I hadn’t seen The Goonies in something like a decade. We put it on at home a few weeks ago because I had to rewatch it for my podcast The Secrets of Movies, and I figured the kids would get a kick out of it.

What I remembered going in were the truffle shuffle, the bone organ, and “Hey you guys.”

What I had completely blocked out was how much these children swear. 1985 was a different word. My co-host Rob had the same experience watching it with his own kids, and Patrick grew up on the syndicated TV cut where every curse got dubbed to “shoot,” so the original was news to him.

But the line that stopped me is one you could easily miss, and it comes early, up in the attic.

Mikey has dragged everybody up to the Walsh attic and found the map. He tells them the story of One-Eyed Willie, including the Spanish galleon, the pirates, and the treasure sitting under their own town. It’s an absurd story and the other kids say so.

But Mikey retorts vehemently, “My dad tells me the truth.”

There’s a nice bit of production trivia buried in that scene. Richard Donner sat Sean Astin down right before they shot it, told him the whole One-Eyed Willie legend, then had him tell it back from memory, because he wanted it to sound like a kid retelling something he loved rather than an actor reciting a monologue. You can hear it as the speech stumbles in the right places.

The dad who’s barely in the movie

Here’s what’s strange. Mikey’s father has almost no screen time.

He waves at the boys from the historical society’s yard as they ride past on their bikes and he turns up at the end and that’s about it. He’s the guy with the pile of historical junk in the attic, an idealist and a romantic, and you get the sense the rest of Astoria thinks of him as a little flighty. Nice guy. Head in the clouds. Never quite got it together.

Yet his son takes his word as fact anyway.

I’ve been chewing on that for weeks now, because it’s a pretty exact picture of what faith looks like from the inside. Mikey’s trust runs through a person. He trusts the man, so he trusts what the man handed him, and then he acts on it hard enough to climb down a well. The evidence for One-Eyed Willie is terrible and he goes anyway.

The word for that is childlike, and we’ve mostly turned that into an insult. Watch a kid do it and it plays as something else entirely. Mikey is the only one in the room willing to bet on a story his dad told him, and he turns out to be the only one who’s right.

Down here it’s our time

The payoff comes later, in the scene everybody remembers.

They’ve hit the wishing well where there’s a rope and a bucket, and up at the top of it is Troy, and home, and the end of the whole adventure. Every kid down there is ready to quit. Mikey isn’t, and he gives the speech.

“Down here it’s our time.”

Rob called that the heart of the movie and I’d go further. It’s the emotional and spiritual center of the thing, and it only works because of the attic scene. Mikey’s certainty was borrowed from his father, and this is the moment he spends it.

Patrick made a point during the recording that I keep coming back to. Up top, the parents are selling their houses to give their kids a better life. That’s a real sacrifice and it’s happening in good faith. But it’s their time, up there, in the world of foreclosure papers and country club developers who win. Down in the tunnels, the kids get one day that belongs to them, and Mikey’s whole argument is that they should spend it being kids instead of being reasonable.

Which makes this a more Catholic movie than anybody making it probably intended. There’s a version of growing up that’s just a slow surrender of wonder, one concession at a time, and The Goonies plants its flag against it. Acting your age sometimes means acting your age. A 10-year-old should be on a pirate treasure hunt. That’s the correct use of a 10-year-old.

The part that got me

I first ran into this movie around 1985 when it came out. I don’t actually remember sitting in the theater, I just remember always having known it, which is its own kind of evidence. I would have been Brand’s age at the time, not Mikey’s, and that distinction felt enormous to me then.

Now I’m watching it as the dad. And the dad in this movie has one job, which he does entirely off screen: he told his kid a true story and his kid believed him.

I don’t know how to write that without it sounding like a greeting card, so I’ll just say it plainly. My kids take my word for things, or at least the younger ones do. The older two young adults have begun having their own minds and opinions, but at least on the important stuff, they all still trust me. Maybe it won’t be forever, and not about everything, but right now they do, and The Goonies is quietly making an argument about what that’s for. You hand them something worth believing, and then one day you’re not in the room and they climb down the well on the strength of it.

Mr. Walsh never sees the tunnels. He never meets Sloth or stands on the Inferno. He gets the jewels in the marble bag at the end and a house he doesn’t have to leave, and he probably never fully understands how any of it happened.

Sounds about right for fatherhood.

One worry, briefly

Warner Bros. confirmed a Goonies sequel in February 2025 with much of the original team coming back. I want it to be good and I have my doubts.

The thing this movie does is hard. It keeps a world that’s dialed slightly past reality, where the danger never actually lands and a boy’s trust in his father is treated as the most sensible position in the room. If you miss that tone and you’ve got a nostalgia delivery vehicle. I’d rather they left it alone than got it half right.

But that’s a worry for later. The original still draws thousands of people to Astoria every summer, and it earned that.

I got into all of this with Rob Leonardi and Patrick Mason on this week’s Secrets of Movies: the swearing, the Sloth makeup, how much Stranger Things and Skeleton Crew owe this film, and whether the sequel has a prayer. It’s out this week. Come argue with me about the sequel.

Hey, you guys.

There’s a temptation in marriage that almost nobody names, because on the surface it looks like devotion.

It’s the temptation to treat your wife as though she were given to you and you alone. Instead she’s given to the world, given to your children, given her own life and her own calling that happens to run alongside yours. She’s not just yours: for your comfort, your household, your needs, your peace and quiet at the end of a long day. She is not a treasure kept where nothing can happen to it.

I’ve come to believe that this one of the quietest ways a husband can fail.

The parable nobody applies to marriage

Scripture puts two ideas side by side in a way I found confusing the first time I really sat with it.

Proverbs 31 gives us the worthy wife, the one whose “value is far beyond pearls.” Psalm 128 calls her a “fruitful vine” and the children the fruit of that vine. Both are about the blessing of a good wife, and both are often printed in wedding programs and then quietly forgotten after the ceremony.

But hold those next to Matthew 25, the parable of the talents. A master goes on a journey and hands his servants his property. Two of them put it to work and double it. The third — the careful one, the one who didn’t want to lose anything — digs a hole and buries what he was given. When the master comes back, that servant has exactly what he started with, and not one thing more. He is the one who gets called wicked and lazy.

Put those together and something uncomfortable comes into focus. If my wife is the treasure entrusted to me, then she is the talent. And the parable is unambiguous about what the Master thinks of a man who takes a treasure and buries it for safekeeping.

What burying her looks like

Nobody sets out to bury his wife’s gifts. It happens by default, and it usually happens for reasons that sound perfectly sensible at the time.

It looks like the household running so smoothly on her labor that the question of what else she might be made for never comes up. It looks like her interests becoming the thing that gets cut when the calendar tightens, because they’re hers alone and therefore the most negotiable. It looks like a husband who is genuinely proud of his wife and has somehow never once cleared a Saturday morning so she could use the gift he’s proud of.

It rarely looks like contempt. It usually looks like inertia, and it’s her husband’s job to do something about it.

Because she has a vocation of her own. My primary vocation is husband and father — that’s first and it doesn’t move. But I also have a secondary vocation as a disciple, someone who is supposed to serve and evangelize and put whatever gifts I have to work in the world. If that’s true for me, it’s true for her. She has a calling from God that is not exhausted by being my wife and our children’s mother, and it doesn’t wait politely until the kids are grown.

Notice that Proverbs 31 says so directly. The worthy wife isn’t praised only for serving her family. She “reaches out her hands to the poor and extends her arms to the needy.” Her heart goes past the doorway of her own home. That’s in the text, right alongside the wool and the flax and the rising while it is still night. The passage everybody reads as a portrait of domestic containment is actually a portrait of a woman whose work runs outward.

Melanie

My wife Melanie studied poetry and literature. She has read more of it than I ever will, and she thinks about it more carefully than I do. She has been writing online for almost as long as I have, first at her own blog, The Wine Dark Sea, and now at her Substack, Singing Each to Each. She homeschools our kids, which is a full-time job that most people mistake for a scheduling arrangement. She not only manages the medical care and special needs of five children, she also mentors other women who are struggling with many of the same issues she’s had to deal with over the past two decades.

Some of that is unmistakably her vocation as a mother. But some of it is hers alone — the reading, the writing, the particular way she sees a poem — and it existed before me and would exist without me.

So here is the practical version of everything above, and it isn’t complicated. My job is to make room. To take the kids so she can write. To treat her work as work and not as a hobby she gets to have if there’s time left over, because there is never time left over; time has to be taken on purpose. To ask what she’s reading and actually listen to the answer.

That's not me being generous. That's the difference between the servants who were praised and the one who dug the hole.

And she does exactly the same for me. That’s the part I’d underline for any husband reading this and feeling accused. This isn’t a one-way ledger where the husband pays out and the wife receives. Everything I’ve been able to do — the writing, the work, all of it — exists because she made room for it, usually without being asked, and often at real cost to herself. A marriage where both people are doing this doesn’t feel like sacrifice. It feels like being on the same side.

The accounting

The parable ends with a reckoning, and I think about that more as I get older.

The Master comes back and asks what we did with what he gave us. And I don’t think the question is only going to be whether I provided, or whether I was faithful, or whether I got the kids to Mass. I think somewhere in there is going to be: I gave you her. What did you do with that?

I’d like the answer to be that I didn’t bury her. That she is more herself for having been married to me and not less. That whatever the Lord planted in her when he made her actually grew, and grew partly because I watered it.

When that collaboration bears fruit — in a happy home full of children, yes, but also in people who see the love of Christ at work in the two of you and can’t quite account for it — then I think we get the line every servant in that parable was hoping for.

“Well done, my good and faithful servant. Come, share your Master’s joy.”

Adapted from a post first published at bettnet.com in November 2020.

You flip on the TV to a random show and it opens with a man, alone in a dark room, drinking. He’s staring at a photograph of a loved one who is dead or gone. We see his flashback that keeps replaying because it hasn’t been resolved. Now which show is it? Of course, that’s an impossible question because this very scene has become a well-worn trope in prestige dramas. It’s so standardized that it functions as a storytelling shorthand that tells you exactly what kind of story this is.

Scroll through the listings on any streaming media service and you will find prestige drama after prestige drama featuring broken, brooding men who are angry, hurt, and dangerous. Just to name a few: There’s James Reece, played by Chris Pratt, in The Terminal List; Jackson Lamb, played by Gary Oldman, in Slow Horses; David Jung, played by Daniel Dae Kim, in Butterfly. I could go on and on. It’s not a new phenomenon either. Think of Mel Gibson in the Lethal Weapon movies or Sylvester Stallone in the Rambo movies back in the 1980s.

Why do we see so many stories of broken, angry men out for blood and yet so few stories of broken men who find redemption and healing beyond revenge, nihilism, or stoic isolation?

Why is this the story we keep telling and why does it almost never end well?

James Reece in The Terminal List, for example, is a Navy SEAL whose wife and daughter were murdered and he sets out to kill the people who did it, keeping the list of names on the back of one of his daughter’s drawings. At the same time, he grapples with brain tumors caused by experiments done on his SEAL team.

Prime Video’s marketing for Season 2 makes the point even sharper as they say the new season puts Reece “on a journey of violent redemption, finding a new purpose after finishing his list.”

While these are dramatically compelling shows and excellent at diagnosing the wound of modern masculinity, they then prescribe cures that won’t work. They cannot work.

Yes, I know I shouldn’t expect action-hero shows to be reflective of Christian anthropology and morality. But I do want to note how often they are already reaching for redemption language and then coming up empty by their own internal logic. And yet there is real redemption to be found.

