Check out my new YouTube channel here
Stories of the Unexpected are short, true life stories of the supernatural which will act as teasers leading to a more in depth discussion here on my blog.
Readers will wonder about a couple of things with this new direction in my blog. First, “Why am I wearing a black turtleneck?” Wearing a clerical shirt sometimes reaches people and sometimes put people off. The black turtleneck is distinctive, but it is not immediately a signal of my being a Catholic priest. This fits with the open ended nature of the discussions on Stories of the Unexpected.
The idea of the YouTube blog is a little bit experimental. There are plenty of great resources out there amongst Catholic priests who are doing apologetics and evangelization. There are also plenty of lay people who are doing specific evangelization and apologetics. I’m trying to come at it a different way. My Stories of the Unexpected will simply be stories of events that challenge our usual, materialistic way of looking at the world.
I intend to leave the conclusions open ended and to prompt the viewer to think about things in more depth. When they come to this blog, as I hope some of them will, they will find a further discussion of the story in question. That discussion, too, will examine the “supernatural story” using the criterion we are called to use as Catholics: first we are to find any possible natural explanation for what happened, and even when we can’t find a natural explanation we should not immediately conclude that the solution to the mystery is supernatural in origin. It might be a natural solution we have simply not discovered yet.
But in saying that, I will also expect viewers to be open minded the other way. I want people to scratch their chin and say, “Well, there is something else we hadn’t accounted for. Maybe reality is rubbery. The created order is open ended. Maybe there are other realms of being and other modes of perception that we hadn’t accounted for.
I hope you will enjoy the stories I will post. I hope to find the time to post about one a week, but we’ll see how it goes.
If you do like the stories I hope you’ll be enthusiastic and share and so help evangelize.
