Tim Staples - Catholic Apologist

A face of calm before he unleashes truth like a broken dam.

Hey all, welcome back to Cool Cats! I’m ending my hiatus with a special treat. As mentioned in a previous post, Brandon Vogt is hosting a Support a Catholic Speaker Month, which is happening right now. As a participant, it was my good fortune to acquire the privilege to write about Tim Staples.

I specifically chose to write about Tim because, when I was a youngster, he gave a talk at my home parish and was my first introduction to the world of Catholic apologetics. It wasn’t a minute too soon, because between the internet and classmates, I was already facing such daunting questions as “Where is that in the Bible?” or phrases like “Catholics aren’t Christian; they believe in works getting you to heaven.” Key to Tim’s effectiveness isn’t only that he knows the ins and outs of Catholic answers to the above statements (not to mention he’s also the Director of Evangelization at catholicanswers.com), it’s that he once believed them.

Tim Staples was raised in a very southern and very Baptist southern Baptist church. This meant growing up in a mindset that not only was the Catholic Church not Christian, it was the whore of Babylon, oh my! He fell away from his faith during his teen years, but he came roaring back with the help of televangelists when he was 18 and about to set off for the Marines. With a renewed vigor in Christ, he participated in Bible studies and ministries throughout his military service and found his way into the Assemblies of God.

During his final year, however, he encountered something that many cradle Catholics haven’t even seen: a Catholic who knew his stuff. This fellow marine was Matt Dula, and he sparked Tim’s journey to prove the Catholic faith wrong. ‘Course, you can see how well that turned out.

Tim immediately followed his conversion with entrance into the seminary, and though he knew maybe halfway through that it wasn’t his true calling, he remained there for six years. Let’s all be thankful for this, because it surely gave him the necessary knowledge for his calling of apologetics without whisking him away to the serious time-eating obligations of a priest. The resulting fruits include the DVDs Why Be Catholic and The Bible Made Me Do It, as well as his book Nuts & Bolts: A Practical Guide for Explaining and Defending theCatholic Faith and speaking tours related to all of the above.

It's worth noting that Tim gives special thanks to his protestant brothers and sisters for helping him form an authentic relationship with God, and indeed we all should only approach other Christians in a loving manner should the opportunity for apologetics arise. Yet, apologetics isn't just trying to prove to other Christians our own Christian existence, it's showing ourselves the well grounded roots and teachings of the church we attend!

You might recognize from the clip above: "I led many Catholics out of the Catholic Church, I never met a single Catholic who was either willing or able to defend his or her faith."

More about Tim Staples:
Other books, talks, etc.
Journey Home interview
CatholicAnswers.com

Gene Luen Yang - Comic Artist

Don't let the smile fool you. He gets smeared with ashes just like anyone else.

If you’re experiencing geekcaine withdrawals from the closing of this year’s San Diego Comic-con, then I have just the remedy. Gene Luen Yang is an award-winning Chinese-American comic artist and writer whom you should check out RIGHT NOW if you want to relieve that emptiness inside.

In all seriousness, Gene is a dream-come-true for Christians aspiring to do cool things on the nerdier side of life. Though comics may not be vilified today as they were in the decades following their inception, any involvement with them is unlikely to earn you a high-five with your priest, Sunday school teacher, or beams of praise from your German-Catholic grandparents. Gene, himself born to strict and devout Chinese parents, knows this and has written an insightful article entitled “Telling the Old, Old Story.” It details the commonalities between the histories of Christianity and the modern comic medium, going as far to say they’re complementary:

...(John of Damascus) suggests that our tradition of visual art grows from the very heart of the gospel. When "the Word became flesh and made a dwelling among us" (John 1:14), God expressed the desire to make what was once invisible (the Word) visible (flesh).
…
To respond to the Incarnation -- the making of the invisible visible -- we must express the Incarnation visually. In other words, we must make comics.