What Pop Culture Gets Right

What these stories get right is that there are many men who’ve been wounded by the world. They’ve suffered from betrayal by loved ones or friends or institutions. They’ve been disillusioned by the compromise of principles and ideals. They’re isolated from friends and family and community. They’ve lost friends and comrades. It’s a reflection of the real societal pressures men face, whether they are veterans with PTSD or fatherless or lack purpose in life. Many men feel burdened by the weight of responsibility and expectations. Or they feel unappreciated and criticized.

Reece is betrayed by his country and his friend. David Jung is betrayed by his partner. Jackson Lamb and his agents are betrayed by MI5’s willingness to use them and then throw them away. We embrace heroes who fight back against a world that has betrayed them because so many of us feel similarly about the institutions around us.

Distrust in authority and institutions has become widespread in the last two decades. This is measurable in Gallup’s polling data that shows Americans’ average confidence in 14 core institutions stands at a near-historic low of 27%, with television news and Congress at 14% and 9%, respectively.

And much of the dramatic basis for this woundedness in the shows is deeply rooted in fatherhood. Reece lost his wife and daughter. Jung loses his daughter to his decision to vanish. Lamb lost an unborn child to Cold War espionage. What these all have in common is the understanding that for men, their deepest vulnerability is not their own safety, but their failure to protect the people entrusted to them.

That protective instinct is deeply ingrained in a Catholic understanding of our humanity and in our understanding of God our Father. The Church has always taught that there is the right and duty to protect the innocent and those under our care. (CCC 2265) Our faith also tells us that justice is a fundamental truth about God himself. So these stories work because they reflect a deep truth in our human nature that recognizes that when someone hurts the innocent, someone should do something about it. That impulse isn’t the problem. The problem is the way the solution is formulated.

What’s lacking in these stories is proportionality, legitimate authority, and redressing the disorder caused. Reece should not be judge, jury, and executioner. Vigilantism isn’t justice. It’s “might makes right”. But these shows rarely notice this, which is revealing.

Meanwhile, Jackson Lamb in Slow Horses is a disgraced spy who has been exiled to a dead-end office. He drinks, smokes, curses, is a disgusting slob and weaponizes his own flatulence. He’s mean to everyone, yet he’s extremely effective and often underestimated. He also protects his people at a cost to himself and others. His defining rule is that he doesn’t let his joes get hurt without consequence. That’s a real protective ethic, a loyalty code, operating in a man with no other visible virtues.

Another common element in these men is the loneliness and isolation. In fact, it’s embraced as a virtue and a strategy. David Jung’s protective act was to vanish and sever contact with his daughter. But the show is smart enough to show that he wounded his daughter by doing this, which had far-reaching consequences. Often, self-medication through alcohol or drugs is how they are shown to cope. Lamb’s drinking is his character. Reece’s dissociation is shown as focus. What these story elements do is depict addiction and isolation as toughness rather than symptoms of a deeper problem.

In 2023 the US Surgeon General issued a warning that loneliness and isolation are an epidemic in US society, and is especially acute among men. Another study in 2021 found that a significant number of men were reported as having zero close friends, which was a huge increase from recent decades. And that loneliness is shown to lead to massive health problems, which is compared to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day.

None of these shows depict isolation as effective in bringing healing and happiness. Reece, Lamb, Jung, Rambo, and the rest always end up as alone as when they started. It’s as if they’re saying that real men don’t deserve or need joy or redemption. They only need to be tough enough to outlast their enemies.

Where Pop Culture Falls Short

But revenge is not redemption and vengeance is not justice. No matter how they wrap the violence in the rhetoric of justice, it’s not. Yes, pursue justice and see that your enemies are punished by the legitimate authorities. But that’s not the same as taking the law into your own hands.

These stories often use the language of cleansing and purification: closure, finishing it, making it right. But that’s not the true form of purification. True purification comes from suffering offered in love, sacrifice made at the cost of self, forgiveness given freely. The way of vengeance is ultimately fruitless because it leaves the avenger as guilty as the one he brings vengeance upon.

“Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord,” writes St. Paul in Romans 12:19, quoting Deuteronomy 32:35. This isn’t a rejection of our instinct to protect the innocent, but a claim about jurisdiction. A man can’t heal himself through vengeance because he doesn’t have a right to it. Only God is the judge.

Of course, these shows and these characters are written to be tragic, to create drama by showing men who are broken and angry and brought to the very end of themselves. But awareness of a dead end is not the same as showing a way out of it. These shows are great at diagnosing futility but terrible at depicting what comes after it. I’m not asserting that we shouldn’t have tragic dramas at all, but that while we can be entertained by them, we need to understand how they show us the wrong path.

In much of what we see on screen, Christian virtue is often absent or is replaced with competence. We admire them for their skill and doggedness and pain tolerance. Sometimes we get glimpses of tenderness and love, but rarely do we see patience, chastity, temperance, or forgiveness. Those are often seen as weakness or played for comedy. And it’s forgiveness which suffers the keenest absence among the virtues. Sure, the shows may wave at patience and humility, but forgiveness would end the stories before the first act of the first episode.

And yes, we get the other virtues of loyalty, courage, endurance, and fidelity to comrades and those are virtues to be admired and celebrated. These are indeed genuine goods in the natural order. But they are only natural virtues without the higher, theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity. They can never be enough on their own.

It would be tempting to diagnose Jackson Lamb as a man without virtue, but he’s more accurately a man without hope. Consider the scene in season 5 where he gives an uncharacteristically sincere monologue about a joe tortured by the Stasi in East Berlin during the Cold War and when Catherine Standish asks him point blank if he is that man, he denies it unconvincingly. In reality, he’s a man practicing fidelity to the dead in a world where nothing can be repaired.

What Christian Masculinity Offers Instead

What Christian masculinity offers instead as a contrast to these stories of broken men is a path of sacrificial strength. First, we need to recognize who Christ really is. He’s not the passive martyr of sentimental piety or the warrior strongman who vanquishes his foes. On the one hand, he drives the money changers out of the temple and on the other hand, he rebukes Peter’s use of the sword in Gethsemane and heals the man he wounded. Both scenes fall within days of each other in the Synoptic Gospels, and both are a sign of manly strength.

In Philippians 2:6-8, we read that Christ, “though he was in the form of God, did not count equality with God a thing to be grasped, but emptied himself.” The Greek verb behind “emptied himself” gives us the word kenosis and it doesn’t mean weakness. It means a capacity deliberately withheld. The model we’re offered in Christ is one of a man whose power is real and whose restraint is chosen.

Jesus tells us that “Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.” (John 15:13). But note the direction of the love: the man gives his own life, not someone else’s. Yet every action hero in this genre goes in the opposite direction. Others die to make him whole. This doesn’t mean that the average man is being asked for literal martyrdom. Instead, we take up the daily, unglamorous version: Getting up, going to work, loving our wives, raising our children, keeping our promises. This is what true masculinity looks like.

True redemption is gift, not revenge. Revenge is something a man does, but redemption is something done to him. The Catechism frames this as: “Grace is favor, the free and undeserved help that God gives us.” (CCC 1996). When Saul was knocked down on the road to Damascus, he was working on his own “terminal list” while actively persecuting the church. God gave him that moment of redemption as a gift. He didn’t earn it, complete it, or finish anything first. Grace interrupted everything and set him on a new path.

Reece wants to be made whole again, to have the debt settled, and to stop being defined by his past. Vengeance can’t do that, but the grace of the sacraments can. And without a body count.

Grace can’t undo the deaths. It can’t bring back dead loved ones or comrades or undo the results of evil deeds done to him. When Paul became an Apostle, his victims did not spring back to life. Christianity doesn’t unmake the wound. Instead, it is joined to Christ’s wounds and made redemptive.

Meanwhile, isolation and loneliness are not the answer they seem to be. I often find myself saying to these characters, “Hey, find your brothers. Let them help you find who you really are.”

“Iron sharpens iron and one man sharpens another.” (Proverbs 27:17). This isn’t just a pat on the back and an affirmation. This implies real friction. Sharpening is abrasive and so, brothers, we need to be willing to be honest with each other and call each other out. We have to be willing to tell each other when we’re wrong. Maybe it’s a parish men’s group that meets whether or not anyone feels like it. Maybe it’s finding a spiritual director who doesn’t hold back from diagnosing your spiritual faults. Or it could be a regular confessor who knows your patterns of sin.

Of course, the Church hasn’t always been great at this part. Too often when men look for a place in their parishes, they don’t find a brotherhood, but a sign-up sheet and a coffee hour.

I do like all of the shows I mentioned partly because they do appeal to a part of masculinity that is often overlooked and sometimes not valued in our culture. And the writing often frames the wounds of men accurately. It’s just that they misidentify the cure. Reece finished his list and was left with a boat and a tumor.

These shows are not a failure and I’m not suggesting that they shouldn’t be made. I’m saying that they are signs of something we should recognize and pay attention to. Millions of men are watching stories about betrayal, isolation, and unresolvable grief and recognizing themselves. Season 2 of The Terminal List is being marketed as “a journey of violent redemption.” The culture wants redemption, but doesn’t know where to look for it.

Christ doesn’t ask a man not to be strong, or to stop being protective, or to pretend that betrayal or loneliness or thankless labor doesn’t hurt. He asks us to stop being our own judge. He wants us to put ourselves in the same room with a priest who can say the words we cannot say to ourselves.

James Reece has a list. What he needed was a confessor.

My dad gave me the coolest gift I’ve ever gotten, and it didn’t cost him a dime. He was friends with a former captain of the USS Constitution, and that captain handed him two tickets to the ship’s annual Fourth of July cruise around Boston Harbor. Dad knew exactly what kind of nut I am about old ships, and especially Old Ironsides, so he took me instead of anyone else.

We met at the boarding line at the Charlestown Navy Yard around 8:30 in the morning. Everyone in that line, passengers and crew alike, had the same barely-contained excitement, like kids waiting for a ride at a fair, except the ride was the oldest commissioned warship still afloat in the world. Old Ironsides doesn’t sail under her own power anymore, hasn’t for a long time. Tugs would ease her out toward Castle Island in South Boston and back, escorted by half the admirals and ship captains in the Navy, plus a group of immigrants who would become United States citizens in a naturalization ceremony held right there on deck while we were underway.

We had the run of the ship. The crew, dressed in period uniforms, snapped to and looked sharp, and I noticed the ranks now included both men and women serving side by side, a detail that would’ve been unthinkable when the ship first fought the Barbary pirates and the British navy. It struck me, standing on two-hundred-year-old timber, how much had changed and how much hadn’t. The ritual was still the ritual. The pomp still meant something.

I wore my USS Ronald Reagan ballcap that day, a small nod to the fortieth president and to the Navy in general. My dad wore his own Navy hat, commemorating his hitch during the Korean War era. We did the math and figured out it had been more than fifty years since he’d mustered out. More than one young sailor noticed the hat, stopped him, and thanked him for his service. He’d wave it off, the way men of that generation usually do, but I could tell it landed.

The Navy Band played the old standards, including one of those marches you recognize the second you hear it even if you couldn’t have named it a moment before. That’s the trick of those songs. They don’t ask to be remembered. They just are.

What stays with me isn’t really the ship, though the ship is remarkable. It’s the picture of my father and me on her deck on Independence Day, two hats from two different eras of the same Navy, watching new citizens raise their right hands under a flag neither of us had to earn the hard way. Getting handed something like that, whether it’s a country or a family or a faith, and being expected to do something worthy with it, is about as American a feeling as I know. It’s also, not coincidentally, about as Catholic a feeling as I know: you don’t get the gift because you deserve it. You get it, and then you spend the rest of your life trying to be equal to it.

My dad has been gone since 2023, so this Fourth of July, like every one since, I don’t just remember the ship. I remember the man standing next to me on it, the wave of his hand when the young sailors thanked him, fifty-some years after he’d earned the right to be thanked and never much wanted the attention. That’s the other thing about being handed a gift you didn’t earn. Eventually you’re the one giving it, or at least trying to.

