Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

A Thorny Baptism Situation

A reader writes:

I have a friend who’s father is (nominal, cultural) Catholic and mother is
Protestant. For some reason she was never baptized as an infant. She has since
come to faith in Christ and wants to be baptized. But she does not believe the
Catholic Church is Christ’s church, and so does not want to be baptized in it.
However, her father will not allow her to be baptized in a Protestant church.
She is 19, but she is a student still dependent on her parents.

If you were in my position, what would you advise her to do? Should she disobey
her father and get baptized in a Protestant church? Should she get baptized in
a Catholic church even though she does not desire to be Catholic? Should she
simply seek out the nearest river and have a layman baptize her?

This is a problematic situation on several fronts. The young woman is a legal adult now, and this makes her father’s refusal to let her be baptized in accordance with her conscience problematic. On the other hand, the girl’s desire to be baptized outside of the Church is itself intrinsically problematic.

To deal with your questions in reverse order:

4. I can’t recommend that she have a Catholic layman baptize her since laymen are only permitted to baptize in emergency circumstances, and it doesn’t sound as if she is in one. I also can’t recommend that she have a non-Catholic layman baptize her since what she should do is investigate the Catholic faith.

3. She can’t be baptized in the Catholic Church without believing in the Catholic faith, so this isn’t an option either.

2. If, after investigating the claims of the Catholic Church, her concience tells her that she should be baptized in the Protestant church then she is obligated to follow her conscience.

1. What I would do is encourage her to set aside the situation with her father and look at the question of whether the Catholic faith is true. I’d assure her of my conviction that the Catholic faith is true and offer to provide her with material to help her investigate this subject and to help her get answers to questions she may have.

This is really the ideal way of dealing with the situation. It may be difficult for her to set aside the situation with her father, but God will do his part–in his own time–to help her find her way to the fullness of the Christian faith.

Superman Returns Ancient Images Of Planet Krypton

china_ice_festival

(DAILY PLANET) METROPOLIS – Today Superman released a number of pictures displaying his heritage from the extinct Planet Krypton. Using a unique photon-gathering technique in deep space, Superman captured light still travelling from the distant, long-exploded planet and used it to reconstruct images of Krypton’s final hours.

CORRECTION: The above image is not, as reported, from the distant planet Krypton. Instead, it is from a pair of snow and ice sculpture festivals in China.

Amazing pictures, folks!

The Ups and Downs of Dieting

weightloss3Every diet book will tell you that you should try to weigh yourself under the same conditions every time so that you minimize the effect of daily fluctuations in weight (caused by eating and drinking) on the readings you get.

Virtually every diet book will also tell you that as you diet you can expect considerable ups and downs and that you shouldn’t worry about these. They are caused by various factors, most notably your body’ retaining fluids for reasons which may not be obvious. Consequently, you shouldn’t worry about these multi-day fluctuations in your weight. As long as your overall weight goes down over time, you’re making progress toward your goal. To keep you from stressing out about these upticks in what the scale tells you, some diet books will recommend that you only weigh yourself once a week. That will give you a better chance of seeing a lower reading than what you saw the last time you got on the scale, but it will not guarantee this.

From what I’ve seen in others who have followed this strategy, it may actually increase the stress they feel when they see an uptick in the scale reading. They feel like they have wasted a whole week of dieting, and if they don’t weigh themselves for another week, they’ll have that feeling hanging over them for a week.

So I don’t do that.

I tend to be systematic in my approach to things and, since I have something of a scientific bent (as illustrated by this blog), I keep detailed info on my diet, exercise, nutritional supplements, etc. By analyzing this data, I can note trends over time and figure out what my body best responds to.

One item I keep track of is a daily reading of my weight, which I used to generate the above graph (click it to enlarge it in a pop-up window). It shows me losing sixteen pounds between April 9th and May 30th. (Overall, I’ve lost almost forty-four pounds since going back on my diet in mid January, after taking a few months off to let my metabolism re-set.) The graph lets you see the kinds of ups and downs one can expect during an effective diet, which is why I thought I’d show it here. Most diet books don’t show what your weight trendline is likely to look like, but it seems to me that it would help prepare the reader for the kinds of ups and downs to be expected.