He also makes an astute observation that our beloved stained glass windows are just a graphical representation of a story, in other words, a very expensive comic.

I hate reading clockwise.

As fascinating as you probably think that all is, you should check out Gene’s work from the library, or buy it if you’re one of those people with money. His most well-known is American Born Chinese, which won an Will Eisner award as well as being a finalist for the National Book Awards in the category of Young People's Literature, which is rare for a comic book (maybe unprecedented, too lazy to look up). It interweaves an ancient Asian narrative, in which a monkey king travels to India to retrieve the Buddhist sutras (Journey to the West), with the identity-bending experience of a young boy living between two cultures. Superimpose a Christian interpretation of God onto the braided narrative, and you have a reflection of Gene’s life as well as that of his fictional characters'.

That guy's always in control. What's the deal?

In the end...I decided I wanted to do an Asian-American telling of this (Journey to the West). Christianity has had a profound effect on Asian American identity. I feel like it’s a particular style of Christianity that emphasizes where Western Christian morality and a Confucian-based moral system intersect. You visit any college with Christian groups or clubs, you’ll usually find a lot of Asians in those groups. -Gene Yang in an interview with talkingwriting.com

He openly admits that his religion is one of the most important aspects of his identity, the other being his heritage (talkingwriting), and you can certainly pick up subtle hints of that in all his work. It shows up in the form of philosophy, or theology if someone took out deliberate Judeo-Christian references to God and his works. This investigation into morality is very apparent in the collection Animal Crackers, The Eternal Smile, and Level Up. In other words, in pretty much everything he does.

Seriously, buy it so you can pretend to have a ridiculously large Game Boy (story's good too).

If by any chance Gene sounds too intellectual or not geeky enough to be your mentor in spirit, you should know that he's in charge of writing the Avatar: The Last Airbender comic continuation. Yeah, the series is in good hands.

More on Gene Luen Yang:

Geneyang.com

The Comics Reporter interview

Dark Horse and Avatar

The Millions interview  (Great insight about race representation)

and

THE ROSARY COMIC BOOK

Etsuro Sotoo - Sculptor of La Sagrada Familia

So I really have to get to know each piece of rock because I can’t change the character of the rock… So I’m not going to change the rock; the rock is going to change me. I discovered a mystery.  

When Etsuro Sotoo left his home in Fukuoka, Japan to visit Spain in 1978, he had only meant to learn more about sculpting stone, but seeing Barcelona’s Sagrada Familia caused his jaw to drop and has anchored him there ever since. So fascinated was he that he tried to communicate with the disciples of the principal sculptor, the late great Gaudi, even though he didn’t speak Spanish or Catalan. He showed them some photos of his work, and this led to the wacky misunderstanding of hiring him to finish Gaudi’s work rather than to study under them. Incidentally, the job of trying to finish Gaudi’s vision would become the most all engrossing tutelage that Sotoo could have imagined.

Sotoo was obsessed for years in trying to understand Gaudi, and many nights went sleepless, to which Spanish wine became an aid. But finally, he made a breakthrough: looking at Gaudi was not enough, he had to look where Gaudi looked. That was, of course, at nature, and this revelation proved most fruitful.


                                                  

Every day the good words of Jesus are spoken. Gaudí had to express this very important work, and he also learned from nature and used nature… But in nature you find fruit and many leaves.…So the fruit is our soul, our heart. And this is why Gaudí wanted all this fruit. 

And at the top of everything there’s fresh, ripe, colorful fruit with no leaves because when our body gives up, our soul rises. When a person has heard a lot of good words and has read a lot of good books, his soul is ripe fruit, but up there there are no words; you don’t need any words. 

Indeed, it’s not enough to mimic someone by their actions, or to scrutinize the product they leave behind. You must look where they are looking, and it was through searching for the object of Gaudi’s gaze that Sotoo found God, the creator of nature, beauty, and mystery. “I invite everyone who wants to understand Gaudí to not pick the wrong door. If you really want to know him, find the the door of spirit and faith.” 1 It would be only a matter of time before he converted to Roman Catholicism.