Highest honors to our heroes. Including the one who gave me the ticket.

I believe in one, holy, catholic, apostolic Church. I say those words every Sunday. I still believe them, including that word “holy.”

Yes, she’s full of the rottenness of men. The stink of sin rises to the very top, sometimes further than we’d like to admit. But she’s still the Church.

St. Paul tells the Ephesians that Christ loved the Church and loves her still, despite her flaws and sin (Eph. 5:21-32). He doesn’t just love her. He died for her, to sanctify her, to cleanse her. He loves her enough to become one with her, to fold her into His own mystical body. The prophet Hosea stayed faithful to Gomer, his wife, even though she was a harlot. Christ stays faithful to His Church the same way, even when she’s unfaithful to Him and reeks of sin.

While we’ve been dealing with this current terrible scandal for more than two decades now, in 2018, we hit a new low with more terrible revelations related to the bishops failing to stop predators like Theodore McCarrick. I read it and wept for my Church. It wasn’t the first such reckoning, and it won’t be the last. The Church has been dealing with such things for 2,000 years, some of it worse than what we’ve seen in our lifetimes. But it never crossed my mind to leave. That Sunday in 2018 after the latest news broke, my family sat in our regular pew like always.

We’d just heard Jesus challenge His disciples after they received the hard teaching of the Real Presence in the Eucharist: “Do you also want to leave?” (John 6:60-69).

Peter doesn’t say, “Lord, I understand what you’re teaching. I know what you mean about eating your flesh for eternal life. Those other guys just haven’t thought it through.” No. He says, “Master, to whom shall we go?”

To whom, indeed. Peter’s admitting he doesn’t fully understand, maybe that the teaching troubles him too. But he knows, down in his bones, that Jesus is who He says He is. The One who comes from the Father to seek and save the lost. That’s enough for him.

It’s enough for me. I won’t leave, no matter what priests, bishops, or popes do, because the “words of eternal life” don’t come from them. They’re not “the Holy One of God” that Peter proclaims. And sure, Peter doesn’t quite live up to that promise. He denies Christ at the cross. But he comes back, forgiven. So I may be shaken too by revelations of misdeeds and sin. I won’t stray far. I’ll come back to the Way.

Joshua says it too: “As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord” (Josh. 24:15). My first loyalty is to the Lord, not to men. We’ll serve Him however He calls us, however that restores His Church and advances the kingdom. The alternative is “non serviam,” I will not serve, and that road leads to hell. Literally.

“Far be it from us to forsake the Lord... therefore we also will serve the Lord, for he is our God” (Josh. 24:16, 18). Whatever comes, my house will serve the Lord. We’ll stay faithful. We’ll cling to the sacraments. And we’ll do our part to support whatever housecleaning the Church still needs.

I really love the Dresden Files book series by Jim Butcher. It’s an excellent detective noir story about a wizard in Chicago who fights evil and struggles with moral questions but is ultimately a good guy. It’s a great series of 14 books, so far.

A number of years ago, Fox tried to make an adaptation of the Dresden Files for TV. I don’t think it even made a full season. It just wasn’t the same.

For example, in the books, there’s a talking skull with a spirit inside it that advises Harry Dresden. For the TV show, they just changed it to a person. I think he was still supposed to be a spirit of some sort, but it wasn’t a talking skull, and so it lost something fundamental. There were other changes that also were a big letdown. And yet, so many Dresden Files fans still clamor for an adaptation.

Find any online gathering of fans of any book or book series. Eventually, you’ll find somewhere where they’ve discussed how this book or series should be adapted for the screen, large or small. They’ll discuss which actors should play which characters, which parts of the books should make it into the show or movie, and which could be lost. There are endless debates about directors, settings, budgets, and whether it should be a series or a movie or a series of movies.

And then, if this adaptation were to come to pass, all of the fans would flock to see it. Often, very often, even if they like the movie qua movie or show qua show, they’ll always say, “Well, it wasn’t as good as the book.” Why do we crave having our favorite books turned into movies and TV shows when we know they never measure up? They can be good, but they always fall short, necessarily, because of the limitations of visual media storytelling as opposed to written media storytelling. Is it because we want to see literal versions of what we only have in our heads or other interpretations, or have we been conditioned to believe that the pinnacle of entertainment media is moving pictures?

Are they really not as good?

I realized that “never as good” is a strong claim. Are there counterexamples? Jaws is a great movie, possibly as good as, and maybe even better than, the book. The Godfather is another where the movie is arguably better than the book. I’ve not read No Country for Old Men, but I’ve heard that the movie and the book are both excellent. Likewise, I haven’t read A Song of Ice and Fire, but I’ve heard from folks that, at least early on, the Game of Thrones series was as good as the early books.

What about one of the most controversial adaptations, The Lord of the Rings? Many fans love the movies. Many fans find the movies to be problematic in what they change, add, or leave out. Certainly, they are great movies in and of themselves, but are they great adaptations?

I think a common denominator in adaptations that are better than or as good as the original book is that they often have directors or showrunners who have strong visions in and of themselves for the story. They have a strong sense of the story and they also have a strong sense of their medium. They know that a movie or TV show can never reproduce the depth of a book. They’re two different media and require different approaches to be successful in storytelling. Jaws and The Godfather are great examples of this. Peter Benchley put all kinds of information about sharks in Jaws that just never made it to the screen. That’s okay, because what Spielberg brought to the screen were the great characters, the great battle, the primal nature versus man tale that was at the heart of the story. The same is true of The Godfather and Mario Puzo and Francis Ford Coppola, not to mention the contributions of the actors.

Another important question is whether there is a recency bias. We almost always read the book first. Does the book being better just mean I got there first and it imprinted on me? Think about times when you’ve seen the movie or TV show first and read the book later. Did you have the same impression that the book was better? In my case, very often I did think the book was better because there was more. There was more detail, more depth, more characterization, more world-building. I have heard from people who have watched The Shining or Jurassic Park before reading the book that they often prefer the film.

The Psychology of the Wanting

Why are we like this? Part of it is psychological. People want it all. Some people want to externalize what they have held private in their mind. Reading is an act of the imagination. In a solo context, an adaptation is a promise to make that thing in your head shared and real. That promise is very seductive, even when it usually disappoints.

Likewise, there’s a kind of validation that comes from an adaptation. “If they make a movie of it, then the thing I love is important.” Adaptation is a cultural ratification of something you’re personally attached to and love.

We also often desire to re-experience the story we love for the first time again. You can’t unread a book, but a film offers the illusion of a fresh first time with something that you already know, you’ve already read, and that you love so much. Relatedly, we also often want to revisit a world that we love. We want to go back to Narnia, or Middle Earth, or whatever the world of that book is. Being able to watch a movie or TV show that features it immerses us in that world again, in a way that goes beyond what our imagination could have produced. Finally, there’s a social aspect where we have read and loved a large book, but the people in our lives who we want to share it with don’t want to read an 800-page book. Here’s a way to share it with them in a way that they are willing to receive it.

Why the Adaptation So Often Disappoints

One of the reasons why the adaptations often disappoint us is obvious: the economics of the medium force compression, simplification, and changing the story to create broad appeal. A novel optimizes for one reader’s depth, but a film optimizes for millions of strangers’ attention. In addition, the interiority of a narrative doesn’t make it to film. Prose lives inside the heads of the characters. The camera can’t go inside. Some movies and TV shows will have a gimmick where they have a voice over of the character to simulate that, but you can’t do that in every story. This is why some of the best novels could never be adapted to screen.

Another problem is that your imagination is not the same as the imagination of the director, the actors, the producers, the studio, and so on. A book lets every reader cast the protagonist to set the setting wherever you want. All locations are possible, but a film casts one actor as that character. It concretizes every setting, every prop, every scene, and that is a loss, not just a gain.

There’s also a problem where those who adapt books to movies and TV shows can’t win. If they make an absolutely faithful adaptation, then people think it’s lifeless and unimaginative, but if they make a bold adaptation that changes things, then the fan base is enraged and they won’t see it. They tell others not to see it. There’s no way to absolutely win over everyone.

Compounding all is that the better you know the source material, the worse the odds are that you’re going to love the adaptation. Your love of the book is the very thing that guarantees the movie fails you. Is wanting the adaptation therefore a kind of self-sabotage? Are we setting ourselves up for disappointment? That gap between anticipation and delivery, is the disappointment baked in before a single frame is ever shot? Does the craving survive contact with a result, or do we forget we were let down and crave the next one anyway? We do, and why do we do that?

How can we find a solution to our problem? Maybe instead of looking for a replacement of the source material, we should look for translation or even conversation. The best adaptations are the ones that take advantage of the medium that they’re producing. Some say that adaptations that argue with their source rather than transcribe it are better. I don’t know if that’s true. Maybe we should look at adaptations as preservation of the culture’s attention to something that we love. Maybe we should see it as a way to introduce this book that we love to a new generation and a new audience. Maybe the movie or TV show’s job is advertising, not equivalence.

It’s entirely possible that we’re making a category error by holding a film to a novel’s standard, like faulting a painting for not being a symphony.

I’ll end with a couple of questions. If adaptations almost always disappoint us, why do we keep lining up to demand them, watch them, and then complain about them? What does that say about us rather than about Hollywood? Maybe we should ask ourselves another question: Would we actually want a perfect adaptation, or would that ruin a book? By setting it in stone based on one director’s and a bunch of actors’ interpretation of it?

(Author’s note: I wrote this in a different form in 2020 at the end of the second season of The Mandalorian. There was much hope in being a Star Wars fan then. Since then, a lot has changed for the big entertainment franchises, but all of us Gen-Xers know that if things seem bleak now, you just need to wait and hope.)

I was young when I met Luke Skywalker, young enough that he didn’t feel like a character, but a real life hero, someone I could imagine becoming. Here was a kid stuck on a farm at the edge of nowhere who wanted to be more than the life he’d been handed. He wanted to fight evil, save the day, get the girl, learn to wield powers he could barely imagine. He was Harry Potter a couple decades before Harry ever picked up a wand, and for a lot of us he got there first.

If you grew up in the late ‘70s and ‘80s, Star Wars wasn’t a movie you saw. It was the air you breathed. It was the toys on the floor, the bedsheets, the lunchbox, the argument with your friends about who got to be Han. You didn’t consume it. You lived inside it.

Then you grow up. And the strange thing about loving something for forty years is that the thing keeps changing while you do.

The prequels were a disappointment. I’ll say it plainly, even though the Clone Wars animated series did a lot to redeem them later. The sequels woke the old feeling up again, then complicated it. I’m one of the fans who actually liked The Last Jedi, flaws and all, but I can be honest now and admit it left me deflated. The last time most of us had seen Luke at his best, he was standing at his father’s funeral pyre on the moon of Endor, the whole bright future of the Jedi waiting in front of him. Decades later we found out we’d skipped all of it. He’d decided he was a failure. The Jedi were finished.

So when the franchise finally gave that moment back, a lone X-wing, a single green lightsaber cutting through what had been an unstoppable wall of enemies a minute before, the gloved hand, the voice, the face, I was near tears. Not because of the special effects. Because of the boy I’d been when I first wanted to be him.

I wasn’t alone. The internet filled up with videos of men my age watching the same scene, whooping and crying, and almost every one of those videos was filmed by their kids, delighted and a little baffled at the sight of dad coming undone over a guy with a sword.

Why do we react like that? I’ve thought about it a lot. It isn’t nostalgia, or it isn’t only nostalgia. Nostalgia is wanting to go back. This is something else. It’s the feeling of a promise being kept. You handed your hope to a story when you were eight years old, and forty years later the story finally pays it off, and for a second the eight-year-old and the middle-aged man are the same person again.

That’s the part I didn’t understand until I had kids.

