Apologetics-low level scholarship

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Melchior:
The ivory tower has a way of creating an intellectual vacuum that is bad for the soul. If you are going to bury yourself in scholarship take a bit of C.S. Lewis’s advise and spend an equal amount of time or greater reading a classic novel, some poetry, shallow fiction or whatever. But it sounds like you have let your mind become imbalanced by focusing in one direction. It is the direction of eggheads.
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I’m a graduate student and this is good advice: STOP READING for a little bit.

Just pray and meditate and spend some time with people and watch a silly movie and go to the sea and play video games and attend mass and write poems and call your mom and walk the stations of the cross and play with puppies and confess your sins and sing in the shower and volunteer for charity and do whatever else you want…

… but stop reading heavy deep skeptical books for a while.

When you are ready to start reading again try Dostoevsky. If that is too much, read Michael Creighton and work your way up to Dostoevsky!

There is an intellectual side to faith but there is an emotional side too. Often I see people over-emphasize one at the expense of the other. Your mind is overworked and your soul needs time to rest.

While you’re doing all of this, know that you have one schismatic Protestant praying for you. 😉

-C
 
Real faithful theologians would agree that any study of the faith and its defense(theology and apologetics) but arise FIRST out of FAITH. One can study theology all one wants, but if faith (cannot be found in books alone) is lacking all is empty. Saint Thomas Aquinas (my favorite Saint: I too follow the Catholic theology of St. Thomas: who by the way was the ONLY theologian recomended by VATICAN II) himself said after a mystical experience (vision??) that all he had thought he knew of God, and all he had written, now seemed like “straw.” For one to really grasp theology, one FIRST should be in a state of grace, then have a strong faith, then and only then, should study CATHOLIC theologians such as Saint Thomas Aquinas (# 1), St. Bonaventure, and the 33 doctors of the church. One should not be looking into the OPINIONS of certain modernist “theologians” a few who were physically present as observers at Vatican II.
As regards Pope SAINT Pius X’s Pascendi, I would have to totally say it really was a work of a GENIUS: if ONLY his words would be enforced today, we would not have many so called seminaries which SOME here in the United States tend to harbour left-wing teachers, and take in ANYBODY. but, the apple does not fall far from the tree: in this case the statement applies to Bishops and seminaries in the USA. A NON-obedient to the Vatican Bishop, oversees a diocesan seminary, which in turn will tend to produce non-obedient to the Vatican seminarians, then priests, who as left wing as some are, are then RELEASED to parishes, and the people (scary).:eek:
All in all, prayer is the best way to attempt to understand a small fragment of the divine(in our limited minds) as we Catholics study theology.
 
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amarischuk:
:

Apologetics= shallow scholarship → conservative Catholics
Academia=deeper scholarschip → faith crisis.
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Well, to (correctly) judge most apologetics as shallow, you must have an idea of the not-shallow. That means you believe in Truth, and the Author of Truth. Hang on to that; that’s what I do.
Joe
 
Hi Adam,

Thank you for your honesty. I must admit that I was brought to tears by your post. You are at a turning point, please, turn toward the Church and not away. Although I don’t feel that “Apologetics-low level scholarship” is really the point of your post, I will address it here.

As a lay Catholic apologist my first reaction is to defend myself and my fellow apologists. But, to be fair I must admit there is some truth in what you say. In fact, there is “low level scholarship” in much of modern Christianity, Catholic or Protestant. The simple truth is that scholarly books don’t sell. Few people outside of academia have the time to read heavy scholarship. This does not mean that they should not, it is just a fact. Many of the really “scholarly” books on theology (both Catholic and Protestant) are so infected by liberalism as to make them useless, if not dangerous. Most of the doctrinally solid books these days are not “scholarly.” I have long decried the lack of good conservative scholarship in Catholicism. Coming from an Evangelical Protestant background, I will have to say that scholarship in that camp is abysmal. I once heard a Fundamentalist preacher proudly proclaim to his congregation that he never graduated high school, as if this qualified him to preach the Gospel.

