Curiosity kills cats

        There was a proverb I used to hear when I was a kid: “curiosity killed a cat.” Lesson: “don’t get too curious—you can get hurt.”

        I am sad that the saying has become the motto for too many religious people, of all religions.

        The motto is bad. The Lord made us curious.

        Second bad motto: “People need certitude.”

        Certitude is a scientific mirage. Maybe it started with Descartes. He thought the only thing he could be certain about was that he was able to think. “I think, therefore I am.” But ever since, some people have gone off on the crusade to acquire certain knowledge. We call some of them “scientists.” But there are other kinds too. We call them “religious people.”

        Science is story-telling qualified by observation. Careful observation, like what we can do with a microscope, leads us to modify older stories we have told. They used to say that cholera was caused by bad air. When they could observe water with a microscope, the story changed: cholera is caused by microscopic bugs in the water. The effect of the changed story was miraculous—cholera disappeared. The miracle led people to look for certitude through science instead of religion.

        We ended up with a battle of certitudes.

        Some old poet, I think Alexander Pope, said “a little learning is a dangerous thing.”

        Both science and religion have men and women of little learning. They are the people who expect certitude from either science or religion. Religious traditions wisely expect “faith,” which is to know things without being certain about them. Science can lead people to believe that science gives certitude, or at least more certitude than religion gives. That is misguided faith in science.

        Both science and religion have people who know that we cannot have certitude. Such people acknowledge that even if they cannot have certitude, they believe that what they are doing can be good for people. They both operate with the assumption that faith can live side by side with questioning, with curiosity.

        For the last couple of hundred years, ever since people began applying scientific observation to the Bible, it has seemed that science corrodes faith. Seminaries can turn out sceptics, who go about destroying religious faith and emptying the churches. The sceptics make two mistakes: they think that science can give us certitude, and they think that religion should give us certitude. By making certitude a pre-requisite for the good life, they distort science and destroy religion.

        The thing is, we are all human beings who live by the worlds that the people around us create. We live by the stories that our tribes believe. Scientists cannot work without a community of fellow scientists—we call them “peer reviewers,” and their very existence tells us that nothing we publish is free from critique. Religious people cannot operate without a community of fellow religionists. Religion without community can become magic. There is no philosophical tradition (“natural law”) or infallible authority (the pope) to tell us which religious statements are true. 

        The fragility of knowledge does not lead to chaos. There is no way for a coach to develop a foolproof way to win games, yet we continue to play games. Games are rewarding. When they cease to be rewarding for players or fans, we modify the rules.

        The experience of “reward” in games is a good analogy for what religious people call “life.” Games are rewarding when the players treat each other with respect; disrespect can get you thrown out of the game. They are rewarding when each player can lose—every player is vulnerable. They are rewarding when people continue to play even after they lose—they are faithful to the game and its players. Respect, vulnerability and faithfulness are the components of love.

        Games do not offer certitude. Science does not offer certitude. Religion does not offer certitude. Yet all three are worth doing. All three can help us love.

        Science and religion both require curiosity. Curiosity is a gift. It does not kill cats.

Passion

Love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement.

“Passion” is the fourth component of the operational definition of love that I have been promoting. Fr. John Joe Lakers, who gave me these thoughts, argued that passion should come first in the list.

It took me a long time to get past thinking that the word “passion” means romantic love. But romantic love is just one kind of love.

Romantic love is beautiful but temporary. It is usually followed by disillusionment, and it cannot keep a relationship alive for the long haul. The word “passion” can point to a much deeper and longer lasting form of love.

Dorothy Day began what she called a “house of hospitality” in New York City in the 1930’s. She deliberately chose to locate it in a slum area of the city, an area characterized by homeless people, drugs, and crime. Her basic rule was to welcome anybody into the house, let them eat there and stay as long as they needed to. When she quoted the Russian novelist Dostoyevski, “Love is a harsh and dreadful thing,” she was surely thinking of what it costs to live so vulnerable to suffering people. But her way of living was a fruitful form of love. Today there are over 180 “Catholic Worker” houses around the world, all following the pattern she set in New York City. Her vision had staying power.

But passion is not limited to such a dramatic way of life. Passion is what causes people to practice a musical instrument many hours a day for years on end. Passion is why people welcome a severely disabled infant into their family and create a life of love around the child.

Passion is a gift. We do not buy it or manufacture it or control it. Passion is “passive.” We get passion from other people. I would say we get it from God, through other people.