I have five of them, and they are at least as crazy about Star Wars as I am. Maybe more. My wife Melanie has gotten pulled into all of it too. So now I don’t just get to feel the old excitement. I get to watch it land on people who’ve never felt it before, and I get to feel it a second time through them.

When one of my kids gasps at a reveal I’ve been waiting thirty years to see, something passes between us that’s hard to name. I’m not just sharing a movie. I’m handing down the same thing my own younger self believed: that ordinary people can be brave, that the galaxy bends toward the light if enough people are willing to stand against the dark, that hope is a choice you make on purpose.

You could call that a lot of theological words. I’ll just call it what it feels like at the time, which is joy.

The people making the best of this new Star Wars are Gen X like me. They were the boys on the floor with the toys. You can tell, because they don’t just reference the thing we loved. They remember what it felt like to be small and to believe a story completely. They built their version out of that memory, and they handed it back to us, and now we get to hand it to our kids.

That’s the whole arc of being a fan of anything for this long. You receive a story. You carry it through your own disappointments and your own hopes. And if you’re lucky, you live long enough to give it away to someone smaller than you, who looks up at the screen with exactly the face you once had.

A long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. We never really left. We were just waiting to bring our kids along.

Originally published on Bettnet.com in 2020.

Travel for pleasure and discovery can be meaningful and fulfilling if done in the right mindset. But if one travels to change oneself, to find oneself, thinking that visiting exotic locales will bring about fundamental realignment, he will find none of that.

But travel is the zeitgeist of our time, say Brett and Kate McKay of The Art of Manliness, and people delay marriage and children in order to go on grand adventures, put off college and jobs for it. And they make “The Hobbit” into one of the sacred texts of Travel. But the McKays point out that Tolkien himself didn’t make an idol of travel and in fact rarely traveled himself. That’s because the journey he advocated was an interior one:

In other words, books like The Hobbit are not necessarily supposed to inspire trips to far-flung lands, but rather to restore the freshness of familiar surroundings right in front of our faces. Once you discover this doorway to realms beyond, you’re able to see the world through a mythological lens, and find that there are hidden dimensions even within the walls of one’s hobbit hole. Once you’ve been there and back again, your perspective is forever changed; you begin to see things as they really are. Everything from the view outside your apartment to your commute to work can become more meaningful, even magical.

I enjoy seeing new places, but as I get older and have traveled more places I realize that it’s hard for any place to live up to the hype, the carefully composed Instagram photos and the breathless travel articles. This is why pilgrimage isn’t merely travel or vacation. It has a purpose and a meaning rooted in the relationship between me and God. The travel to other places is about helping me grow in ways unrelated to the physical location. I go on pilgrimage not to find myself, but to encounter God in a new way that is only possible if I enter the journey cognizant of this necessity.

There is a uniquely American virtue of travel. Our mythical heroes were inveterate wanderers: Daniel Boone, Lewis & Clark, Johnny Appleseed. Even today, if you go to a social event, people will often discuss their latest travel adventure and the subtext is that those who don’t travel are boring and conventional.

But travel for its own sake is ultimately empty unless it is tied to a deeper purpose, a pursuit of enduring virtues, a desire to love others and to love God above all.

Originally published in my now defunct blog Bettnet.com on June 7, 2019

Most of us live inside a web browser. Email, banking, shopping, news, all of it runs through that one window. So the browser is also where most of the online danger lives: phishing, malware, tracking, fake sites.

On this week’s Secrets of Technology, Tom Grelinger and I worked through how to make your browser safer without turning into a paranoid hermit. Think of it as locking your doors and maybe adding an alarm. You don’t need a concrete bunker with guard towers.1

Here are the tips worth your 15 minutes.

Start with three principles

1. Keep everything updated. Your browser, your phone, your computer. When a security update shows up, it usually means someone found a hole that needs patching. Turn on automatic updates and stop thinking about it.

2. Use the protections already built into your browser before you go buy anything extra. Modern browsers ship with strong security features. Start there.

3. Keep it simple. Fewer extensions, fewer exceptions, fewer custom tweaks. Every extra thing you bolt on is one more place for trouble to hide.

The incognito myth

Private or incognito mode does not make you invisible.

It clears your local history and cookies when you close the window, which is handy. But your internet provider, your employer, your school, and the websites you visit can all still see where you go. It cleans up after your session on your own device. That’s the whole job.

Turn on what your browser already gives you

The exact names differ by browser, but the useful switches are the same. Go into your privacy and security settings and turn these on:

• Enhanced safe browsing (Chrome) or SmartScreen (Edge). These warn you off known-bad sites and downloads.

• Always use secure connections (HTTPS-only mode). Forces the encrypted version of a site.

• Block third-party cookies. These are the ones advertisers use to follow you around the web and build a profile on you.

• Tracking protection (Firefox calls it Enhanced Tracking Protection, Safari calls it Intelligent Tracking Prevention).

• Fraudulent website warnings. Leave them on even when they nag you.

DNS filtering: the best return for your money

If you do only one thing from this whole list, do this one.

DNS is the internet’s phone book. It turns a name like amazon.com into the numeric address your device actually connects to. A DNS filtering service blocks access to malicious, unsafe, or inappropriate websites by intercepting and filtering domain name requests before a connection is ever established.

Set it up once on your router and it protects every device on your network: phones, tablets, laptops, the smart TV, all of it. Most services are free or close to it.

A few I’d point you to:

• NextDNS. What I use. Very configurable.

• Cloudflare for Families. Set your DNS servers to 1.1.1.2 to block malware, or 1.1.1.3 to block malware plus adult content. (One thing we got slightly wrong on the show: plain 1.1.1.1 is Cloudflare’s fast resolver, but it does not filter anything. Use the .2 or .3 address if you want the blocking.)

• OpenDNS FamilyShield.

Many routers also let you set different profiles, so the kids’ devices can be locked down tighter than yours.

Extension hygiene

Every extension you install can theoretically read the pages you visit, change what’s on them, and see what you type. That’s a lot of trust to hand a free toolbar.

You should have one good password manager and maybe one trusted content blocker. Everything else has to earn its way into your browser. Skip anything that promises to speed up your computer or shower you with coupons. And if your browser ever flags an extension as no longer meeting its standards, don’t just disable it. Uninstall it.

One heads-up for Chrome users: the full version of uBlock Origin no longer runs there after Google’s extension changes. If you want it, you’ll need Firefox or Brave. Chrome offers a lighter version that works, though it isn’t the same.

Lock down your logins

• Use a password manager. Everyone. No exceptions.

• Turn on multi-factor authentication everywhere it’s offered.

• Use passkeys where you can. They’re easier than passwords and much harder to steal. Store them in a cross-platform password manager and the same passkey works on your phone, laptop, and desktop.

A word on Apple’s Private Relay

If you have Apple’s iCloud+, iCloud Private Relay is a nice privacy layer. It routes your traffic through two hops, so no single company knows both who you are and where you’re going.

It isn’t a VPN, and it doesn’t always play nicely with everything. I keep it off because I record podcasts over the internet. But for most people it’s a quiet win against tracking.

Your phone matters most

Most browsing happens on phones now, so hardening only your computer misses the point.

The single most important mobile habit: stay away from random free VPNs, “browser cleaner” apps, and sketchy hotspot tools. There’s no free lunch. A lot of those apps make their money by harvesting the very data they claim to protect.

Setting up a device for someone else

If you’re helping a parent or grandparent, keep it simple. Pick one (or at most two) browsers, not five2. Turn on the built-in protections, add a password manager, and stop. The fewer settings there are to maintain, the fewer you’ll forget to check later.

The rapid-fire checklist

• Keep your browser and devices updated

• Turn on built-in safe browsing and HTTPS-only

• Block third-party cookies

• Install one trusted content blocker, not three

• Use a password manager and passkeys

• Turn on multi-factor authentication

• Set up DNS filtering on your router

You’re never going to get perfect privacy online. Aim for the balance of security and convenience that’s good enough for you, and good enough for the people in your life who’ll never read a post like this one.

You can hear the full conversation on Secrets of Technology at StarQuest: https://starquest.fm/TEC347

Sources

• Cloudflare, “Introducing 1.1.1.1 for Families” (the 1.1.1.2 malware and 1.1.1.3 malware-plus-adult-content addresses): https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-1-1-1-1-for-families/

• CISA, “Evaluating Your Web Browser’s Security Settings”: https://www.cisa.gov/news-events/news/evaluating-your-web-browsers-security-settings

Pope Leo XIV dropped his first encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, about 24 hours before we sat down to record this week’s episode of Secrets of Technology. I spent most of Memorial Day going through it line by line, and I’m still chewing on it.

People are already calling it “the AI encyclical.” That’s not wrong, but it undersells what’s actually on the page. This document is Pope Leo telling us what kind of pope he intends to be. It’s his vision for the whole pontificate, and AI is the doorway he chose to walk through.

I had Joanne Mercier and Fr. Andrew Kinstetter on the panel with me, and the three of us spent the episode trying to do justice to it. Here’s where we landed.

This is Rerum Novarum for the AI age

The first thing that jumped out at me is the continuity. Leo traces a straight line from Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891, through the Second Vatican Council, all the way to today. If you want a short course on the social doctrine of the Church, read the first couple of chapters. It’s that good.

The parallel is the whole point. Leo XIII confronted the Industrial Revolution, an upheaval that reorganized how people lived and worked. Leo XIV is doing the same thing for the AI revolution, and he’s right that we’re only at the cusp of what these tools will do. This is a change in kind. Faster computers don’t reorganize what it means to be human.

He says it plainly:

“While Leo XIII spoke in his time of ‘new things’ (rerum novarum), today we cannot limit ourselves simply to repeating his insightful teachings. Instead, we must ask God for the wisdom to interpret the great trends of our time, particularly technological advances.”

A columnist at the New York Times described the encyclical as the Pope “protecting his market share.” That’s the most tone-deaf take I’ve seen. The Church’s business is humanity. Anything humans are involved in is already the Church’s concern, by definition. God became one of us to be involved in our lives. You can’t get more hands-on than the Incarnation.

Leo doesn’t hedge on the Church’s standing to speak:

“No one can demand that religion should be relegated to the inner sanctum of personal life, without influence on societal and national life, without concern for the soundness of civil institutions, without a right to offer an opinion on events affecting society.”

Technology is never neutral

Leo makes a point I keep coming back to: tools carry the values and assumptions of the people who build them.

A hammer is just a hammer, but a nuclear bomb is a different kind of tool, built for one purpose and carrying that purpose inside it. AI sits along that spectrum.. These systems are trained, not coded. They essentially grow. And here’s the part nobody likes to say out loud: the people who build them don’t fully understand how they work either.

He puts it directly:

“In practice, however, technology is never neutral, because it takes on the characteristics of those who devise, finance, regulate and use it.”

That’s why Leo keeps returning to transparency and accountability. If we’re going to use these tools, we need to know the moral framework baked into them, and right now most of that happens behind closed doors.

Joanne made the point that it mattered to her that the co-founder of Anthropic was at the Vatican during all this. It put a human face on one of these companies. For what it’s worth, Anthropic’s Claude is the AI I reach for most, partly because it at least tries to operate with some boundaries. Whether that holds up over time is anyone’s guess, but they seem more willing than most to wrestle with the ethical and spiritual questions.

Babel or Jerusalem

The image at the heart of the document is Babel versus Jerusalem, and the timing was almost too perfect. The encyclical landed on May 25, the day after Pentecost, (and was officially signed on May 15, the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum), right after we’d read about the Tower of Babel at Mass. The Holy Spirit was clearly working overtime on the scheduling.

Babel is centralized power, the flattening of cultures into one voice, technological domination, and human self-sufficiency without God. Jerusalem, in the rebuilding under Nehemiah, is collaborative, local, relational, a building project done by a community for the glory of God.

