Living by Faith and Reason - Dr. Francis Beckwith

[Music] I do think that it's certainly true intellectuals tend to as shouldn't be surprising tend to intellectualize things in my case I think returning to the church opened up an aspect of my life that had been absent as an evangelical protestant one of the things that actually surprises people when when I tell them this that if you look at the Evangelical Protestant world there's so much placed on memorizing scripture being able to argue with let's say Oh Jehovah's Witness who comes to your door or trying to convert a Mormon friend by you know explaining why their interpretation of Scripture is is wrong and it's a lot of it's it's very rationalistic and intellectual when I returned to the church certainly arguments made a difference to me that the church was able to answer certain things that I don't think could be answered from Evangelical Protestant perspective however one of the wonderful things about returning to the church was the life of prayer the sacramentals the times at mass where it wasn't about me trying to figure out what the meaning of transubstantiation was it was simply to receive Christ and to accept that on faith later on as I as the years passed I had a couple of interesting moments when my father was ill in 2013 in November of that year he had been diagnosed with cancer and I wanted to select a saint to pray to for his healing and so I got online and I googled cancer patient st. and up popped Saint Anthony of Padua and so I didn't tell anybody this I didn't even tell my wife but every evening and every morning I would pray to Saint Anthony of Padua up until the day that my father passed away in fact I prayed at the morning that he died after he passed away that I think the Saturday following his death he died actually on the morning of Ash Wednesday in 2015 February 18th my mom was going through his belongings and my father who was a Catholic he went to Mass every Sunday but he wasn't one of these Catholics that like talked about his faith or wore a lot of medals he was you know very unassuming about his faith and he lived it he was a man of great generosity and charity and love so she's going through his his personal items and there's this little looks like a little booklet maybe about a half an inch in size maybe a little larger than that and she says your father and my mother who had a Brooklyn accent she goes your father can't read this around everywhere and and he goes in fact one time I tried to take his slacks to the taking his slacks to the dry cleaners and she he was he went he almost lost it because he says where's that where are my pants and he pulled the but what turned out to be a st. Anthony of Padua medal is she hands it to me and I open it up it says st. Anthony of Padua pray for us and it was this prayer and I got so choked up it was and I told my mom I said you won't believe this to this day consider that as a kind of minor miracle now as a philosopher who did his doctoral dissertation on miracles that was my my dissertation was on David Humes argument into miracles I would call this philosophically a second class miracle that is there were no laws of nature that were violated but there was a coincidence of improbable events that seemed to point towards a message and so it was deeply comforting that my father who I would have never suspected carried around a religious metal had one and happened to be about the very Saint that I had prayed to on his behalf [Music] [Music] [Music]

Channel: The Coming Home Network International

Views: 1,059

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: God, Jesus, Holy Spirit, Miracles, St. Antony of Padua, Death, Prayer, Scripture, Apologetics, Evangelical, Catholic, Roman Catholic, Protestant, Becoming catholic, Baylor, Theology

Id: xajxYmmoxL8

Length: 4min 58sec (298 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 22 2019