Episodes

Sam stands in the shadow of Mordor and says it plain: there is some good in this world, and it is worth fighting for. That sentence does something to a person. It raises the old question the materialist world has never quite answered—where does the idea of goodness even come from, and why does it make a claim strong enough that we keep going when every calculation says turn back? The natural moral law is written on the heart; a law implies a lawgiver; the ache for a goodness that costs something...

After an exhausting election season, it’s easy to argue about which way our country should go without asking what it’s all for. In a 1911 newspaper column, more than a decade before he became Catholic, G.K. Chesterton offered a test as old as mankind: can an honest man marry an honest woman, raise their children and give them a secure life? In this episode, we look at why every political and economic system should be measured by that standard, why the family comes before the state, and why finan...

Does God have a gender? Why does the Catholic Church use masculine pronouns like “He” and titles like “Father” and “Son”? In this episode, Greg explores the scriptural, theological, and traditional reasons behind this language, drawing on the Catechism, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Pope John Paul II’s Theology of the Body. He addresses modern objections—Is it patriarchal? Why not “Mother” or gender-neutral terms?—and shows how this language shapes our faith and relationship with God. ...

For secular folks this is Halloween, for Catholics it's the eve of All Saints Day, but for Protestants it's Reformation Day, when Martin Luther nailed his complaints against the Catholic Church to a cathedral door in Germany. Today, Protestants celebrate what they imagine is a heroic and prophetic scene. But as Greg explains in this snapshot, it's nothing to celebrate. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a...

A glimpse of something beautiful can put you on the road before you have a name for the destination. In this episode Greg returns to the moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam sees a white star through the shadow of Mordor, and to the way Tolkien and Lewis kept writing the same thing: beauty is not an ornament. It is a pathway. He traces that hunger through a childhood Christmas song, the Magi following a star, and the recognition that the Catholic house had kept that beauty and given it a fac...

Catholicism does not lower the bar to make the faith easier to swallow. It treats people as adults and expects them to grow up — in doctrine, in moral responsibility, in the seriousness of the sacraments, and in the long conversation the Church has been having with itself for two thousand years. In this conversation with Ed, Greg and Ed talk about what it feels like when a church stops trying to entertain you and starts expecting you to keep up. They look at the features that get criticized as b...

Nine or ten at night, fog on a mountain road, and a Catholic chapel the size of a tool shed. A crucifix, a couple of benches, a place to pray. It was the first Catholic building Greg ever walked into, and it was quiet. A lot of people describe the same pull. An empty church on a Tuesday that is full of glass and saints and stories, and dead quiet. Confession lines, a candle, a priest anointing someone before surgery, five silent minutes while the vessels are purified after Communion. Not a lower...

A Christianity of new beginnings gets old. The megachurch was the recovery of real church, and before that the Jesus Movement, and before that some other return to the original, each one arriving as the source and aging into a period style. For a lot of people the pull toward Rome starts there: not in a proof about Peter, but in a wish to go upstream and find the water still moving. In the early 2000s that wish was unfashionable. Not arriving had become a spirituality, with books and sermons hun...

Nearly five hundred episodes of this show have been about why the Catholic Church is true. That work was real, and it is not being retired. It was also incomplete. Most people do not start down the Road to Rome because they won an argument. They start because something draws them — a longing, a story, a seriousness, a beauty — before they can give the thing a name. In this short introduction to Drawn to Rome, Greg tells the part of his own conversion he usually leaves out: Tolkien, read as a kid...

Four true sentences became, for a lot of us, the entire gospel. They were a trailer. They were never the film. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. You are a sinner. Jesus is God’s only provision. You must receive him as Savior and Lord. Whether or not anyone still uses the name, those four sentences are the unexamined scaffold of a great deal of conservative evangelical Christianity — the invitation at the end of the sermon, the question that ends the conversation, the prayer ...

The Romans Road is the gospel many of us first learned: all have sinned, the wages of sin is death, Christ died for us, confess and believe, call on the Lord. Those verses are true. This episode asks why a handful of lines from Romans 3, 5, 6, and 10 should be the front door of the whole Bible, and why Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount so often has to be managed after the fact. Greg traces the habit from Luther’s claim that Romans is the “purest Gospel” through the revivalist “plan of salvation,” and t...

A myth does not want a conversation. It wants you on defense: ten charges in a minute, each one cheap to shout and expensive to answer. This episode is about refusing that game without refusing the person. Love runs both ways — toward the critic, and toward the Catholic who has been worn down by family, forwards, and the pressure to win dinner. You may walk away. You may pray and keep the relationship. You may live a life in Christ that the plot cannot cast as a dupe, and leave the rest to time ...