Here’s how he sets it up:

“On the one hand, there is the Tower of Babel, where collective effort follows a plan that dominates and ultimately dehumanizes. On the other hand, there are the ruins of Jerusalem, which under Nehemiah’s direction are rebuilt piece by piece as a project of shared responsibility. [...] What are we building?”

Leo asks the obvious question: is Silicon Valley building a new Babel? Then he asks the better one. What would a Jerusalem-style technology actually look like? His answer: tools that assist human judgment instead of replacing it. Education instead of manipulation. Communication that serves truth instead of deep fakes. Technology designed around families and communities instead of engagement metrics.

That last one landed hard for me. My whole job is making content, and the pull toward chasing numbers is real. We need enough audience at StarQuest to keep the lights on. But the actual point is whether we’re bringing the Gospel to anyone. The encyclical was a good reminder of why we do this and how we should do it.

The technocratic paradigm and the dignity of work

Leo warns about what he calls the technocratic paradigm: everything becomes measurable, efficiency becomes the highest value, and people get reduced to how fast they process and produce. Outrage amplification, the infinite scroll, the surveillance economy, workers treated as replaceable nodes. We’ve all felt it.

His description:

“When it becomes the standard by which everything is judged, it begins to dictate what matters and what can be discarded, reducing creation to an object of exploitation and human beings to mere cogs in a system driven toward ever greater efficiency.”

He warns the result can be “an increase in means without a growth in humanity: ‘having more’ without ‘being more.’”

Fr. Andrew tied this back to the dignity of work, which is one of the foundational principles of Catholic social doctrine. Adam was given the garden to till before the Fall. Work was part of the plan from the start. It’s where we find ourselves and grow. The danger isn’t work. It’s treating any worker as a line item.

And the Church is not immune. I’ve watched it happen in dioceses and parishes, where someone gets put in charge because they were successful in the corporate world, but they were never formed in how the Church thinks about work and people. Joanne put it perfectly: the Church loves to say “we’re not a business,” and sometimes turns around and acts like one, just with a religious accent.

Leo’s response runs through subsidiarity. Regulation here isn’t only a job for the state. It’s communal. We regulate these companies with our pocketbooks, our attention, and our voices. We can’t shove all of it onto legislators and walk away. That matters even more when so much power is concentrated in a handful of transnational corporations. He names the problem:

“In many cases within the digital context, control over platforms, infrastructure, data and computing power does not rest with States, but with major economic and technological actors.”

His answer is shared responsibility, not surrender:

“We cannot allow a handful of actors to dictate these processes on their own; instead, we must build forms of cooperation that respect the various levels of the global community and make them jointly responsible for the common good.”

If you’re the United States or the EU, maybe you can push back. If you’re Ghana or Oman, how do you regulate a company bigger than your whole GDP by orders of magnitude?

The erosion of shared reality

The strongest section, for my money, is the one on truth and communication. Leo says the Church is less worried about a robot uprising and more worried about humans losing the capacity to perceive truth all together. That’s the real apocalypse. Not Terminators walking the earth. People who can no longer agree on what’s in front of them.

We’re already there. Depending on which algorithm has you, the other side isn’t just wrong, they’re evil and stupid, and they’re getting the same picture of you. There’s a great Doctor Who episode, “Dot and Bubble,” where people are so wrapped in their personal media feeds that they can’t see the monsters in the room with them. If they’d just look up, they’d survive. They can’t. It’s the whole problem in one image. WALL-E nailed it too with the couch potato humans glued to their screens.

Joanne pointed out this started before AI. Remember back in the 80s and 90s when people all watched the same TV shows at the same time and we shared conversations about them over the water cooler the next day? Now we’re stuck in our silos. Everything is aimed narrowly at you now, and AI is pouring gasoline on it.

Don’t fall in love with the toaster

The line that stopped Fr. Andrew cold, and me too, is about emotional attachment to chatbots. Leo writes that the danger is not so much that a person might believe they’re talking to another person, but that they may “gradually lose the very desire to form genuine human connections.”

That reframed it for me. The real problem is that you might stop wanting the real thing. We’re made for community and for love, and a relationship with software runs against our nature.

So I’ve made it a personal rule. I never give the AI a name and I never give it a pronoun. I’m going to start calling mine “toaster.” Jimmy Akin says it about Data on Star Trek, and he’s right. It’s a machine. I don’t say please and thank you to it either, partly to save tokens, mostly to keep the line clear in my own head about what is a person and what isn’t.

Mortality is a feature, not a bug

There’s a whole section on transhumanism. The dream of digital immortality and uploading your consciousness runs straight into the Christian understanding of incarnation, embodiment, and resurrection. For us, human limitation and mortality are part of the design. Dying is part of being human. We don’t throw life away, and we extend it naturally where we can, but we were never meant to live forever in this world. We’re a resurrection people. We get our glorified bodies back at the end. The older I get, the more I’m looking forward to that, aches and pains gone. But I’m in no hurry either.

The duty to remain human

The key line in the whole document is this one:

“In the era of artificial intelligence, when human dignity is threatened by new forms of dehumanization, ours is the pressing duty to remain profoundly human. We must lovingly safeguard the grandeur of humanity bestowed upon us and revealed in its fullness in Christ, the splendor of which no machine can ever replace.”

If you take one sentence away, take that one.

The practical takeaways are for everyone, not just the people building the technology. Use it intentionally. Preserve silence and contemplation. Resist algorithmic dependency. Cultivate real, embodied community. Keep making things yourself. I’ve started writing fiction again, and I use AI as a sounding board for character names and breadcrumbs, never to write the actual thing. I’ve also started leaving my phone in my pocket when I’m out, no earbuds, just sitting there. The kids call it “raw dogging reality.” I call it being a person.

And then Leo does something no pope has ever done in an encyclical: He quotes Tolkien. It’s Gandalf, in The Return of the King, before the Black Gate: “It is not our part to master all the tides of the world, but to do what is in us for the succor of those years wherein we are set, uprooting the evil in the fields that we know.”

A pope who confronts AI head-on and quotes Tolkien to do it. I’ve been waiting twenty years for the Church to take technology this seriously. This is the conversation Secrets of Technology has always been about as perhaps the only specifically Catholic tech podcast, and I hope you’ll join us for a lot more of it.

Read the encyclical: Magnifica Humanitas. Listen to the full discussion at starquest.fm/TEC346. If this work matters to you, you can support StarQuest at GiveStarQuest.com.

These were the days when all we had were the Original Series reruns and a single movie to satisfy our Trek fandom and so I dove right in. I began to imagine the rest of the Enterprise and would invent stories of characters moving about the ship’s decks. I invented new ships and new crews and filled whole notebooks with hand-calculated warp tables, crew manifests, science department rosters, and specialization breakdowns. and on and on. (No, I’m not neurodivergent. Why do you ask?)

I also dove into the world of Star Trek novels. Once a month, my mom would drive me to the New England Mobile Book Fair, a warehouse-like store where one could buy paperbacks for 25% off the cover price. There, I would collect stacks of science fiction and fantasy novels, including every new Star Trek book, and then consume them rapidly, then wait impatiently for the next month’s trip.

Fast forward a couple decades to the early days of the web where I discover whole communities of people like me who obsess over creating new ship designs and inventing in-universe documents and blueprints. I marveled at the talent and skill it took to draw new designs or even use the primitive 3D-modeling software of the time to create images that they could upload. (Some of those sites, like Ex Astris Scientia, still exist.) There were those designs, the just-concluded Star Trek: Deep Space 9 series, and the new global war on terror and the war in Iraq. Together, they gave me the impetus to start writing my own Star Trek stories.

At the time, I had been reading a lot of Star Trek fan fiction. Fan fiction had existed long before the internet and photocopied fan stories had been around at conventions since the 1970s, but like so many things, the internet supercharged it. I admired several stories at the Trek Writers Guild (another site which still exists) and that’s where I posted my stories. They even interviewed for me an article in 2004.

My first story aimed for the fences: a novella of an imaginary Star Trek ground force called the Starfleet Marines. I had never been satisfied with how televised Trek just pulled guys off starships and threw them on the surface off a planet with little more than phaser rifles. No shields, no armor, no tanks. Given the technologies in the shows, I imagined a very different kind of ground war. The result was “A Planet Too Far,” a Tom Clancy-style military thriller of the Marines’ invasion of a Dominion-held planet. It followed a series of characters through every phase of the campaign.1 It wasn’t great— too much tell, don’t show, and the dialogue could be rough—but I had a blast writing it and people responded warmly. I wrote a few more stories, but then I met Melanie, we dated, we married, we had kids, and ... you know the old tale.

To support the story, I developed a whole set of reference materials on the Starfleet Marines: ships, tanks, orders of battle, the whole infrastructure. I based much of the imagery off of fan-made designs, after getting permission from their creators, of course. But I couldn’t execute them exactly from my vision. I always had to take what was available and work with it as is.

Until now, that is. Suddenly there were AI tools where I could say, “Help me create an in-universe design briefing for a Star Trek Starfleet Marines tank.” I’d work through details interactively, refine the concepts, then say, “Turn this into an illustration.” Back and forth we’d go until finally I had the designs I imagined, laid out like those technical reference books I admired as a kid. I’m not an artist. I couldn’t have done it on my own. Instead the AI let me work like a director.

And in the past few weeks, I spent a lot of time developing all these reference materials, just having a blast going back to my childhood, but this time with advanced computing power instead of paper notebooks and pencils. Suddenly, I was getting story ideas, Prompts, and then outlines. I started writing one of those last week and before long, I had a short story.

So now I’m launching my newest Substack site called Starfleet Marines. Right now, it has that one short story, but also a whole library of reference materials I’ve created as background material for my stories. I plan to write many more. I know I’m mostly just enjoying the chance to revisit those days of wandering the decks of the Enterprise in my imagination.

I hope you will check it out, tell me what you think, and maybe even subscribe.

That is no longer the world we inhabit.

Today our devices do not wait; they anticipate. They light up unprompted, suggest destinations before we have chosen them, surface products we merely mentioned in passing, and nudge us toward actions that may be helpful, profitable, or simply habitual. This shift has a name—ambient computing—but most of us experience it not as a concept, but as a constant background hum. Technology is no longer merely a tool we wield; it has become an environment in which we live. And we must acknowledge that environments shape us.

The ethical tension here is not primarily about dystopian surveillance, though that makes for better headlines. It is subtler than that. It concerns consent without awareness, agency without reflection, and the slow movement from choosing our way through life to confirming options that have already been selected for us.

Traditional consent presumes knowledge, freedom, and intention. You know what you are agreeing to, you are free to decline it, and you intend the outcome. But ambient systems complicate this framework. Yes, we click “agree” on terms-of-service agreements that none of us truly read. Yes, we enable permissions because otherwise the app does not function. Yet inevitability is not the same thing as moral consent. The fact that modern life requires a smartphone does not mean we have endorsed every way that our smartphones operate in the background.

This is important especially when technological inevitability begins to feel like moral resignation.

The deeper question is not whether a device occasionally suggests something useful; it is whether we are slowly training ourselves to accept guidance without deliberation. When your GPS proposes a route and you follow it without thought, you have not chosen; you have confirmed. When your watch tells you to stand and you comply, perhaps that is good—but are you forming discipline, or outsourcing it? Virtue requires intention. It requires interior participation. If the system always initiates, what happens to the muscle of deliberation?

Over time, habits formed in one domain tend to spill into others. If we grow accustomed to nudges and prompts in our technological lives, we may find ourselves less inclined to pause, question, or resist elsewhere. And this is where the spiritual dimension becomes unavoidable. The Christian understanding of the human person presumes interiority, silence, and the freedom to reflect. Yet ambient technology fills every gap with stimulus. Notifications interrupt prayer. Advertisements colonize imagination. Silence, once ordinary, becomes rare enough that we only notice it when it disappears—during a power outage, a camping trip, or some unexpected stillness.