Yet, to say that a book or work is not scholarly is not the same as saying that it is not accurate. The internet is a different beast altogether. There is a lot of good stuff on the net and a lot of lunatics. I must admit that after you get past a certain point in apologetics there is a lack of good books. This is because modern Catholic apologetics came about to help everyday Catholics understand and defend their faith. For too long Catholics have believed that theology was out of their reach, the domain of “scholars.” The modern Catholic apologetics movement (thanks in large part to Catholic Answers) is changing this.

Adam, we need fine minds like you and Chris. The challenge here is not to lessen your scholarship, but to increase your faith. Please remember that an orthodox scholar is not an oxymoron.

PAX CHRISTI

Bill
 
Adam, I’ve been reading some apologetic boards over the years and I always wonder where the living Person of Jesus Christ is in all of it? It’s not enough to be an expert on all the doctines of our Church if one does not know and have faith in the living Person of Jesus in their lives.

"When talking to a group of American bishops, Pope John Paul 11 stressed this point: 'Sometimes even Catholics have lost or have never had the chance to experience Christ personally: not just Christ as a mere “value”, but the living Lord."
The realisation that many Catholics are gravely impoverished in their faith by a lack of personal relationship with and loving knowledge of Christ is now frequently being admitted by Church leaders. When addressing the need for a new evangelisation of Europe, Cardinal Daneels of Belgium commented on the tendency to speak of the values of Christianity but to overlook the living person of Christ: Many of our faithful … are strongly attached to the values of the Gospel … especially justice, peace, solidarity… But this cult of values is separated from the cult of the living person of Christ: from prayer … and sacramental practice… Such a Christianity, reduced to an ethic, cannot subsist for long."

Since I’ve been involved in discussions on these Christian boards, I see everyone arguing doctrine but very few focused on Jesus Christ Himself Who is what Christianity is all about.

As the Holy Father has said:

"Christianity is primarily a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. It is a Damascus-road experience like the one St. Paul had. It is a personal Pentecost like the Apostles had in the Upper Room. Everybody’s experience may be different, but experience the love of Christ we must, or we will end up in a dry, brittle, intellectual head-trip. We will succumb to will power Christianity, the ultimate oxymoron and try to work our way up to God. That will eventually crush us under the load, and we will give up the fight in some significant way. "

God bless you
 
“Reading, after a certain age, diverts the mind too much from its creative pursuits. Any man who reads too much and uses his own brain too little falls into lazy habits of thinking.”

~ Albert Einstein

More to come, I hope…
 
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MIDGIE:
Adam, I’ve been reading some apologetic boards over the years and I always wonder where the living Person of Jesus Christ is in all of it? It’s not enough to be an expert on all the doctines of our Church if one does not know and have faith in the living Person of Jesus in their lives.

Since I’ve been involved in discussions on these Christian boards, I see everyone arguing doctrine but very few focused on Jesus Christ Himself Who is what Christianity is all about.

God bless you
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Perhaps you see nothing but apologetics on these boards because, well, these are *apologetics * boards. That is the purpose of these particular boards and it is what people come here to discuss. There are other, spirtuality based boards where it would be improper to discuss doctrine and apologetics because the purpose of those boards is not apologetics, but spirituality. 🙂

BTW, are you sure the last quote you cited was from the Holy Father? Granted, I haven’t read everything he’s written, but I can’t ever remember him using the phrase “head-trip.” :confused:
 
The pursuit of knowledge for knowledges sake is futile. It will not lead you where you really want to go. You are trying to learn about Jesus from a book. Try talking to Him … it is possible when in adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. But you have to listen … stop talking … hear His voice.

Another way … try getting some callouses on your hands from cleaning dirty dishes at a soup kitchen or sorting cans and boxes at a food pantry.

There is value in the dryness you are experiencing … God waste’s nothing. Many graces come from persisting even when all seems hidden and dark.
 
I often mourn the loss of true Catholic scholarship among my fellow Catholics - so many of my fellow teachers seem ignorant of the faith. However, I do not believe that it is dead.

Rather, I see two distinct groups out there. First, there are the uneducated masses who have been the victims of poor catechesis and even worse education. So many schools don’t teach students how to think, no matter how much they give lip service to “critical thinking.”

However, the second group is made up of incredibly informed Catholics who are also excellent thinkers.