Anti-Catholic propaganda is not a pile of arguments waiting to be answered one by one. It is a story: a pure church, a theft, a long night, a remnant, a monster with a face. That story has kept the same shape for five hundred years. It works by emotion, not evidence. Once the plot is in place, facts become scenery and you cannot fact-check a myth. This episode is about recognizing that narrative for what it is. The next episode is about how to respond. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism ...

In the second conversation, Ed turns from his own story to the people who write in every week and say they are exactly where he was two or three years ago. He talks about the things that actually help: treating your relationship with God as the most important thing in your life, finding a few trustworthy voices and ignoring the rest, asking yourself honestly what is holding you back (usually authority or the demand that every last question be answered first), and accepting that the process takes...

Ed is no longer just considering. After four-plus years of conversations on this show, he is now a candidate in the mid-year OCIA cohort at our parish and will enter the Church on the Feast of Christ the King. Sitting at the secret compound (earth-movers optional), he talks about what it actually feels like to walk into Sunday Mass as a newbie: the missed genuflection, the missed missal, the Laurel-and-Hardy choreography in the back pew, and the sudden realization that Catholic liturgy demands a...

The hardest part of becoming Catholic is often not the doctrine. It is the moment a friendship, a marriage, or a family table starts to feel the strain. In this episode, Greg talks about recent conversations with listeners and people in OCIA whose families experience their interest in the Church as a rupture—and about his own long friendships with Protestant and evangelical colleagues, some of them thirty or forty years old, that have never quite recovered from his conversion. The usual peace of...

In this re-release of one of our earliest conversations, Greg and Ed sit down on the podcast’s first anniversary to explain why this show is called Considering Catholicism—and not something more generic. Drawing on C.S. Lewis’s own hallway analogy in Mere Christianity, they make the case that the “mere” version of the faith can get you through the front door, but it cannot answer the real questions that come next: what the Church is, how we are saved, what the sacraments are for, how we live, an...

You cannot unring a bell. Once it has sounded, you can leave the room or cover your ears, but you cannot reach backward and make the ringing not have happened. That is the Catholic claim about the sacraments: they are not snapshots of a spiritual mood, and they are not memorials of a decision you once made. They are acts of Christ that do something real. Baptism, Confirmation, and Holy Orders leave a mark that cannot be erased. Valid marriage creates a bond that lasts until death. Absolution act...

Why don’t Catholics just dedicate babies the way so many evangelical churches do? In this episode we look carefully at the difference between a sincere baby dedication and the Catholic sacrament of baptism. Dedication is a beautiful public commitment by parents and the church to raise a child in the faith—but it leaves the child’s spiritual state unchanged. Catholic baptism claims something more: that Christ acts first, remitting original sin, conferring sanctifying grace, and incorporating the ...

Thomas named a frustration many people feel when they look seriously at Catholicism: on paper and in history the Church looks strong, bold, and majestic, yet in many ordinary parishes and contemporary voices it can feel soft, embarrassed by its own doctrine, and eager to concede to the spirit of the age. In this final episode of the series, Greg takes that dissonance seriously. He distinguishes it from the usual “Church of sinners” cliché, places Vatican II and its aftermath in the much longer p...

Thomas named the papacy as one of the biggest speed bumps on the Road to Rome. The questions are familiar: Who made a man in Rome the boss of Christianity? What about the corrupt popes? Can he just make things up? In this episode Greg takes those questions head-on, beginning with Jesus’ words to Peter in Matthew 16 and the early Church’s recognition of that office. He looks honestly at the mixed historical record of the men who have sat in the chair, explains the real (and limited) nature of pap...

Thomas raised two related difficulties with the Mass: what the Catholic Church actually claims is happening on the altar, and how underwhelming or casual many ordinary parish celebrations can feel. In this episode Greg stays focused on the first question. Drawing on Scripture, the early Church, and the Church’s precise language of transubstantiation, he explains why Catholics insist that the whole Christ — body, blood, soul, and divinity — is truly present under the appearances of bread and wine...

Thomas asked the natural follow-up question to the “broken window”: if forgiveness cancels the debt but the damage remains, what happens to that remaining damage after we die? In this episode Greg takes up the common Protestant objection that any further purification after death seems to add something to the finished work of the Cross. Drawing on the Catechism, Scripture, and the Church’s long practice of praying for the dead, he explains that everyone in purgatory is already saved and will reac...

Thomas asked a question that a lot of people carry quietly: if Christ has already paid the full price for our sins, why does the Catholic Church still talk about penance, temporal punishment, and making satisfaction? In this third episode of the Dear Doubting Thomas series, Greg takes up the “broken window” image Thomas used and the common Protestant retort that any further “doing” after forgiveness seems to add to the finished work of the Cross. Drawing on the Church’s careful distinctions betw...