We do not need to abandon technology to address this, nor would that be realistic. But we do need to reintroduce friction. To disable features that do not need to be always-on. To restrict permissions that are casually granted. To create spaces—physical or temporal—where devices are not permitted to intrude. To look up a route before driving instead of surrendering entirely to the algorithm. To practice a digital Sabbath not as a productivity experiment, but as stewardship.

Because that is ultimately what this is about: stewardship of attention, of agency, of the interior life.

Ambient computing does not need to be sinister to be formative. It shapes habits precisely because it is subtle. And the question each of us must ask is not, “Is my phone spying on me?” but rather, “Am I still choosing?”

Awareness is the beginning of freedom. In a world where technology no longer waits for us, reclaiming intentionality may be one of the most necessary—and most countercultural—acts available to us.

I discussed the topic of ambient computing recently on my podcast “The Secrets of Technology.” You can find our discussion in episode #334

Photo credit: ID 118616941 © Tero Vesalainen | Dreamstime.com

Ash Wednesday is next week and in a sign of our modern times, a common Lenten abstinence among many Catholics I know is some form of giving up or limiting technology. For some, it’s no TV or movies. For others, it’s giving up video games or any of use their smartphones beyond necessity. Some even set their phones to use only grayscale in order to make the phone less attractive. And then Easter comes and we happily return to our old technology habits.

But what if we took a different approach to technology year round? Maybe we can look at technology as not something bad for us that we grudgingly use, but something good that we nevertheless want to be in control of and not be controlled by. This is where the idea for the digital Sabbath comes in.

On a recent episode of my technology podcast, The Secrets of Technology, that I did with Pat Scott and Fr. Andrew Kinstetter, we discussed the idea of a regular digital Sabbath that asks not only what we are willing to give up for a season, but what kind of relationship we want to have with technology for the rest of our lives.

A Sabbath is not a productivity hack or a detox. It is not primarily about feeling better, sleeping more, or optimizing attention. At its core, Sabbath is about worship, rest, and trust. It is the deliberate choice to step back and acknowledge that the world continues to function without our constant input. God remains God even when we are unreachable.

That is increasingly difficult to believe in 2026.

Our devices are no longer optional tools we pick up and put down. Phones are wallets, calendars, maps, keys, authentication devices, family communication hubs, and emergency lifelines. Most professions depend on screens, even jobs that once seemed immune. Farmers, artists, tradesmen, and pastors all rely on connected technology to do their work, and simply turning everything off is often unrealistic.

At the same time, the default posture that technology trains in us is not neutral. It encourages urgency, interruption, reaction, and consumption. Notifications demand our immediate attention, while algorithmic feeds reward outrage and comparison. Silence begins to feel uncomfortable and being unavailable and unreachable by others can trigger anxiety. Over time, this shapes not only habits, but our interior lives.

Prayer, however, requires something different. It requires stillness, patience, and the ability to remain present without constant stimulation. Likewise, love requires presence too, as does genuine rest. When technology consistently pulls us away from those places, the question is no longer whether tech is good or bad. The question becomes whether we are using it freely, or are being used by it.

A digital Sabbath is an attempt to answer that question honestly.

The goal is not abstinence for its own sake. It is to reclaim attention and offer it deliberately to God and to one another. This requires boundaries, not as a form of control, but as a path to freedom. Christian tradition has always understood this. This is why monasteries have walls: So that prayer can flourish within them. The liturgy has structure so that worship can be shared. Families have homes so that love has a place to grow. Boundaries create space where freedom can exist.

Practically speaking, a digital Sabbath must be realistic. It does not mean pretending that phones are unnecessary. It means deciding in advance how they will be used during a defined period of time. The Sabbath can be a literal Sunday, from sundown Saturday to Sunday night. Or it can be a whole weekend. Sometimes you might want to take a whole week. And it doesn’t have to be the same thing every week. Maybe it’s one Sunday a month. Or it’s every Sunday, but once a month you extend to Saturday. The digital Sabbath can be any length of time that works for you and your family.

And the form it takes is up to you. For some people, the Sabbath might look like avoiding social media, news, email, and shopping apps for a day while still allowing calls, texts, maps, music, and prayer tools. For others, it might mean the whole family docks all devices in one place, keeping a single phone available only for emergencies, and choosing activities that are shared rather than solitary. At a more demanding level, it could resemble a retreat, with long stretches of intentional silence and no screens used for leisure at all.

The specifics matter less than the intention and the question that we must ask ourselves: Does this use of technology help me become more attentive, more prayerful, and more capable of love?

This approach is especially important for families. Children learn far more from our example than just from some rules hung on the fridge. If a digital Sabbath is framed as punishment or deprivation, it will fail. But if it is marked by joy, confidence, and shared life, it can become something children look forward to rather than resist. That means replacing screens not with emptiness, but with presence. Have family meals together around the table without any screens. Make conversation with one another, especially if they lead to laughter and joy. Play those long-neglected board games. Take a walk in a beautiful park or around the neighborhood. Read some beloved books together aloud. Make a visit with family or friends. Pray together a Rosary or the Divine Office or make a visit to an adoration chapel.

It also requires letting go of the fear of missing something important. Sabbath rests on the truth that we are not the center of the universe. If something truly urgent happens, there are ways to be reached. Most things that feel urgent are not. Learning that distinction is part of the grace of the practice.

Over time, even small, regular periods of disconnection can change how Sundays feel, how families relate, and how prayer is experienced. They can restore a sense that time is not merely something to be filled, but something to be received.

In the end, a digital Sabbath is not about rejecting the modern world, but about living in it with intention. Technology remains a powerful tool; the challenge is ensuring that it serves human dignity, relationships, and faith rather than quietly reshaping them.

Lent can be a good place to begin. The hope is that it does not end there.

To hear our complete podcast discussion about the Digital Sabbath, with specific tips, hints, and techniques, listen to the Secrets of Tech #329 at https://starquest.fm/TEC329

I was recently re-reading The Lord of the Rings yet again. I’m currently in The Return of the King, where Gandalf has brought Pippin to Minas Tirith after he foolishly gazed into Saruman’s palantir and attracted the eye of Sauron. Fans of both the books and the movies will recall how Pippin impressed Denethor with his forthrightness and manners and how Denethor accepts him as a Guard of the Citadel. But if you’ve only seen the movies, you won’t have experienced what comes next.

While Gandalf and Denethor settle in to discuss the affairs of war and state, Pippin is taken by one of the guards, Beregond, to be shown his new duties. What follows is a series of seemingly inconsequential scenes of quiet, uneventful moments. They check on Shadowfax to see that he’s being cared for in the stable, then they go to the cafeteria for food, of course, for a hungry hobbit, which they take to a battlement where they sit looking over the Pelennor fields. And they talk. They talk about the Shire, about Gondor, the ways of hobbits and men of the West, and of Pippin’s journeys that led him to Minas Tirith.

I can imagine that when Peter Jackson and Philippa Boyens and Fran Walsh were adapting the screenplay, it was pretty easy to discard this inconsequential scene. But that quiet scene is exactly what matters most. I would argue that it’s quite important and it’s one of the things that sets Tolkien apart from all his would-be imitators in the past half century and more.

That’s because it is this scene and so many more like it that form the heart of this tale. This simple scene of two new comrades-in-arms sitting down over a meal to begin a new friendship shows precisely what the war against Sauron is about. Yes, we need to save the Elves and prevent Orcs from pillaging the lands and darkness from defeating armies. But what they’re really fighting for, what every soldier ever fights for is to preserve his own life, the life of the man next to him, and the way of life they have always known.

Most fantasy and sci-fi authors sprint through the action we crave. A lesser author would have let Pippin and Beregond go off stage, as it were, and we’d stay with Denethor, sharp in his despair, and Gandalf, reading Denethor’s heart overshadowed by the Enemy’s influence. Instead, Tolkien gives us this quiet talk between Pippin and Beregond where they discuss the state of things in the plain, unvarnished way only soldiers do. Later, Beregond has his duties and sends Pippin to find his son who will show him around the city. It is in the small moments where Tolkien builds his world.

(It is a mistake to think that world building is only about languages and maps and magic systems. Tolkien understood that a world is built on relationships, culture, and lived experience and that everything else grows from that. A world is created by living in it, not just by writing it on a page.)

To be sure, there are good authors today who know that a steady diet of action loses its savor. Off the top of my head, I think of Christopher Rucchio’s Sun Eater series and Brandon Sanderson’s various Cosmere stories. In those books, characters step away from the action, but usually into introspection, not conversation. Rarely do we get a simple conversational repast, a kind of literary refreshment for both characters and readers and a moment of human connection.

The Lord of the Rings is filled with such scenes, from recuperating days in Rivendell to Sam’s meal of coney and taters in Ithilien and more. The most famous of these “disposable” interludes is probably the detour to Tom Bombadil’s home, where having barely begun their journey the hobbits are hosted by the enigmatic, yet powerful fellow and leave his home, having received no great benefit to their mission or so it seems.

This is precisely why I think that those who’ve only seen the Peter Jackson movies, as great as they are, and haven’t read the books are missing out on what truly makes The Lord of the Rings great. The limits of film can’t capture the quiet, lived-in richness of Tolkien’s world. The medium of movies or streaming TV itself won’t allow it. But in the books, time slows. We get to live in the subtlety. We get to breathe the grace.

And that, I think, is the gift of Tolkien. Not just the grandeur of battles or the sweep of history, but the stillness between, the quiet conversations, the meals shared, and the friendships formed not in the blaze of glory, but in the soft light of morning or the hush before war. Those moments are the soul of Middle-earth—and the reason the books endure long after the last horn sounds on the Pelennor.

I recently rewatched A Miracle 34th Street (the 1947 version) for a discussion on The Secrets of Movies and TV Shows with Shelly Kelly and Patrick Mason. We had a great discussion and I encourage you to go listen to it. But I wanted to summarize some of the insights we had here.

Before Christmas became something we argued about online—before it was a battlefield over culture, commerce, and belief—there was a quiet black-and-white film that asked a much simpler question: What does it mean to believe?

Released in 1947, A Miracle on 34th Street arrived at a fascinating moment in American history. The country was fresh out of World War II, wounded but hopeful, and rapidly transforming into a modern consumer society. Cities were growing. Advertising was booming. Faith, optimism, and trust were all under strain. And into that world stepped an elderly man who calmly claimed to be Santa Claus.

What’s striking is that the film never insists we settle the question of whether he is Santa in a literal sense. Instead, it shifts the burden onto us. The real issue isn’t whether miracles are possible—it’s whether cynicism has become our default posture.

The story sets belief and “common sense” in direct tension. Common sense says adults should know better. Common sense says the world runs on rules, paperwork, and practicality. Common sense says hope should be managed carefully, especially for children. And yet the film keeps suggesting that common sense, when left unchecked, hardens into something smaller than wisdom.

The child at the center of the story is especially important. She isn’t naïve or foolish—she’s intelligent, articulate, and carefully trained not to believe in things she can’t verify. In many ways, she’s more adult than the adults around her. And that’s precisely the problem. The film suggests that imagination, wonder, and trust aren’t childish weaknesses we outgrow; they’re human capacities we risk losing.

What makes the story endure is how gently it makes its case. There are no sermons. There’s no explicit theology. God, Jesus, or any of the actual Nativity events or people are never mentioned. And yet the entire film is saturated with the logic of faith: believing before seeing, trusting without guarantees, choosing hope even when disappointment feels more rational.

Even the famous courtroom scene isn’t really about law. It’s about authority. Who gets to define reality? Who decides what counts as “real”? Is truth limited to what can be proven, or is there room for things that only exist because people act as if they’re true?