I see modern apologetics as an attempt to bridge the gap between these two groups. It is not rigorously scholastic because it is attempting to communicate truths to people who are only able to digest it in small amounts. Yet, it is instrumental (or will be) in raising the general scholarship among Catholics. I know many people who began reading and thinking again because of Catholic radio.

Also, I would like to reiterate that Catholic scholarship is very different from what I call “academia.” Catholic scholarship is a search for the universal truth. In addition to reading, writing, and discussing, Catholic scholarship must include time in prayer - including meditation and contemplation. Saint Thomas Aquinas even said that he learned more by kneeling in front of a crucifix than he learned from any book. He spent tine in front of the Blessed Sacrament every day. When “scholarship” means denying revealed truth because it cannot be “proven” by the rational mind, it has lost sight of the universality of truth. Academia tends to become self-absorbed and prideful. True Catholic scholarship should lead us to a humbling sense of awe and wonder at the truths of God.
 
Thank you everyone for your interesting posts.

I suppose that the posts could be divided into several classes. The first class would be my favorite: get out of the books. I can assure everyone that since returning home from the seminary I have read a whopping 70 pages of Marie-Dominique Chenu’s Nature, Man and Society in the Twelveth Century (with a preface by Etienne Gilson, published by the Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies). Yet in that time I have put my small sailboat in the lake, been camping several times, played a dozen road hockey games (usually after watching the cup finals with the guys, sob…poor Calgary) and lastly worked and gone to Mass.

For those who suggest I have been too “heady” I must say that this was a deciding factor in my disillusionment with conservative Catholicism. I am very much an intellectual person (or at least I play one on TV). I lived with the EZLN (Zapatista’s) in Chiapas with CCODP (the Bishops ‘charity’) and am not afraid to get my hands dirty. But when I went to Vancouver (the big city) to study there and I met with two Catholic groups on campus: Opus Dei and CCO (something like the Newman club) I began to really wonder. Both were very conservative and very much “into” personal sanctity and prayer etc. I asked the leaders (the Chaplin was Opus Dei) if they knew where the Catholic soup kitchen was in Vancouver (I knew there must be one). Not only did they not know where it was, they didn’t even know if there was one and no one seemed to care. So after a prolonged telephone search I found the kitchen, volunteered there every Friday (I usually had Fridays off) and once a semester organized a group from the University to put on the meal (on weekends groups came in and brought their own food because the food bank only provided food for the week). Sadly I had more atheist friends, protestants and liberal Catholic friends show up than from the “official” Catholic groups on campus. Infact my agnostic friend and his wife (he’s in med school, she’s in pharmacy) were the only people to loan me a car to bring the $300+ of food I needed to purchase to the kitchen (I usually was able to collect enough donations to make my financial contribution acceptable to a students budget).

So that is the first groups.

The second group of posts were the expected anti-intellectual ones. “You are reading modernist heretics… who destroy your faith”. Anyone who calls Jacques Maritain a modernist heretics has never read more than two words from him. I am want to find some really good conservative authors and I do not believe that is because of some some conspiracy. To quote (was it Arnold Lunn in his debate with Haldane? this is from your book Mr Keating) the more experienced debater has failed to convince the less experienced, not because of a lack of rhetorical skills, but because the other has the truth.

I see this in the academic world, if the pope was not the pope, his books would not be published, and Peter Kreeft is a popularizer (not in itself a bad thing) but not a scholar whose writings are at the same level as Etienne Gilson (who for you people who cry “modernist” at anything with a degree, was quoted by the Pope himself in his book “Crossing the Thresholds of Hope” and the conservative press Ignatius caries a number of his books). But Mr. Rutland’s observation that scholarly books don’t sell is a sad fact. I am personally greatful to the University of Notre Dame, the University of Toronto and Ignatius press for keeping many very good books in print (that and the used book stores such as alibris or abebooks).

