This might be mean of me, but I suspect that you have an easier time stomaching the hints of faith in Signs (I haven't seen Frailty) because they are more oblique and less Christian than those in Own Meany.
I wonder if thinking of religion as *a* thing is a source of your confusion? The particularities of dogma do look incredibly strange if you're used to thinking of religions purely as systems of thought (and thus in much the same category as philosophies), rather than as communities of individuals *seeking* a system of thought (well, actually, a system of living). Chances are, for every Catholic who was outraged by Owen Meany, you can probably find one, or several, who don't find the idea of a modern-day virgin birth all that threatening. As for prophets, there are 4 million or so Mormons who have no problem with the idea of modern prophets, Catholics do have the Pope, and the various Christian convictions about the possibility of individual revelation are to numerous and varied, even within the same sect, to classify. Every devout individual spends a lifetime working within the frictions of faith and doubt, and his own conscience vs. the mores of his religious community, and creates and recreates his own mythology *all the time*. A particular religion is the aggregate of all those individual processes, and any attempt to pin it down and say "Catholicism means this an this, and not that and that, and I agree here and not there, amen," is going to leave you frustrated, or sounding ignorant and hostile. The Catholic church is a 2000-year-old community. Doesn't it just *figure* that it would look pretty motley by now?
I wonder if thinking of religion as *a* thing is a source of your confusion? The particularities of dogma do look incredibly strange if you're used to thinking of religions purely as systems of thought (and thus in much the same category as philosophies), rather than as communities of individuals *seeking* a system of thought (well, actually, a system of living). Chances are, for every Catholic who was outraged by Owen Meany, you can probably find one, or several, who don't find the idea of a modern-day virgin birth all that threatening. As for prophets, there are 4 million or so Mormons who have no problem with the idea of modern prophets, Catholics do have the Pope, and the various Christian convictions about the possibility of individual revelation are to numerous and varied, even within the same sect, to classify. Every devout individual spends a lifetime working within the frictions of faith and doubt, and his own conscience vs. the mores of his religious community, and creates and recreates his own mythology *all the time*. A particular religion is the aggregate of all those individual processes, and any attempt to pin it down and say "Catholicism means this an this, and not that and that, and I agree here and not there, amen," is going to leave you frustrated, or sounding ignorant and hostile. The Catholic church is a 2000-year-old community. Doesn't it just *figure* that it would look pretty motley by now?
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