In that sense, the film is surprisingly honest about belief. Faith doesn’t come with certainty. It comes with risk. The characters who choose to believe aren’t rewarded immediately. They doubt. They hesitate. They almost give up. And yet belief becomes transformative—not because it bends reality to their will, but because it changes how they live within it.

That may be the film’s quietest insight: miracles don’t always look supernatural. Sometimes they look like generosity spreading, institutions choosing integrity over profit, adults rediscovering wonder, or families forming where none seemed possible before.

It’s also worth noting what the film doesn’t do. It doesn’t romanticize Christmas. Instead, it treats Christmas as a test—of trust, of values, of whether we believe the world can be better than it often appears. The anxiety over commercialization feels almost modern, which should make us uncomfortable. If they were worried about it in 1947, maybe the problem isn’t new at all.

In the end, A Miracle on 34th Street isn’t really asking whether Santa exists. It’s asking whether we’re willing to live as though goodness, generosity, and hope are real—and whether we’ll keep doing so even when the evidence feels thin.

That’s why the film still works. Not because it’s nostalgic. But because every generation has to decide, all over again, whether belief is foolish… or necessary.

And maybe that’s the real miracle.

“Ninety percent of success is just showing up.” That’s a quote often attributed to Woody Allen. Or to put it differently, 90% of success in life is reliability. If you show up when you said you would, where you said you would, to do what you said you would—on a consistent basis—you will find great success in life.

Success isn’t primarily about brilliance or aptitude or skill, and it’s not even about luck. Success hinges on your reliability.

When people can count on you, they will turn to you. They will look to you for leadership and to get things done. They will give you more work, and they will pay you to do more work.

But reliability, or “showing up,” is not just about career success. It’s the foundation of every meaningful relationship. When a friend needs you and you’re there—truly there—you move from acquaintance to friend, and from friend to their inner circle. Many people wonder how certain friendships become lifelong bonds. It’s not magic. It’s not charisma. It’s the simple, repeated experience of you were there when I needed you. That’s how trust is formed.

And in romantic relationships, reliability takes on an even more profound dimension. When your boyfriend or girlfriend or spouse can rely on you to do the things you said you would do, to be the person you said you were, that constancy becomes the soil where love actually grows. Grand gestures are fine, but they don’t outweigh the day-to-day steadiness that makes someone feel safe. When they can’t trust your follow-through, they might still love you, but they’ll hesitate. They’ll guard themselves. Reliability doesn’t merely support love; it protects it.

The hard reality is that being the kind of person who simply does the task you said you would do puts you ahead of 90 percent of people, because most people—if we’re honest—aren’t consistent. They mean well but don’t follow through. They intend great things but never quite complete them. That alone creates enormous opportunity for those who can push past that inertia and show up faithfully.

Now, I am by no means perfect in this area. I’ve missed commitments. I’ve overextended myself. I’ve had moments—recent ones—when I volunteered for something and then had to back out. That happens. It’s not about perfection. Nobody wins at that game.

But the more you can cultivate reliability—especially when you’re young, or new in a role, or entering a new season of life—the more doors will open. Reliability is remembered. People notice it even if they never say anything aloud. And over time, it shapes your reputation far more than intelligence or charm ever will.

Success is tied, inevitably, to your relationships with other people. So feed those relationships. Strengthen them by being someone others can count on. Be the person who gets things done. Show up. And then show up again. Over time, that quiet consistency will build a life of trust, opportunity, and genuine connection—far more than any burst of talent or stroke of luck ever could.

ID 160463023 © Khwanchai Phanthong | Dreamstime.com

Hope is the defining principle of the Rebellion in Star Wars. That’s not exactly an original thought since the name of the first movie is A New Hope (ANH). Nevertheless, there’s much to unpack when we look into this idea.

The second and final season of the Andor series has just wrapped, which leads directly into Rogue One and then ANH. In Rogue One, on Jedha, while searching for Saw Gerrera, Cassian says he’s hoping to get a meeting with him and Jyn scoffs, “Hope?” Cassian replies, “Yeah, rebellions are built on hope.” Later, Jyn echoes the same line at the Rebel council meeting on Yavin 4. As Jyn tries to convince the Alliance leaders to take action at Scarif, one of the leaders challenges her: “You’re asking us to invade an Imperial installation based on nothing but hope?” And she responds with Cassian’s line: “Rebellions are built on hope.”

Early on, Cassian is still somewhat the jaded and cynical rebel. He doesn’t quite believe in Jyn or Saw and certainly not in Galen Erso. Cassian recites the line about hope like an old mantra—repeated often, but hollow. But by the time Jyn uses it in the council meeting, she has transformed from a jaded, cynical young woman into a fervent believer. She may not trust the Rebellion fully, but she refuses to let her father’s sacrifice go unheeded. He gave up everything–life, family, freedom–for the sliver of hope that he could put a fatal flaw in the Death Star that could later somehow be exploited.

His action is a metaphor for the Rebellion at large. The Empire is immense and powerful. There are millions of stormtroopers and thousands of starships, not to mention the seemingly all-seeing Emperor and his immensely powerful henchman, Darth Vader. How could a small band of ill-equipped rebels possibly overthrow the Empire? But Galen believed and held onto his hope that somehow, some way, some day, his plan would work.

And, of course it did. But before it did, at the movie’s end, we hear of hope again. After the supreme sacrifice of Cassian and Jyn and their friends on Scarif and Admiral Raddus and his flagship and all the other Rebel ships over Scarif, Princess Leia escapes in the Tantive IV with the Death Star plans and one of the ship’s officers asks her what it was in that transmission from the planet and she replies simply–in the last word of the movie–“Hope.”

Moments later and 39 years earlier, A New Hope begins.

But where did Cassian get the idea that Rebellions were built on hope? The exact phrase itself came from an unexpected source: The concierge at the hotel on Ghorman where Cassian stayed during Andor season 2.

That sense of hope and even joy is what sets Star Wars (and Star Trek) apart from other science fiction epics. Whether it’s Alien or Blade Runner or more recently Zach Snyder’s Rebel Moon, much of what we get for space opera or epic science fiction is often bleak and dark and brutal.

That sense of hope is what resonates for Christian fans of Star Wars because hope is one of the theological virtues which St. Paul partners with faith and love in his first letter to the Corinthians (1 Cor 13:13). What sets this theological virtue apart from normal hope? The Catechism tells us, “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.” (CCC 1817). In other words, Christian hope is trust in the good to come, even when it seems distant or impossible. Sound familiar?

Throughout the saga, we see this kind of hope everywhere. In the original trilogy, Luke clings to the belief that good still exists in his father—despite all evidence to the contrary. His hope, rooted in love and faith, ultimately leads to Anakin’s redemption.

Leia Organa, Luke’s sister, remains steadfast in hope, despite seeing her entire planet and all its people destroyed in an instant, despite being held in the depths of the Empire’s seemingly unstoppable weapon by the Emperor’s two strongest henchmen.

In the sequel trilogy, Rey carries hope throughout the three films, hoping in the future despite so much uncertainty about her past, her present, and her future. SShe doesn’t know who she is or where she comes from. Is she a Jedi? A Palpatine? Can Kylo Ren be redeemed? But her hope in ultimate good propels her forward.

Contrast that hope with the despair of the Dark Side. Anakin’s turn begins with fear—the enemy of hope. That fear drives him to control fate rather than trust it, and in doing so, he loses everything.

Palpatine, in both the Empire and the First Order, understands this. He rules by fear, control, and despair—antidotes to hope. In Return of the Jedi, he mocks Luke’s faith, telling him that his faith in his friends is his weakness. (Spoiler: It wasn’t.)

In Star Wars, like Christianity, hope also inspires self-sacrifice. Obi-wan’s death in A New Hope, Holdo’s sacrifice in The Last Jedi, and Cassian and Jyn’s deaths in Rogue One all reflect the same aspect of Christian hope in which we are willing to sacrifice present comfort for eternal truth. “Indeed I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and count them as refuse, in order that I may gain Christ.” (Cf. Philippians 3:8–11) Without hope, such sacrifice would be meaningless.

While the Rebellion and Resistance suffer loss after loss, defeat after, still they persist. Likewise, Christian hope also perseveres through suffering (Romans 5:3–5).

In Star Wars, hope motivates every conflict. Star Wars is always about a small, hopeful resistance against a vast, dark empire–David vs. Goliath. Hope also defines heroism. The greatest acts aren’t victories, but sacrifices made in hope. And hope reaches beyond the present. The heroes fight not for power or revenge, but for a future they may never see–a deeply Christian vision (Hebrews 11:1).

Star Wars doesn’t just tell stories about hope–it breathes it. From Luke to Leia, from Jyn to Rey, the saga holds up hope like a lightsaber in the darkness. Like the Christian call, it urges us to trust in promises not yet seen. And reminds us–as St. Paul said–“hope does not disappoint.” (Romans 5:5)

I hadn’t mentioned it here before, but over the course of two weeks in July, my wife, Melanie, and I went on a whirlwind pilgrimage to Italy associated with the apostolate where I work, StarQuest Media (SQPN), and the Jimmy Akin’s Mysterious World podcast.

More than 60 pilgrims spent 12 days in Rome, Assisi, Orvieto, Lanciano, Loreto, and San Giovanni Rotondo. Along the way, we passed through the Holy Doors of the four major basilicas of Rome; stood within a few feet of Pope Leo and attended a papal Mass; prayed near the tombs of current and future saints; touched the very stones of the home where the Virgin Mary received the Annunciation from the Archangel Gabriel; and more.

Rather than bore you with a travelogue of the places we visited, I thought I’d share my thoughts on the most surprising aspects of our trip.

You can travel to Italy in July and survive

I was one of the organizers of the pilgrimage and when we were planning it, we knew that Italy–and especially the big cities–are extremely hot and humid in July and August. So why did we choose to go then? We really didn’t have much choice due to the schedules of the major people involved. April or May would have been great and late September would have also been good, but our headline attraction, Jimmy Akin, could not do either of those.

As a consequence, during our entire trip the temperatures were generally above 90°F the entire time, except for our last evening. On one day we were in Assisi, it was near 98°. So we sweated. A lot. And we drank a lot of water and ate plenty of gelato. Sure the hotels and buses were air conditioned, but most of the ancient buildings we visited were not. So you take your time and you get used to it.

That isn’t to say that it isn’t dangerous, but if you take precautions and take your time, you can survive. Also, everyone says Rome shuts down in July as people go on vacation to escape the heat, but we hardly saw any places that weren’t open. Maybe it was because of the Jubilee Year and the new pope and all the pilgrims in the city, but this was also true in the smaller places we visited.

You are probably capable of more than you think

Related to the heat and the exertions it required, I learned that I was capable of more than I thought. I am not very fit, to be honest. I’m overweight, I’m over 50, and I hadn’t kept up with my walking regimen before the trip. This was one of my biggest worries.

But I did it. At no point did I think I couldn’t go on. And there were others who had it much worse than me. At least one older woman on the tour hobbled everywhere with her cane, but she made it.

At the end of each day, my feet were sore and I relished the idea of a shower to cool off and get refreshed, but by the end of the trip, I was still ready for more. I may not want to climb any stairs for a while now that I’m back, but I feel fit as a fiddle.

You can go from stranger to fast friends in days

On the trip I was in the strange position that most people knew me and I didn’t know them. Since I’m the cohost of Mysterious World and the host of other podcasts, people already knew me. There were also other pilgrims who I’d only known online, some for several decades, but we were meeting in person for the first time.