Building off this were the posts to presonal sanctity; which I really dislike the contrasting of with the intellect. In Canada we do not get EWTN but in the seminary we did and I watched Archbishop Fulton Sheen for the first time. I recall he was talking about the distinction between the intellect (whose object is truth) and the will (object-love) and how this can account for why my devout grandmother (with the better half of a grade 12 education-grade 6) can be more devout than the scholar, because the two faculties of the soul are distinct. Well Newman’s Grammar of Ascent would disagree with this and so do I. If Catholicism were the only religion on earth this could work, but scholarship seems to be diametrically opposed to superstition in all cultures and this is a much more plausible explanation for the lack of faith in academia…
 
Now I am not saying Catholicism is superstition; however, after much Bible studying, I cannot say the same for much of the tradition view of Scripture. People’s advice to “read the Bible” is self-defeating because often it is the Bible which is the cause of the problem. In other threads people were complaining about Fr. Raymond Brown, but what about Fr. Donald Senior or Fr. Lawrence Boadt? Theirs are, I think, examples of true Catholic scholarship attempting to deal with a current crisis (such as monogenism and transformism…on which Fr. Rahner has an interesting section in his Theological Investigations). Some might be the modern version of Siger of Brabant, others Bonaventure, and others modern Thomas Aquinas’. The twelth century experienced a similar problem with Aristoteleanism and Aquinas himself found himself in “hot water”.

The point isn’t “Rahner is damaging my faith” but the serious intellectual problem of assimilating my scientific, philosophical and historical knowledge with the “revealed Truth”. I will not abandon either; however, when push comes to shove I will gladly take the title “modernist” for abandoning monogenism or denying the literal flood, or the Ban in order to make revelation pallatable.

Mr Keating brough up two points of interest. The first concerning internet apologetics sites. I think another value to the sites is that the also provide a level of personal contact not present in books and allow for open dialogue (more often than not this dialogue seems to degenerate). All in all they serve a purpose but at a certain point they fail to fulfill the intellectual questions they inspire.

The second point regarding the “new Spring” and the Pope. Given the evidence I do not like this “spring” (and not because I am Canadian and miss hockey season). But this springtime of conservative priests is coming at a price. The priests in the seminary where I was were nearly all 3rd worlders, undereducated and not particularly interested in academics. Very nice people, and I think many would be excellent priests, but the western culture of scholarship is not present in the same degree, especially in the Africans, Latin Americans and Asians (one Chinese semianrian noted the very poor quality of Chinese priests back home). The list of scholars I provided were responsible for VII even though some became very disillusioned with the council, nothing is replacing them though.

Simply put I am experiencing a growing pain in my faith, where it truly is being revolutionized as I try to assimilate everything into a single coherent whole.

But sadly I have not had the opportunity of responding to each post idividually. Rest assured that I read them all and I thank each and every one of you for them.

“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to athiesm, but depth in philosophy bringth back ones mind to religion” Francis Bacon

In Christ,

Adam Marischuk
 
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amarischuk:
Now I am not saying Catholicism is superstition; however, after much Bible studying, I cannot say the same for much of the tradition view of Scripture. People’s advice to “read the Bible” is self-defeating because often it is the Bible which is the cause of the problem. In other threads people were complaining about Fr. Raymond Brown, but what about Fr. Donald Senior or Fr. Lawrence Boadt? Theirs are, I think, examples of true Catholic scholarship attempting to deal with a current crisis (such as monogenism and transformism…on which Fr. Rahner has an interesting section in his Theological Investigations). Some might be the modern version of Siger of Brabant, others Bonaventure, and others modern Thomas Aquinas’. The twelth century experienced a similar problem with Aristoteleanism and Aquinas himself found himself in “hot water”.

The point isn’t “Rahner is damaging my faith” but the serious intellectual problem of assimilating my scientific, philosophical and historical knowledge with the “revealed Truth”. I will not abandon either; however, when push comes to shove I will gladly take the title “modernist” for abandoning monogenism or denying the literal flood, or the Ban in order to make revelation pallatable.

Mr Keating brough up two points of interest. The first concerning internet apologetics sites. I think another value to the sites is that the also provide a level of personal contact not present in books and allow for open dialogue (more often than not this dialogue seems to degenerate). All in all they serve a purpose but at a certain point they fail to fulfill the intellectual questions they inspire.

