2024 Fr. Ken's Lenten Teaching Series

Fr. Ken Wolfe's 2024 Lenten Five-Week Teaching Series

Monday evenings at 6:30 PM
and 
Tuesday mornings at 8:45 AM following Daily Mass
Beginning February 19/20
Chapel

Fewer and fewer of us can remember a time when the Judeo-Christian consensus still held in our civic life. A time when only a few essential stores remained open on Sundays; when our neighborhoods emptied out on Sunday mornings as neighbors went off to their churches and parishes; when just about everyone observed Christmas, Good Friday, and Easter in conscientious and reverent ways, when divorce and abortions were only gossiped about and not advocated with aggressive public policy.

Many point to the 1960s as the beginning of the deconstruction of Christian public morality and faith. What triggered it all: a very polarizing war in Vietnam, film of body bags and casualties on the evening news – with only three or four TV networks to choose from, the Civil Rights Movement, anti-war demonstrations on college campuses, the invention “the pill” and rise of the so-called Sexual Revolution, counter-culture, Rock 'n Roll, Mick Jagger, Woodstock, hippies, drugs and psychedelics, the always present tension of the Cold War, the Cuban Missile Crisis, the assassinations of President John F. Kenndy, Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, Jr. 

Who or what was to blame? Change galore, what stayed the same?

Leap ahead to the world-changing terrorists attacks of Tuesday morning 9/11/2001. And then on September 30, 2007, Richard Dawkins, Daniel Dennett, Sam Harris, and Christopher Hitchens sat down for a first-of-its-kind, unmoderated two-hour filmed discussion. The Four Horsemen of the Atheist Apocalypse began their gallop into 21^st century Western culture on an evangelistic, no-holds-barred, and relentless attack on the belief in God and religion.

In the West we are certainly at a low ebb of Christian faith in what is now called a “post-Christian” culture. But something unpredictable and encouraging seems to be happening.

I invite you to join me over five weeks during Lent to look at a fascinating new book that makes the remarkable claim that the tide of Christian belief is coming back with force.

For over 15 years Justin Brierley, a UK broadcaster, hosted the Unbelievable? and Ask NT Wright Anything podcasts. Brierley sat across the table and facilitated conversations around faith, theology, science, and the impact of social media between dedicated and articulate agnostics, atheists, and Christians from all walks of life. In The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God, Brierley describes the dramatic collapse of New Atheism into a thousand warring factions. Brierley shows how there has been a definite shift to deep concerns around morality, virtue, meaning and identity. Now a host of converts such as Paul Kingsnorth, and Holly Ordway and near-Christians such as Tom Holland and Jordan Peterson, are inviting a re-examination of the explanatory power of God to science, history, culture, sanity, and human destiny.

This is an optimistic and hopeful study. The Gospel offers light and hope in the darkest of ages.

Over the course of several weeks, Fr. Ken shares supporting and instructive videos and other resources to aid in the processing and understanding of this topic.  

VIDEO RESOURCES HAVE BEEN MOVED PERMANENTLY TO https://www.statucson.org/recommended-videos