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Then the Lord rained on Sodom and Gomorrah brimstone and fire from the Lord out of heaven . . . and lo, the smoke of the land went up like the smoke of a furnace. —Genesis 19:24,28Prior to the last fifteen years or so, the leading archaeological theory, for those who believe that Sodom and Gomorrah existed, placed the location of these cities on the south end of the Dead Sea, on the eastern shore—although there were several prominent advocates among archaeologists as far back as the nineteenth c …

I want first to address those who might still be unsure of whether to believe in the Eucharist. To them, I would ask (or you might ask), “Do you want the Eucharist to be true?” Since our desires don’t make something true or not, that question may seem irrelevant, but it isn’t. Faith involves the intellect and the will. It’s not just about knowing, for instance, that God must logically exist. It’s about the heart saying “yes” to him and desiring him. If we don’t want to believe, God always gives …

We read of Jesus instituting the Eucharist in the Gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, as well as in St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. John gives us something different, which is not surprising: John wrote his Gospel long after the other three, and he assumes you’ve read them already. His Gospel is meant as a sort of “gap-filler,” covering important moments in the life of Jesus that nobody else had written down yet. He offers us the “the rest of the story.”Instead of focusing on the Euc …

I still remember feeling betrayed by the Catholic Church. I became a Catholic in 2012 because I was convinced that the Church checked out on paper. I was able to see the biblical, historical, and rational reasons for its claims. However, I soon began to notice a wide chasm between the Catholic Church as described in theory and the Church as seen in action. I came to call it a conflict between “paper Catholicism” and “experiential Catholicism.” The cognitive dissonance from this tension severely …

Those of us who believe that the Eucharist is really Jesus have to examine our own hearts and lives, too. Some time ago, I met a man who had once worked for a Western intelligence agency. He was embedded in a majority-Muslim country, posing as a businessman. Given the lawlessness of parts of the country, he had to be driven across it in the dead of night to avoid bandits. As they were speeding across the desert at high speeds, with the headlights off, his driver—a Muslim who had no idea of his …