person ever according to Forbes

2025  Donald Trump announced that he would raise U.S. tariffs on Canada by 10% in retaliation for an anti-tariff advertisement sponsored by the Ontario government. 

In bed at 9:35, up at 4:40; 0500 203.2 129/77/64 101;  52/70/51, mostly cloudy.

Morning meds at 7 a.m.  Entresto at 5:30 a.m. and 8:20 p.m.

Brewers won Game 2 of the World Series, up 2-0.  I went to bed at about 9:40, after the 6th inning, with the score tied at 4, not wanting to completely screw up my sleep patterns.  When I woke up this morning, first I read Sarah's text message about the arsonist's destruction of Hitler's Eagle Nest on Obersalzberg, then checked the score of Game 2.  The odds are with the Brewers, but of the 57 Series that have started 2-0, 11 of those saw the team in the deep hole go on to win.  Fingers crossed.  Go, Brewers!

You don't believe that shit, do you?  That was the question my best friend Tom St. John, raised Catholic but a Jewish convert, indelicately put to me 25 or 30 years ago on the Sunday morning when he picked me up after Mass at St. Francis church.  We were heading to the airport for a golfing junket to Myrtle Beach, SC, with another bunch of long-term buddies.  Tom knew me about as well as anyone did, so he found it hard to believe I had returned to the Catholic Church in my middle age.  He knew I was not the credulous sort, nor particularly God-minded or enamored of churchy stuff.  He was baffled that I started going back to church, and not my neighborhood parish or Gesu parish on the Marquette campus, but to an inner-city parish.  So was my wife, and probably my children.  And so was I.  I still am.  Was it just a continuation of a long midlife crisis?  My own recherche du temps perdu?  Proust lay in bed with pen and paper; I joined St. Francis Parish.  I don't recall how I answered Tom's question, but I remembered it as I read Emilee Hackney's All That's Unseen.  

Did I "believe that shit"?  No.  Except in my earliest years, I never really believed that shit.  I believed that I should believe it.  I lived in a culture and society that claimed to believe it, but by the time I was in 6th grade at St. Leo's, I worried about confessing the sin of Doubt.  I have never been a whole-hearted believer like young Emilee Hackney.  My near-overwhelming problem was that I could never not-believe.  I could never not-believe that there is a God, that Heaven and Hell exist, that there will be a Last Judgment when I will be judged a lifelong sinner and unworthy of God's love and a place in Heaven.  The Sisters of Providence, the Irish Christian brothers, and the priests of St. Leo Parish, and later the Jesuits, all taught or conditioned me to believe and to fear, and it worked.  You can take the boy out of the Church, but you can't take the Church out of the boy.

Young Emilee Hackney, on the other hand, did believe.  She actually sensed the Holy Spirit enter her when she was saved.  She describes an intensely emotional Pentecostal worship service in which she experienced what she understood as the Holy Spirit's presence and power within her.  As she stood among worshippers shouting, praying, weeping, and raising their arms, she experienced an overwhelming physical sensation, including heaviness, trembling, and a burning feeling in her chest.  Then, a man placed his hand on her forehead and commanded her to speak, and she began speaking in tongues, producing sounds she could not understand or control.  She eventually fell backward, losing awareness of her surroundings.  Real "holy roller" stuff, as we used to describe it, very different from my Catholic childhood experiences in which religious conviction was sustained principally by instruction, ritual, institutional authority, and fear of damnation.  

The difference between being taught that God exists (a concept, idea, or proposition) and believing that one has actually experienced God's presence perhaps explains the difference between Emilee's deeply personal, trusting early religious life and my own skeptical and uncertain one.  

I'm struck by the profoundly different modes of worship we experienced.  While she and her fellow believers were shouting and gesticulating and falling over on the floor and speaking in tongues, we Catholic kids were marched into church by our nuns to watch a priest dressed in weird garments facing away from them and uttering unintelligible words in Latin.  Instead of singing "Jesus loves me, this I know," we sang Tantum ergo sacramentum, Veneremur cernui.  Of course, the Latin part of those thousands of experiences changed with Vatican II and the switch to vernacular Mass, but I was already in my 20s when that happened.  Indeed, it wasn't until 1967, when I was out of the Marine Corps, that the Church allowed the Eucharistic Prayer, including the consecration of the bread and wine, to be said in the vernacular, when Hic est enim corpus meum at long last became "For this is my body."  But the fight within the Church over Latin vs. the vernacular continues to this day, with rabid traditionalists insisting that the Latin or "Tridentine" Mass is the only authentic Mass.  

What strikes me most about Emilee Hackney's religious experiences as she grew from childhood to adulthood as an Appalachian 'hillbilly' in a Pentecostal culture is not how much hers differed from mine as an urban Catholic, but rather how similar they were.  Each of us was profoundly affected by the cultures in which we were raised.  As Oliver Wendell Holmes said, 

We are all tattooed in our cradles with the beliefs of our tribe; the record may seem superficial, but it is indelible. You cannot educate a man wholly out of the superstitious fears which were early implanted in his imagination; no matter how utterly his reason may reject them, he will still feel as the famous woman did about ghosts, ‘I don’t believe in them, but I am afraid of them, nevertheless.’

We were both very influenced by religious leaders, preachers for her, priests and nuns for me.  We both had intensely religious childhoods.  Our understandings of ourselves, our bodies, our thoughts, our moral worth, and even our eternal destinies were shaped by people claiming to speak with divine authority.   And all those "others" whose actions shaped and conditioned us were in turn shaped and conditioned by their own others.  (Turtles all the way down😁). We could change, of course, and both she and I did, but many don't.  They just get deeper into the culture they were born into and try to pass it on to their progeny, but we all ought to recognize that the cultural milieu of birth is both the soil from which our moral life grows and the source of its distortions — a tension that demands critical self‑examination and personal, moral, and political responsibility.  For both Emilee Hackney and me, that has been a long and arduous road.

I have completed Part 1 of her memoir and will start Part II.  Emilee is still struggling with her faith and her beliefs about life and the world after learning of her fiancé's child sexual abuse of girls in their Pentecostal congregation.  She's angry that God let his crimes happen, and that he let her be fooled into loving the guy for years.  How did an all- just, all-loving, all-knowing, all-powerful God let her life get so upside down when she loved Him and trusted Him to care for both her and her predatory fiancé?  The old persistent problem of "Theodicy," or how to justify or reconcile the existence of evil and suffering with the belief in an omnipotent, omnibenevolent, and just God.  It's what I spoke of at Tom and Sue Clark's kitchen table years ago: how it's a lot easier to visualize God as a mean prick than as a loving, all-powerful father.  I did it by rejecting and disbelieving the Thomistic, Catholic, Christian notion of God having all those "all-this, all-that" qualities.  I'm eager to find out how Emilee dealt with it.