One of the things I’ve noticed over time is that I tend to have a weight rebound immediately after each time I achieve a new low (unless I’m on a semi-liquid variant of my diet that keeps pushing my weight down). It’s like at each new weight low my body decides that it needs to reassure itself that we aren’t going to starve, so it starts hanging on to water and my weight increases temporarily. You can’t see this very well on the above graph because of the special events it records (the colored areas), but now that I know this happens, I expect it and so I don’t get concerned when it happens. It’s a normal part of how weight loss works for me.

Another thing I’ve noticed is that the stress of travel will cause my weight to bounce up. That’s what’s happening in the purple box on the track line. It was the day I went up north of L.A. to give talks at a Protestant school. Sure enough, when I got back my weight had gone up (this particular spike is exaggerated due to the time of day I had to weigh myself), but the effect was temporary and only lasted a few days.

The two blue boxes on the graph represent tiems I was varying my diet. I occasionally do experiments to see if I can make it more effective than it normally is. (Normally I lose two pounds a week on average.) The first blue box represents a period when I switched to an almost-all-liquid diet that focused on protein. At the moment, I’m trying a diet variant focusing mostly on fat. I can’t maintain such diet variants for overly long (they tend to be way too BORING to sustain indefinitely), but gathering the data will show me what my body responds to best.

"Where Are They Taking Those Women . . . ?"

sabinesAt the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

sevenbridesActually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

“Where Are They Taking Those Women . . . ?”

sabinesAt the moment I’m listening to an audio course on Roman history (which I will review soon), and as I go through it, it’s bringing to mind all kind of incidents I remember that involve Roman history. One of them occurred just last year.

I was in an art museum with a family of friends, and we were looking at a room of sixteenth to eighteenth century paintings, most of which dealt with biblical or mythological themes. I was studying a picture at my eye-level (Daniel in the Lion’s Den or something like that), when the tiny voice of the family’s youngest daughter rose to my ears.

“Where are they taking those women . . . ?” she asked.

I bent to look at the painting at her eye level and saw that it was a painting of men hefting women on their shoulders and carrying them off (much like the one I’ve reproduced here, which is of the same event).

I looked at the card next to it to see what it was titled. “THE RAPE OF THE SABINES,” the card said.

My mind reeled for a second as to what to tell the child.

“To have fun,” I said.

“Oh,” she replied, contentendly.

sevenbridesActually, as the Roman history course I’m listening to now points out, the “rape” of the Sabines wasn’t really a rape. It was actually “kidnapping with intent to marry,” but it still left me wondering what kind of weirdo would hang a painting of the event at the eye-level of a six year old child. That’s one of those practical organizational rules like “Don’t put the horses at the front of the parade.”

(FYI, if you’re not a student of Roman history, you may have heard of the abduction of the Sabine women from the goofy musical Seven Brides for Seven Brothers, where it is recounted in the goofy song “Oh Those Sobbin’, Sobbin’ Women.” Sobbin’ = Sabine. Get it?)

Welcome to New Server Land

Typepad supposedly upgraded its servers last night, so this should cure the slow response times we’ve been having on the blog lately.

Let’s hope so. I don’t want to have to move the blog again after getting it settled in here.

Thus far it *does* seem on my end that the server is responding much faster and without the long hang times that were plaguing it the last few days..

Spines Sprouting Everywhere

Brumley has a good piece on the recent displays of intestinal fortitude by bishops vis-a-vis pro-abort (and other pro-evil) politicians.

The same page (father down) also has an interesting interview with Bishop Bruskewitz on the national conference’s Review Board (dealing with the aftermath of the sex abuse scandal) and the problems that the bishop sees with it. He’s quite displomatic in how he phrases things, but if you read between the lines he’s severely slamming the way the board has been set up and run.

(Now if Brumley would just migrate to a board that has built-in permalinks so people could point directly to individual stories. . . . And if he would only post more regularly. His content is too good to be allowed not to exist.)