December 7, 2025
Dear Friends,
The theologian and author that I have talked about for the last several months and that Father Leo invited to our parish, Dr. Andrew Root, has been here and gone. As is the case with most things in parish life these days most people would not prefer to spend extra time out of their already busy lives on a speaker in the church hall on a wintry Sunday afternoon and even though those of us who did, groupies that we are, did not I suspect identify with much that Dr. Root had to say in his one hour presentation but it is not unimportant that he was here.
The titles of Dr. Roots books (he has published 62) in themselves are worth spending time with, real time, to try and see if they even speak to us, if they have any kind of connection to our “faith” life, our “religion,” our experience of and with the Catholic Church.
Among them are:
Faith Formation in a Secular Age, The Congregation in a Secular Age, Churches and the Crisis of Decline, When Church Stops Working, Evangelism in a Time of Despair, The Church After Innovation, The Church in an Age of Secular Mysticisms.
Just spend a minute looking at those titles and see if anything grabs you or speaks to you.
A major premise of Dr. Root’s work is that there is change needed, change in just about every aspect of our lives as individuals and as a community and as creatures of a Creator who saw all that was created as good because it came into being and is sustained in being by the Word Made Flesh, Jesus Christ.
He identifies the need for change in a careful and respectful analysis of many aspects of ordinary life which in his mind exhibit the symptoms of serious depressions which like clinical depressions is unacknowledged and unrecognized because the causes and the symptoms have been incorporated into our lives as normal and necessary.
We are exposed to an enormous display of suffering that surrounds us in so many places of cruelty, violence, and deception normally expected to overwhelm healthy people, yet, most of us plow thorough with nary a nod because we deny and distract ourselves with entertainments or righteous angers that may or may not be reality based or we put ourselves in front of screens for way more time than is good for us or as is the case with many people in our country who identify as Christian including Catholics we “put it all in “God’s” hands and let it go at that only it doesn’t go the suffering is still there.
Andrew Root believes as do I that we are all in need of something other than what we have, that we are all in need of real and sincere consolation not pity and more cultivated senses of victimhood, that we all need to slow down and think more calmly and serenely, and that we need to do what Jesus has told us to do, and we especially need to pray for the folks that we think are idiots, fools, unenlightened dimwits, and we need to listen more carefully to the moment we are actually inhabiting.
I think Dr. Root will be largely unappreciated by most people who identify as Christian including many of us who identify as Catholic Christians and that is sad because I sincerely believe he is one of the very few credible theologians willing to publish his work in our country carefully observing and thinking about and studying and writing and talking about the possibilities for a real faith in the Living God revealed in creation and the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ. He is not in a phony argument with the realities of creation and the People of God, who we all are, nor is he hell bent on infantilizing Christianity with a un-reflected, understudied version of the Gospels that is obsessed with stuff that Jesus never, ever considered to be an important aspect of his life or teaching, offering us a “God” too easy to believe in, way too like us with very little if any doubt or uncertainty and no real questions to ask that arise in our hearts.
Peace,
Father Niblick