The second point regarding the “new Spring” and the Pope. Given the evidence I do not like this “spring” (and not because I am Canadian and miss hockey season). But this springtime of conservative priests is coming at a price. The priests in the seminary where I was were nearly all 3rd worlders, undereducated and not particularly interested in academics. Very nice people, and I think many would be excellent priests, but the western culture of scholarship is not present in the same degree, especially in the Africans, Latin Americans and Asians (one Chinese semianrian noted the very poor quality of Chinese priests back home). The list of scholars I provided were responsible for VII even though some became very disillusioned with the council, nothing is replacing them though.

Simply put I am experiencing a growing pain in my faith, where it truly is being revolutionized as I try to assimilate everything into a single coherent whole.

But sadly I have not had the opportunity of responding to each post idividually. Rest assured that I read them all and I thank each and every one of you for them.

“A little philosophy inclineth man’s mind to athiesm, but depth in philosophy bringth back ones mind to religion” Francis Bacon

In Christ,

Adam Marischuk
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Adam,

At the risk of sounding uncharitable I must say I am starting to see the problem. You base many of your assumptions on the foundation of your own intellect and what you percieve to be absolute truth regarding modernism and science. You take for granted rationalistic and skeptical schools of thought while completely dismissing that there are great minds out there that can make a very good stand against certain scientific theories that are incompatible with a proper view of Salvation history as well as those who can quite thoroughly engage Biblical higher criticism and leave it in the dust. Scholarship does not require skepticism as a starting point to be considered properly intellectual.

I think you fall victim to your own intellect and the perceived superiority of some writers because you prefer their writing style or school of thought. As simplistic as that may sound that is exactly what you are doing. It is intellectual snobbery. You set up a particular set of qualifications to fit your defintion of scholarly. While doing so you dismiss anything that does not fit your modernistic preconceptions as inferior and not worthy of consideration and then you despair of truth precisely because of your own biases. Perhaps there are things that you dismiss to easily and should reconsider.

It is time for you to be simple. And I don’t mean stupid. I mean simple as discovering or re-discovering the root. Christ puts an emphasis on child like faith for a reason. You can not determine the nature of God and Christianity by judging it by scholasticism. You must determine the validity of scholasticism by judging itaccording to what your God has revealed. You cannot have the faith of an mental giant and sustain. You must first believe like a child. And you really should think long and hard about what that means.

You are atomizing everything and that is the real problem. The devil is in the details my friend.

In Peace,

Mel
 
"…some of the most remarkably stupid people I ever met where at University (including professors).”

Is it just me, or does there appear to be just a touch of an inflated ego in the above qoutation?
 
I have three brief comments:

The Truth is someone, not something.

Still, quiet, sincere Eucharitsic adoration cures many misconceptions.

Try Frank Sheed. Understandable does not equal unscholarly.
God bless,
Strider
 
Apologetics= shallow scholarship → conservative Catholics
Academia=deeper scholarschip → faith crisis

I wish I had no idea what you are talking about here- but unfortunately there was a time where I could have invented the same equation. I remember when I started my undergraduate degree as a Religious Studies (don’t ask me why folks were scared to call it THEOLOGY) major, my faith foundations came from a rich spirituality primarily passed down to me by my rosary-toting mother. I soon “learned” by such “brilliant” theologians as John Dominic Crossan, Elizabeth Schussler Fiorenza, and Hans Kung that the faith my mother passed on to me was highly delusional, sexist, and at the very best based on any number of myths. And I told her so. What stayed her hand from beating me senseless I’ll never know. I wish she had.
After reading these individuals one could ask me, “What do you believe?” and I wouldn’t have had the foggiest clue WHAT I could possibly answer. My mind (which I thought was SO enlightened and informed) was so full of junk it (and my soul) had no direction.
Oddly enough, it took a protestant asking me incessant (if annoying) questions about my faith for me to decide I needed to sort all this out. It was a long road back. What it all eventually boiled down to (for me) was this: “What do I believe scripture is?” And “What do I believe about sacred tradition?” Once I sorted these two out, all else fell into place.
It sounds like you have put knowledge before God. In doing so you have forgotten GOD IS KNOWLEDGE. Not the other way around. Or have you forgotten the basics of the Dumb Ox? You are not agnostic. I don’t think an agnostic could ask the questions you have. You’ve just forgotten the basics. Not only that, you’ve set in your head that conservative= non academic. Just because some of us are “conservative” Catholics, that does not mean we’re ignorant. Chances are we put every bit as much thought into our theology as you have yours.
Theology= faith seeking understanding.
If you have no understanding, where did you go wrong?
You are in my prayers.
 