We choose to be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our involvement with others. We do not choose passion. Something or someone else gives it to us.

Because love requires passion, love, then, is a gift. 

 

[published in Muddy River News, 4/12/2026]

 

Vulnerability

           The third part of an operational definition of love is vulnerability. Vulnerability is when you do not have control.  

John Joe Lakers, who gave me many of these ideas, tells the story of a couple he had been helping to prepare for marriage.

Laura and Mark were meeting with JJ in his office. Mark had been set to graduate from QU in the spring, but Laura was going to have to return to QU for another year. Mark was in turmoil; he had not yet heard from the graduate schools to which he had applied, and he was afraid that Laura might fall in love with someone else during the year they planned to be apart. As the two of them talked with JJ about the future, Mark suddenly broke down and cried in Laura’s arms.

 

At that moment, Laura knew that she wanted to spend her life with him.

 

Later, Laura and Mark were re-living the event with JJ. As Laura described her experience,  tears of joy came to her eyes. His breaking down had showed her the depth of his love for her. Mark’s memory of the event was different. He said: “I never felt so unlovable in my life, and I was determined that it would never happen again.”

 

JJ’s comment: If both Laura and Mark had not been together physically at the moment when they recalled the experience of his breaking down, both of them could have gone through life without ever knowing how different their experience of the event was. Mark would never have known how wrong he was when he determined never to let something like that happen again.

 

Men are supposed to be in control, not to show vulnerability.

 

Our society fears vulnerability. We need security. But if we let security take over our ability to be vulnerable to the people we love, we imprison ourselves.

 

The First Letter of John says “Perfect love drives out fear.” To love is to go ahead even when you know you might get hurt. You ignore the fear when you decide to love.

 

Three of the four elements of an operational definition of love are respect, faithfulness, and vulnerability. Those three are under our control. The fourth one, passion or emotion, requires special treatment because passion or emotion is not under our control. We decide to be respectful, faithful, or vulnerable. The Marriage Encounter slogan was “Love is a decision, not a feeling.” We cannot decide to be emotional. We can control what we do when we experience emotions, but we cannot control the emotions themselves. They just happen.

 

published in Muddy River News, March 14, 2026

 

 

 

Mater et Magistra

 

Mater et magistra. “Mother and teacher.”

“Mater, si, magistra, non.” That is how William F. Buckley responded to Pope John XXIII’s 1961 encyclical, Mater et magistra: “Mother, yes; teacher, no.”

In 1961 Mr. Buckley’s clever response to the pope was heresy to most Catholics. That was because he, and most Catholics with him, had a too restrictive view of what a teacher is.

Jesus once said that he alone is the teacher, all the rest of us are learners. A good teacher learns from students—teaching is not a one-way street. That is the principle that Pope Francis tried to get us to accept in his effort to promote “synodality,” which is intended to help church teachers learn from the rest of the church. That was as true of the pope himself as it is of the rest of us.

At least since the 1940’s, when Pope Pius XII began to grapple with new questions arising from scientific knowledge of the human body, the official teaching agents of Catholicism, the “magisterium,” have seemed to feel responsible for issuing definitive statements about the morality of every new scientific advancement. What has happened is that Catholic moral teaching has become less and less persuasive to our fellow seekers of truth, inside and outside of the church boundaries. There is a host of questions where public moral sensitivity has moved away from what the magisterium says ought to be done. 

We believers need to enter into honest dialog with everyone else about such questions. We are all learners.

Twenty-five years ago a Catholic personal friend of mine, Mary Lyndon Shanley, published a book titled Making Babies, Making Families: What Matters Most in an Age of Reproductive Technologies, Surrogacy, Adoption, and Same-sex and Unwed Parents. I was impressed by her approach to the moral issues raised by the list of topics in the subtitle of her book. Our Catholic magisterium has a long list of official statements about all of these issues, but as far as I can tell, few people, and few Catholics, are guided by what the magisterium has said. That leaves faithful Catholics with the choice of being counter-cultural and obeying what the church officially says, or abandoning the official teaching and floating free in an atmosphere without moral guidance.

