Review: The Archeology of Faith | National Catholic Reporter

Review: The Archeology of Faith | National Catholic Reporter by MSW. MGB: The book is an interesting idea. A few things stand out in my archeology of faith. My father's people were European Christian, Jewish and Roma - the latter having roots in the Samaritan faith until the conversion by Thomas, one of the Lord's brothers (we don't have a virginity cult, so the concept is not problematic to us).  That side immigrated for economic and political reasons, not religous. and were solid germanic Catholics by then.  My mother's family, at least part of it, did come for religious reasons, to Seventeenth Century Plymouth. In my DNA is the founding in America of the Congregationalists and Presybterians, the Anabaptists,the Quakers and the Disciples of Christ (and lets not forget the non-religous Masons).  My family history is a whose who of American Protestantism. yet my Mother sought the mysticism of the Catholic Church and converted just before marrying my Father. That last part is more common than you think, although not so much now.  People don't care as much about relgion to convert to gete married, they just get married.  The ghetto seems to be gond.



The interesting thing is that, in marriage, the Church has adapted to the fact of non-converting spouses and couples who only come on Easter and Christmas, for Marriages and Funerals.  The Church is a lot more adept at adapting - sometimes in the wrong direction, like when Pius X scratched the Reactionary itch in face of Modernism - a Traditionalist response, where we continue practice without lashing out against change accepted by others, is more, well, traditional.  In truth, every generation accepts its own hearing of dogma and tradition, for faith comes to us as individuals from God, both through and outside the Sacraments. The Faith is a psudonym for Sect and leads us to intolerance of the other, not the tolerance that comes with true faith.