St. Paul is concerned not just about protecting the vulnerable consciences of new believers, who can’t shake off all the trappings of their lives as nonbelievers all at once, but also about strengthening their understanding of the Bible.

The Churches that have the best shot at providing vision and stability to whole communities – in some cases perhaps whole countries – are those that manage the danger of factions by agreeing on love of Jesus celebrated in the sacraments, and described in the Bible.

And yet it is still true that you can only think with information stored in living tissue. Only the information you get into your brain is available to you to think with, decide with, believe with.

Today almost 400 million Christians face physical violence, subjugation, false detention, expropriation of property, enslavement, forced exile and murder because of their religious beliefs – a number amounting to one in seven Christians worldwide.

Jesus is, by far, the most exhaustively documented character from all classical antiquity. Christianity exists today because new generations of Scribes told the story and wrote it down.

It wasn’t just the three wise men from the east (Matthew 2:1-12) who were looking for Jesus, dying to learn more about Him. In age after age there have been people who felt the cold death swirling about their feet and wondered if maybe the stories they had heard of a Divine Deliverer from the children of Abraham might just be true.

People in our time are looking for meaning and purpose, which have become critically absent as the world has grown more secular. They are finding it among people who have Bibles in their hands, and pray with the scriptures daily, several times daily.

The ministry of the word is still keeping people busy. One large Catholic parish today is four or five times the size of the whole earliest Church. Evangelists for such parishes need to be people deeply immersed in the thought world of the Bible. They need to read it and talk about it daily, they need to apply it boldly and prudently

The Church was not able to hold on to its first organizational structure in large degree because it didn’t have the instructional resources to manage a Church that size. But now we have the Bible, and twenty centuries of truly excellent reflection on it by some of the greatest minds in human history, all of it embedded in the Mass that is celebrated millions of times a day all over the world.

The evidence that a religious revival may be underway is clarifying and solidifying. It would be even more solid and clear if the Church were to get out in front of this.

At slump times, even experienced believers have a hard time finding the words, and so the prayers of the Bible and the Church are valuable ways for them to persevere.

So, what happened to Solomon? We may never know. So, why did God allow all that to happen? It has been suggested that sometimes a period of deconstruction is necessary, a diminishment of religion and its influence, so that a new generation can arise that looks at religion with fresh eyes.

The arc of the Bible is always toward the radical, unlimited love and mercy of God. To conclude, after reading just 1 Samuel 15, that God is a hateful ethnic cleanser, is a stupid way to read the Bible. There is a difference between what is in the Bible, and what the Bible teaches. You have to read the whole thing.

Many churches and denominations today are disintegrating because theyhave abandoned the thought world of the Bible.

Spiritual suppleness and elasticity can be preserved, even deepened, if it is regularly saturated in prayer and reading of the Bible, rubbed in deep by the sacraments of Eucharist and Confession. Souls don’t need to be old to be dry and brittle.

If we want to hear the voice of Jesus, really hear Him, then maybe we have to stick around the Bible-talk longer than Satan did, to learn its accents and figures of speech, to anticipate where it is going and why.

The problem isn’t that we don’t know what the truth is. The problem is that just enough people have been challenging all that, and we have gotten confused.

We need to live our lives in such a way that people ask questions, and then we have to give them answers. That is what repentance looks like for us now. Because repentance is a kind of levelling up.

Jesus never did, and still doesn’t, have a problem with a spirituality based on close reading of the Bible and earnest prayer based on that close reading. He has a problem with people not doing that enough.

24 July 2025 Matthew 13:10-17 “But blessed are your eyes because they see, and your ears because they hear.”Matthew 13:16 In the early...