The same dilemma is at the root of serious political divisions in our country. Because our faith leaders have not engaged in serious dialog with others who do not share our beliefs, one whole segment of the Catholic population has voted for a political party that has abandoned programs designed to alleviate hunger and disease in poorer nations. The Democratic party has used the politics of U.S. Catholic leaders as a reason to banish anyone who considers abortion a moral evil from the party. We are in the middle of a religious war once again, forgetting the past two centuries of peace that arose from the First Amendment of our Constitution and that were re-affirmed by the Second Vatican Council in its decree “On the Dignity of the Human Person,” Dignitatis Humanae.

Catholic moral thinkers, including Thomas Aquinas, grappled with the wider culture surrounding the faith community. Thomas was condemned by the University of Paris because he used Aristotle, whose writings had been preserved from destruction by Muslim scholars.  Surely Pope Leo XIII had that in mind when he wrote in 1879 that Catholics should use Aquinas as a guide for their thinking.

Bigger than us

Bigger than us

 

“Bigger than us” I say.

As I reflect on the place religion might play in this messy world, where so many people do not seem to have any need to see and respond to God, I ask myself, what is the core of religious response?

My answer: a sense that there is something bigger than us.

Something, maybe someone, bigger than us. Not just bigger than me, bigger than all of us.

Who are us?

 Back in the ancient days of sociology, the 1950s, one of the more famous sociologists, Robert K. Merton, coined the term “reference group.” He suggested that we fashion in our minds a group of people with whom we identify. We may not belong to that group, and may have no physical connection with them, but they shape who we are.

One of my reference groups is the Roman Catholic church community. That community, in the very concrete form of St. James parish in Decatur, Illinois, saved my parents from the effects of what I believe were my two alcoholic grandfathers, one of whom committed suicide. My parents were lower class—neither went to high school. They were suddenly uprooted from their families in Springfield and sent to Decatur by the Bell Telephone Company. There the church community, and especially its leader, Fr. Francis Ostendorf, rescued them.

The Catholic community is world-wide. It inspired my brother to live for nine years as a missionary on the Brazilian Amazon, which led me to choose “Latin American social and economic development” as one of the two topics I studied intensively for my degree in sociology. My black seminary classmate, Fr. Bennet Spivey, who died two years after his ordination of Lou Gehrig’s disease, motivated me to identify with Black Catholics.

So for me, “us” is worldwide. And now that my church has expanded its sense of who can experience the voice of God, “us” for me is even wider than the Roman Catholic world.

So I say, when Jesus said “make disciples of all nations,” I say: the word “disciple” means “learner.” Jesus calls me to make learners of all nations, and then, maybe when some learners want to affiliate in a deeper way with my church, we can baptize them. Too often in history we baptized first and then made learners. Usually we never got around to the learning and let the baptism (or lack of it) become an excuse for exploitation. “If we baptize you, you can work for us without pay. If you refuse baptism, we kill you.”

 

The troubles of our time

Our greatest problem as we muddle our way through the environmental mess and the worldwide migrations our behavior is causing, is that too many of us are drifting in a world where there is nothing bigger than us. We are masters of our destiny, and our technology should be able to dig us out of whatever hole we dig ourselves into. Without anything bigger than us, self-interest tells us that restraints are not needed.

The regulators do not regulate because there is no sense that there is something bigger than themselves. Why be concerned about the feelings pf co-workers, or respectful of people who look different?

 

Love

My friends kid me about my fascination with definitions. But I insist that we need a working definition of love. Otherwise the word can mean anything, even murder. My working definition of love: respectful, vulnerable, faithful involvement of people with each other. (And, if you are a believer, with God).

Why should I respect, be vulnerable to, and be faithful to someone if there is nothing bigger than us?

But there is something bigger than us. That something, who I believe is a someone, is God.

I believe that we should be respectful, vulnerable, and faithful in our dealings with one another because that is how God is involved with us.

God loves, which is the message that Jesus took from his Jewish background, especially the psalms, and lived out himself.

 

 

Faithfulness

 [published in Muddy Riverr News, February 16, 2026]

    The first part of an operational definition of love is respect. The second is faithfulness.

    Faithfulness means that involvement is open-ended—you don’t know how your relationship with another person will look in the future, and you don’t close it off right now.

    This makes human life delightful. Any time two human beings are open to each other, the relationship might continue on into the future. When we do something to other people that shuts down that possibility, our lives are impoverished.

    When Jesus said we should become like little children, he was talking about how a child who has experienced love by another person knows that it is fun to repeat that experience. We are created to enjoy being involved with one another.

    Faithfulness is most important in the kind of relationship that we call marriage. But faithfulness is not limited to that kind of relationship.