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Fidelis:
BTW, are you sure the last quote you cited was from the Holy Father?
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I just answered an e-mail from someone on this board about the same quote. I’ll tell you what I told him:

***, I just did a search for the quote and I came up with someone else using the same exact quote, but couldn’t find the quote from the Pope. A few years back, I did a search for ‘“encounter with Christ” and “Pope John Paul II.”’ I went through every writing of his that came up on the search, and copied everything to a file that he said about having an “encounter with Christ,” but I didn’t think to save the sources for each quote…which I’m kicking myself I didn’t do now. Here’s a sample of the quotes I’ve collected:

"…The most beautiful and stirring adventure that can happen to you is the personal meeting with Jesus, who is the only one who gives real meaning to our life."

"The burning desire to invite others to encounter the One whom we have encountered, is the start of the evangelizing mission to which the whole Church is called."

***“Only in the encounter with him, the Word made flesh, do we find the fullness of self and happiness,” the Holy Father added. “Religion itself, without the experience of wondrous discovery of the Son of God and communion with him, who became our brother, becomes a mere set of principles that are increasingly difficult to understand, and rules that are increasingly hard to accept.” ***

***“The proclamation of Christ is not something reserved for a few, the Pope states. It is “the responsibility of all the members of the People of God,” he writes. “Those who have come into genuine contact with Christ cannot keep him for themselves, they must proclaim him.” This proclamation must not be imposed but proposed “with confidence,” the Holy Father explains.” ***

"Only the one who has experienced God can speak about him in a convincing way," the Pope said."

"While we may have assented intellectually to the Lordship of Jesus Christ, we may not have sufficient personal experience of his power in our lives to give us the boldness and assurance to proclaim him as Lord and Savior to our society and our world."

***“Christianity is primarily a personal encounter with Jesus Christ. It is a Damascus-road experience like the one St. Paul had. It is a personal Pentecost like the Apostles had in the Upper Room. Everybody’s experience may be different, but experience the love of Christ we must, or we will end up in a dry, brittle, intellectual head-trip. We will succumb to will power Christianity, the ultimate oxymoron and try to work our way up to God. That will eventually crush us under the load, and we will give up the fight in some significant way.” ***

"Our personal encounter with Christ bathes life in new light, sets us on the right path, and sends us out to be his witnesses. This new way of looking at the world and at people, which comes to us from him, leads us more deeply into the mystery of faith, which is not just a collection of theoretical assertions to be accepted and approved by the mind, but an experience to be had, a truth to be lived, the salt and light of all reality".

"Christianity is not an ideology; it is a personal encounter with Christ. The most consoling effect of this encounter "is, precisely, the certainty that, this everlasting and overwhelming love with which God loves us (means) he will never abandon us."

"We wish to see Jesus," a group of Greeks come to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover asked the apostle Philip (John 12.21). That desire, John Paul suggests, is the desire of everyone today who seeks the fulfillment of Passover freedom in the goodness we are able to experience now, and in the beatitude that is, by God’s grace, our human destiny. Enabling the world to meet the truth about itself is what the Church is for; the Church does that by bringing all those yearning to see his face into a personal encounter with Jesus Christ."

"The Christian must encounter God in mystery."

"The martyrs know that they have found the truth about life in the encounter with Jesus Christ, and nothing and no-one could ever take this certainty from them. Neither suffering nor violent death could ever lead them to abandon the truth which they have discovered in the encounter with Christ."

***“The knowledge conferred by faith is of a different kind: it presupposes a personal encounter with God in Jesus Christ.” ***

"Neither theological knowledge nor social action alone is enough to keep us in love with Christ unless both are proceeded by a personal encounter with Him."

There are many more quotes but I’d have to do 2-3 notes. I still collect his quotes about having an “encounter with Christ” to this day when I comes across them and save them to a file.

