Been reflecting a bit more on catechetical issues, both in regard to the postings below and the interviews I’ve been doing about De-Coding.

The bottom line really is the paradigm out of which you’re working. The assumptions you live by. So for young people raised in the West over the past three decades, the bottom-line intellectual assumption is relativism. No objective truth. What’s true for you, great, as long as it doesn’t hurt anyone. This is true especially in regard to religion.

Many years ago, the first year I was teaching in Florida, I worked with a religious sister, not at all inexperienced in teaching, but new to this school. It was early in the year, and she had just returned the first test to her ninth-graders.

She staggered into the faculty lounge after class. What happened, we wondered. Turns out she’d been dealing with a mob.

Why? Because on their returned and graded tests – which I believe were about the origins and background to the Bible or something – students had had points taken off and answers marked wrong.

“You can’t take points off!” they insisted, “This is religion! There are no wrong answers!”

And there you have it.

As long as our students believe that there are no wrong answers – that there is nothing definitively true to be said about God and religion – we are wasting our time. They will listen politely (or not) to our attempts to shore up their Catholic identity are pointless, because the truth is, they just see it all as one more interesting, but not necessarily compelling item in the Great Marketplace of What’s True For Me.

That’s why, at some point, influenced by what I read of the Jesuit William O’Malley (not a favorite of some, but very, very good on this score), I started beginnning all my classes with epistomology. (without calling it that.)

What is truth? How do we know what is true? What are the criterea for determining truth?

And then we move on. (And that’s how Prove It: God begins as well).

Now, the problem is, of course, that many of those charged with teaching religion would be as puzzled by this as students initially are, for they are just as deeply committed to relativism, and Christianity has a nice option among others, as their students.

It’s the same thinking I brought to the Da Vinci Code book. Sure I could load up with details, as some have in their responses, and God bless them for it, but I made a choice, based on my assessment of those smitten with DVC – they need, not a wealth of information, but to have their thought processes and assumptions challenged. These are the sources Dan Brown uses. Are they reliable? Isn’t it interesting that Brown never, ever uses the New Testament or early Christian writing or liturgy as evidence? Why not? And how reliable are these? You might be surpised….

My publisher, after reading the manuscript, called it “subliminal apologetics,” and in a sense, that’s exactly what I set out to do – in a non-threatening, friendly kind of way, call people to simply re-evaluate how they think about truth in relationship to Jesus and Christian origins. Is there anything that’s really knowable? Is everything really up for grabs, with nothing certain?

Because, in my mind…that’s the deepest problem that the popularity of this book reveals: the widespread conviction, even among the nominally Christian, that it’s all very mysterious, there’s nothing we can know for sure, so it’s useless to try to “know” anything and we might as well be open to believing…anything.