I don’t need your money.

It’s cool, this isn’t a grift, I want to get my ideas out there. Too many Catholic/spirituality pages are hoity-toity and professional, and therefore somewhere between “lame” and “inaccessible.” These are the sorts of diatribes I would have with Bruce Springsteen over a whiskey, if he drank liquor and wasn’t a cuck. Anyway, I try to keep it to two posts a month, that’s why you should subscribe, because I won’t clutter your inbox.

But of course I’d appreciate it!

I do have five mouths to feed, after all. Your donations would first go toward buying me a mic and a decent camera, and maybe a one-off hire for a producer/editor so my videos don’t look like shit. That really helps good ideas get out there, if you thought I had one. (Tell me which one that was!)

More importantly

My primary thoughts are on YouTube/Rumble, this Substack is for one-off ideas that don't fit the series, though I plan to write up more focused summaries of the My RCIA series’ content/episodes.

This is really what started it all, was I was sitting in on my then-fiancée’s Rite of Christian Initiation for Adults classes (i.e. conversion to Catholicism classes), and felt like the teacher — a deacon, mind you — was doing a piss poor job. For that matter, it was a lot of the same problems I had teaching 5th-7th grade catechism classes (i.e. Sunday school) from the book. The problems were the same in both:

1. The deacon’s lectures and the textbooks were all nambly-pambly feel-good shit. Literally all the same shit you get from non-denominational Protestant kumbaya ice cream socials, Marvel movies, or TikTok Progressive polemics though I repeat myself twice. This doesn’t make Catholicism seem like it has anything to offer.

2. Other side of the same coin: It was missing the really deep shit that makes you think, that brain bending philosophy, the mind-blowing patterns and consistencies in scripture and doctrine. Anything that would make Catholicism seem awesome in contrast to all the drivel these other sources provide.

3. They didn’t even address common criticisms of the faith. No mention of solo scriptura, the Crusades, the Reformation, Papal Infallibility, the Inquisitions… stuff every New Atheist 5th grader knows and will inevitably attack a Catholic with. Every Catholic should know how to defend these ideas and events, but instead the wimps writing feel-good textbooks are leaving their kids woefully unprepared for internet forums, basically guaranteeing their faith lapses eventually at the hands of flimsy, regurgitated Christopher Hitchens “gotcha” lines.

So I wanted to bring the cool shit to the forefront, integrate science, reason, and faith, and face real Catholic challenges head on, while making it fun and relatable. For my version of RCIA, I try to hit what I feel are all the basic stuff you need to know to become a Catholic, to appreciate the faith, to think like a Catholic.

I tried bumming around Bishop Barron’s Word on Fire forums for evangelization training, but it was a) expensive, 2) similarly patronizing and lame, and D) they generally felt like I had an abrasive personality. Catholics have a long-standing reputation for drinking and swearing, why not lean in?! But my IRL friends thought I was hilarious and frequently provided interesting trivia and insights, so they encouraged me to start a podcast. This was as far as I got. This is my magnum opus, bush league as it is, and it’s still a work in progress, I rarely have a spare hour when the kids are sound asleep for me to produce this, and I never find enough time to learn how to edit, then actually edit these for cutting repetition, dead air, flat jokes, etc. I do find time during work hours to procrastinate and write, however, and thus I have a Substack to supplement, and possibly supersede.