    Faithfulness can be a low key behavior based on the tiny delight that can come from just another person’s smile—the smile of someone we meet on the street. When we know that we could, even if the possibility is hugely remote, meet that person again and have the same delight, we behave accordingly.

    We know that many of our contacts with other people are not so delightful—we sin—all of us. We damage each other, sometimes deliberately. We do things or say things that can shut down a relationship, even with someone we have loved.

    It doesn’t take much familiarity with the online world to know that online can be a sewer of unfaithfulness. It seems to be easier to say things online that you could not say face to face, which means that we shouldn’t say it online either. Every person who reads what I write online could be a person I might come to enjoy talking with some time in the future. I have a friend I disagreed with very much, but we learned to listen to each other and we changed.

    I owe my ideas about respect and faithfulness to Fr. John Joe Lakers, my Franciscan colleague and friend, whose 1996 book, Christian Ethics: An Ethics of Intimacy, says that intimacy should be the basis of all our moral judgments. As I read the book, I got the idea that what he calls intimacy can be the basis of an operational definition of love. Respect and faithfulness are two of the four behaviors that make intimacy.

 

Disciplecy

    Democracy, autocracy, bureaucracy, meritocracy. All of these words end in the letters “c-r-a-c-y,” which are based on the Greek word “kratos,” which means “rule.” Democracy is rule by the people. Autocracy is rule by oneself (the person on top). Bureaucracy is rule by a committee. Meritocracy is rule by the deserving.

    The problem is the word “rule.” To rule means to tell other people what to do.  Democracy means that the people can tell you what to do. Eventually, in a democracy, what the people tell you to do can feel pretty much the same as what the monarch would tell you to do.

    Pardon my christianity, but Jesus said “You have only one teacher. All of you are learners.” The word “disciple” comes from the Latin word “to learn.” To learn is to change your mind. Jesus’s last words in the gospel of Matthew were “Go and make disciples of all nations.” He didn’t say “Go and rule all nations.”  He said, “Go and make learners of all nations.” Make learners of all people. Make all people open to changing their minds. Don’t rule them.

    So, I suggest the word “disciplecy,” pronounced di-si-ple-see. Take away the word “rule.” Disciplecy means learning how to live with other people. Learning how to live with other people means being ready to change your mind. The purpose of a disciplecy is not to tell people who should rule over them. It is to help people live together without killing each other.

The Roman Catholic Church

    I was born into a Roman Catholic family, so the story of the Roman Catholic Church has been a lifelong interest for me. Roman Catholic traditions have been too much shaped by Roman Empire traditions—canon law has the last word about everything. Popes down through the years have looked more like emperors than learners.

    The Catholic Church under the recently deceased Pope Francis engaged in a group process labeled “synodality.” The word “synod” is an ancient term for a gathering of church people to discuss things. The purpose of synodality is to get church people to learn from one another, starting with the pope. It is to get people to change their minds about what God wants, starting with the pope.

    The most recent synod was a three-year process beginning with getting people’s opinions on the grass-root level, letting the opinions migrate toward some kind of consensus, and ending with month-long meetings of representatives from all over the world. They met in a hall with round tables at which all the participants sat as equals, listening to each other, with electronic devices to deal with the variety of languages. Even Pope Francis sat at one of the round tables. They were there to learn from one another.

    When democracy really works, it is more like a disciplecy, people meeting to figure out how to live together in some kind of peace. They make rules, but the rules are hammered out by people changing their minds about what is a good way to get something done.  

    One problem we have is that our democratic gatherings tend to evolve into techniques for telling other people what they should do. They become “cratic,” focused on rule, rather than on how to live together. They get involved in collecting and distributing money taken from other people, which can be used to tell those people what to do. They become empires focused on amassing power rather than tools for living together.

    The same thing happens with our business organizations. In the capitalist dream, an entrepreneur comes up with a new way of doing something, struggles competitively with other people trying to do the same thing, and the result benefits everybody. In our world, the entrepreneur gets bought out by a bigger competitor, who gets bought out by a still bigger competitor, until we have a capitalist empire where the emperor tells everybody else what to do.

    Our country has become an empire ruled by emperors, both political and economic. Some emperors are not bad, like Caesar Augustus. Others, like Nero, are not so good.

    Democracy is not the best word for what we want, both in religion and in politics. We would do better to call it disciplecy.