God bless you
 
Adam,

I, Johnny come lately, have read the whole thread. Midgie’s post was the most important one. I know that from personal experience.
I pray you will encounter Jesus personally. You will know if and when you do and it will change your life.

Apologetics is always a secondary thing at best, but so is just about everything else.

I pray God’s blessing and grace to you.
 
The intellect brings some to faith. To others, it is a hindrance. The greatness of our Catholic faith is that we can have a strong faith whether we are drawn to it from a deep theological, intellectual point of view, or by a simple and awesome trust.

Here’s what I do know: anything - even Catholic literature - that causes you to doubt the faith should be avoided. The intellectual person will say that such a suggestion is ridiculous. But it is not ridiculous. An intellectual who refuses to stop reading materials that is causing him to abandon faith is putting his sould at peril. At some point, your studies have become a matter of pride: since you are now into more “thoughful” literature, it must somehow be more true. Not so. It may be true that our theology is deep and complex, but faith need not be. Pray to St. Therese of Liseux on that.

Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses. You may have been drawn to the Church through the intellect - strength. But if the studies became more important than reflection, prayer, meditation, and asking the Holy Spirit to guide your way, then your very strength became your weakness. Satan will recognize that and use it against you. C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters do a wonderful job of pointing out how the devil takes setbacks and tries to turn them into victories. Be vigilant.

Ask God to reveal Himslef to you. Do this in sincerity, away from studies.

May God bless you on the journey you’re on.
 
I must say, yes we need to live the faith. However, lets not get feely-touchy either. What I mean is: KNOWING your faith. KNOWING Jesus CHRIST (not just “Jesus” the social worker) is a MUST before we can even begin to LOVE or have: “a relationship with the person of Jesus in all this.” It seems that CERTAIN emotion based “catholic” movements/groups DOWNPLAY the intellect which GOD Himself gave us. No one says you MUST be an ignorant Catholic, and that way you will encounter “Jesus”. That reminds me of the many Saints (oh and how THEY had a Personal relationship with Jesus CHRIST, and by the way, Mary too, we cannot downplay Her as some NON-Catholic groups do) who were men and women of great intellect and yes it worked well with holiness. Examples?😉 Saint Albert the Great, Saint Thomas Aqinas, Saint Bonaventure, Saint Anthony of Padua, Saint Robert Bellarmine, S.J. and other people such as: Cardinal John Henry Newman, Bishop Fulton J. Sheen, and other SAINTLY scholars in the CATHOLIC Church.:dancing:
Code: 
  It would be wise for some people to read Pope John Paul II's Encyclical: "Fides et Ratio" (Faith and Reason).   
   Our faith is not JUST about emotions, jumping up and down, spinning like tops on the floor, or confusing others with NO KNOWN languages, but it is a faith of Love.  However, the great principles (I don't know what the evangelicals, pentecostals teach, but THIS is CATHOLIC) of our faith at are:  we were created to KNOW God, and in knowing God, we would then, and only then be able to LOVE God, and then we are to serve God, and in --serving God, be eternally happy with Him forever in Heaven.:bowdown: 
Hence one CANNOT love what one does NOT KNOW.  But how can we know without prayer AND Sacred Study?   Their are religious orders in the Church that have always focused on study and teaching as true forms of prayer! Some examples , the Dominican Order, the Benedictans, and, in teaching, the largest of the male orders: the JESUITS, who when they WERE all devoted to the defense of the church and doctrine, (and who still take a 4th vow of obedience with regards to missions) produced (the Dominican Saints too) the greatest intellectual minds in Catholicism, and well, I am sure they had a personal relationship with Jesus CHRIST(we have to distinguish between the fundamentalist notion of this: which sad to say has made its way into the Catholic Church in SOME sectors: people looking for emotional uplifts, even at the cost of pure emotionalism seperated from much truth and tradition, and the TRUE CATHOLIC NOTION of a RELATIONSHIP with Jesus Christ who reveals Himself through the CHURCH, and especially the Blessed Sacrament; not according to what EVERYONE FEELS "Jesus" is.:tsktsk: :blessyou: :clapping:
 
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