Etsuro Sotoo has sculpted hundreds of pieces for the Sagrada Familia, has been a university professor, and is a recipient of the Ars Spiritis Prize of Lladro and the Fukuoka Prize for Culture. 

It’s the most important place, but it’s a pelican. It’s a symbol of the love of a mother, the symbol of the love of God. Because we can’t say that a physical object is the love of God. But the love of a parent to his or her children is the love of God.

The only way was you’d have to set two boards, and there was 16 meters, which is over 100 feet down; it was nothing. And why did Gaudí hide the love of God in such a difficult place? Because
the love of God, the love of your mother, if you’re near, you can’t see.

Italicized sections were taken from a transcript of Etsuro Sotoo's talk at Fordham University in New York (the year is obscured by a typo). I encourage you to read the entire thing to benefit from this incredibly thoughtful and reflective artist.

More on Etsuro Sotoo:

1 The Scultpor Who Became Catholic (Rome Reports)

Gaudi Calls the Future  (Crossroad Cultural Center transcript)

Gaudi Club 

Dean Koontz - Bestselling Author

"Real joy comes from those moments during the writing when you feel the great beating heart of the divine." 1

Ash Wednesday is approaching. It’s a time for meditation and reflection, a time to contemplate our morality and mortality. Taking time to consider our lives and the world around us is a cornerstone of Catholicism, resulting in the advancement of science, the founding of systems of education, and of the building of whole societies of counter-cultural contemplatives (but don’t take my word for it, find out for yourself). With this in mind, I introduce a cool cat who looks evil in the eye and asks the tough questions: Dean Koontz.

Koontz knows firsthand what he is up against. Childhoods like Koontz's are often what people have in mind when they ask, “If there’s a god, why he does let bad things happen?” Koontz grew up under the whim and oppression of an abusive, alcoholic, and sociopathic father. Even as an adult, Koontz could not maintain distance from him because there was no one else to take care of the man in his later years. Rather than a heartwarming story of a father-son reconciliation, Koontz had to endure several attempts on his life. Indeed, why does God let these things happen?

A staple of Koontz’s books seems to be that though evil might triumph in the short term, good always prevails in the long run. This belief in the power of good, or perhaps in God’s plan, is what allows Koontz to confront evil and not shy from addressing it. He admits, he does not find it glamorous and so will never portray anything but a pathetic villain. (NRC)

Evil, as part of this world as it is, is offset by the wonder of this world: “If you remain alert to the lessons of life and aware of the mystery of the world, it is difficult to deny the existence of design in all things.” 1 This acknowledgement of the wonder of reality, while also providing a meaning and a form to truth, is part of what Koontz loves about being Catholic. What drew him to the church in the first place, however, was witnessing the closeness of his then girlfriend/current wife’s Catholic family. After some reading, he was particularly drawn to the “intellectual rigor” of the faith as evidenced by St. Thomas Aquinas and G.K. Chesterton. 2

Koontz finds science and faith to be complementary, and many of his books deal with quantum physics and biology. He also explores bioethics through his disabled characters, and he doesn’t draw the same conclusions as a certain Peter Singer who measures human worth through output:

If you bring these [disabled] people into your life, I’ve discovered – I’ve never found one who whined or complained like average people do. I’ve never found one who wasn’t grateful for every good thing that comes their way. And I haven’t found one that wasn’t an inspiration to people. If you can inspire other people by your own courage and your own stoicism, you’ve had a very valuable and important life. So they bring a great deal to the world. - Catholic Exchange, 2009

In a good example of stewardship, Koontz works extensively with Canines Companions for Independence, a group that trains dogs that greatly contribute to the lives and opportunities for the physically and mentally disabled.

More on Dean Koontz:

1 Nation Catholic Register Interview, 2007

2 Catholic Exchange Interview, 2009

Deankoontz.com