And yet, it took only hours in some cases for us to feel like old friends, making jokes and talking about interesting subjects and sharing about families and more. There’s a bond that’s created when you travel with others, especially in stressful situations. We met a couple who homeschools their kids in Canada; a wonderful gentleman from England who works on the Oxford English Dictionary; two sisters from the Pacific Northwest, one of whom retired from the US Navy as a Command Master Chief; a family of parents and two teen daughters; and so many more. At every breakfast and dinner, we made an effort to sit with new people and get to know them. With over 60 people on the trip, we didn’t quite get to meet everyone and have one of those conversations, but we made meaningful connections with many.

The Holy House of Loreto is amazing and its shrine even more so

I had been to Italy before, 25 years ago, but only in Rome and Assisi. The first time was a very quick four-day visit and the second time was during World Youth Day in 2000 and so the ability to see and do much at that time was limited by the tight schedules and crowds. Melanie had spent a semester of college in Italy so she had seen more, but mainly in Rome and northern Italy.

Meanwhile, apart from Lazio, this pilgrimage focused mostly on Umbria and southern parts of Italy and we managed to see some surprising new places. I’d purposely kept my expectations and research on the locations we were visiting low so I could experience surprise and delight and that was a good strategy.

One of the most surprising places for me was the town of Loreto and the basilica that contains the Holy House. This small stone structure inside of the massive early Renaissance church was brought from the Holy Land by an Italian family called De Angelis. (Their family name was later morphed into the legend that “angels” carried it from there to Loreto.) The Holy House is the home that the Virgin Mary grew up in with her parents, Anne and Joachim, and where she received the Annunciation from the angel Gabriel. It was incredible to stand within those walls and touch them, imagining Mary putting her hand in the same place and the Divine Light of the angel washing upon those stones. Also, in the small House, beneath an altar that was created there after the House arrived in Italy, there is a small stone altar from its time on the Holy Land. The story is that this was the altar of the Apostles, where they celebrated Mass after the Resurrection in Mary’s house. Although it’s behind a grill, I was able to touch it with my fingertips.

The basilica itself is a beautiful expression of devotion and art with many chapels provided by the donation of various nations, i.e. a German chapel, a French chapel, and others. The American chapel is the newest and reflects the status of aviation as of the 1970s and its art style is evocative of the era. It even includes images of helicopters, the first papal trip on an airplane by Pope Paul VI, astronauts, and even UFOs.

Italy is incredibly open, spacious, and unpopulated

I imagined that in a place that has been occupied by advanced civilizations for thousands of years that the land should be filled by a megalopolis. In some ways, I expected central Italy at least to be built up like the Northeast Megaplex of the United States between northern New Jersey and Boston. But what I found instead is that the land is incredibly open and rugged. Most of the area that you can see from the major highways is either mountainous or agricultural. The amount of land given over to growing sunflowers, olives, and grapes in the areas we traveled was incredible. Cities and towns, especially older walled towns, tended to be very contained.

When I consider the massive depopulation caused by successive plagues and wars over the centuries, not least the massive death toll of World War II, it makes a tragic sense. Had the war not happened, imagine the millions of people who would be alive throughout Europe today.

On a more hopeful note, Italy remains a beautiful country, not just on her incredible coasts, but also in her heartland. Driving from Rome, through the Appenines, to the Adriatic coast was gorgeous as we went from picturesque valley to valley, and then driving along the coastline south. On the US East Coast, it would be rare to find long stretches of beautiful beaches without imposing hotels lining it mile after mile.

One of the most beautiful places we visited was the small hilltop village of Monte Sant’Angelo, which overlooks the Adriatic Sea on the “spur” of Italy’s boot. This pretty town of white-walled stone buildings on steep walking streets is the home of the Grotto of Saint Michael, an ancient apparition site where the Archangel Michael appeared several times in the 5th century inside a cave. Several churches have been built, one over the other, over the cave and you enter in the top church and go down, down, down the stairs until finally you find yourself in a chapel that is half-cavern, half-building. On our trip, we arrived just as Eucharistic Adoration and Benediction were ending and we had a chance to kneel in prayer before the Lord. Over the centuries, many kings and princes and popes and other important people have made their way to this site to pray and experience this town.

The Italians have food allergies figured out

One of our concerns before the trip was that Melanie has several food allergies, including wheat and tomatoes. Imagine not being able to eat either of those in Italy of all places! But we had been assured by several people that Italians were very good about food allergies and that turned out to be true.

Every menu was clearly marked with allergens, including some we didn’t know could be allergens. At every group meal, the guides and the venue ensured that Melanie’s place setting was clearly marked and they would bring her specially prepared gluten-free pastas and breads and other items. And the Italian versions of gluten-free foods are far superior to the American packaged foods. Much American GF pasta we’ve tried tended to be gritty or odd tasting, but the Italian brands tasted just like they should! The same with the breads, which had the kind of structure that I thought only gluten could give. I don’t know what alchemy they used to create these amazing foods, but Melanie was quite appreciative.

On one night, the group went to a pizzeria in Rome where Melanie had pizza whose crust was indistinguishable from real pizza dough. It was incredibly well done.

Melanie also has a fragrance allergy, which meant that the towels and sheets in hotel rooms needed to be washed in unscented detergents. A couple of the hotels were able to accommodate us. One simply could not make it happen. Our guides went above and beyond by making a last-minute visit to a shop to buy sheets for our bed for our stay there. This is a lesson for us in the future: We need to always bring a set of sheets and towels for hotels where they can’t get us unscented sheets and towels.

Italy is very hilly

The hills! Everywhere in Italy seems to be either uphill or downhill, sometimes with very steep inclines. Towns like Orvieto, Assisi, and Loreto were built on hills to be defensible, but even more modern places seem to be on hilltops. Rome is famously built on seven hills, but everywhere we went we had to walk up and down. And when it wasn’t hills, it was stairs. And even when it was level, it was a lot of walking.

For example, on the 6th day in Rome, we walked over 7 miles. In the morning, we started at the Scala Santa, the Holy Stairs from Jerusalem where Jesus was brought before Pontius Pilate. Pilgrims can kneel and pray up the steps, but one try on my bad knees and I decided to walk up the regular staircase next to it. There are a couple of chapels at the top of the stairs, nothing too remarkable, but then it was off across the street to St. John Lateran, Rome’s cathedral. After that we walked down the street to Santa Croce, which holds a number of relics connected to the Crucifixion, including pieces of Christ’s Cross and thorns from the crown of thorns.

Then we took buses back to St. Mary Major, the fourth of the four major basilicas of Rome and the last of the main Holy Doors of the Jubilee. We stood in a long line to pass through security and then a long line inside to pass by and pray at the tomb of Pope Francis. There we saw the relics of the nativity manger and the icon of Santa Maria Salus Populum Romanum. We walked from there back to our hotel for a lunch break and then back on buses to a spot near Castel Santangelo where we walked past Piazza Navona to the Pantheon and then on to the Trevi fountain, which was incredibly crowded and way too touristy. Along the way, we saw some pretty sites and amazing churches, including the Gesu, which we didn’t see inside and which had a wedding going on.

We walked from the Trevi to the Capuchin ossuary. This is a crypt under the church of Maria Della Concezione Della Capuchins which contains several altar areas where everything is constructed of and decorated with the bones of deceased friars. It was different than I expected. First, we had a self-guided tour through a museum about the Capuchin order in general, which was pretty good. Then there was the bone crypt itself which turned out to have been more like an art project by a single capuchin and less the custom of an entire community, which surprised me. It didn’t feel creepy at all. In fact, as I looked at the skulls, I was struck by the fact that each one was a brother in Christ who lived a whole life like me, with hopes and dreams and challenges, and who was loved by God.

After Mass in the church above the crypt, we then walked to the Spanish Steps where we had a group dinner and then after, a very long walk back to the buses by the Tiber River. And that was just one day, albeit the longest. By the end of the 12-day trip, I had logged almost 50 miles of walking! That’s over 4 miles per day!

An unexpected chance to see Pope Leo

Our trip to Rome coincided with Pope Leo’s first summer vacation as pontiff. Originally we were supposed to see him during the weekly angelus prayer and blessing in St. Peter’s Square on Sunday, which usually means thousands or tens of thousands of people and the pope way up on a faraway balcony. But the Pope was at the summer retreat outside of Rome in Castel Gandolfo, where the crowds are a bit smaller, but the square is smaller too, so it would still be hard to get up close. But then our tour operator managed to snag tickets for our group to a Mass with Pope Leo in the nearby town of Albano.

So we got up early and got buses to the small town, which is only minutes from Castel Gandolfo. We would be in the square outside the cathedral, but a large screen was set up and there was only a couple thousand people at most. We also were able to stand in the shade for the whole Mass. When the time came, Pope Leo came through the square on foot, passing just within about 20 feet of us! Then we celebrated Mass with him and even were able to receive Communion from priests who brought ciboria from the pope’s altar.

From there, we quickly returned to our buses and went to Castel Gandolfo. The square there was already packed and we ended up in a massive crowd down the Main Street. We could hear his prayer, but couldn’t see him. But that was okay because we’d already seen him in Albano!

After the Angelus, at the advice of our guide, Melanie and I made our way against the crowd into the square and then down a side street. From there we came upon a small street that overlooked the volcanic lake that makes the town famous. We snagged an outside table at a restaurant and had an amazing meal with a glorious view. It was a very good day.

Italian beer is good now

One of my memories from my last trip to Italy was that while the food, wine, and gelato were great, Italian beer left a lot to be desired. The main Italian brand Peroni was essentially an equivalent to Budweiser, weak and tasteless. On our day in San Giovanni Rotondo, we had lunch in the hotel restaurant. Usually we drank wine and bottled water with our meals, but I saw they listed a couple of craft beers on the menu, a wheat beer and a saison. I was intrigued and order the wheat beer. Wow! It was great! Craft beer has come to Italy and it’s apparently good.

The guides can be great

Our tour operator arranged for local guides in most of the places we visited. In the majority of situations, they were guides vetted and hired by the tour company, but in some places we had to use guides provided by the venue or from an approved list. The guides hired by the tour company were all pretty great. Giorgio was our main guide in Rome and he was knowledgeable, faith-filled in his outlook, and proficient in English. Daniella and Romana guided us through Orvieto and Assisi and were also quite knowledgeable, fun, and personable.

On one day, we had a tour of the Vatican Museums, which was a first visit for me, although Melanie had been a few times. Our guide was Valentina, a pretty, young woman who flirted with all the male museum employees, all of whom seemed quite appreciative of her attention. She was nice, but she moved us pretty fast through the vast galleries and focused mainly on the secular art pieces or at least had a primarily secular outlook on them. In the Rafael rooms, for instance, she focused on the famous School of Athens mural, but then ignored the stupendous Adoration of the Eucharist on the opposite wall. But overall, she did a pretty good job.

In San Giovanni Rotondo where we were learning about and praying at the shrine of St. Padre Pio, we had a male guide whose name I never caught, whose English wasn’t great and whose guiding left a lot to be desired. He never quite understood that he didn’t need to translate Italian names into English and so he kept calling the town “St. John Circular,” which … isn’t quite right. But he also had a habit of stating the obvious as well. He’d point to a chair in Padre Pio’s room and say, “This is Padre Pio’s chair.” And in fact, he said little in his tour that we couldn’t have figured out on our own.

On the other hand, the guide at the Abbey of Monte Cassino, the great Benedictine monastery, was great. Her English was very fluent, her knowledge was extensive and deep, and she came with a devout understanding of St. Benedict and his monastic life.

In general, I recommend having a good guide when you visit Italy because while you can read guidebooks, there’s nothing like the passionate intensity and knowledge of someone whose passion for their home and their faith impelled them to start a career sharing them with visitors.

How a free trip can be expensive

A 12-day trip to Italy staying in very fine hotels and having top-notch guides is obviously not cheap. So how can we as a one-income family with five kids, living in one of the most expensive metros in the US on a small non-profit salary afford for both of us to go? That’s the deal the tour operators make with tour leaders. When Trinity Tour Travels approached us with the idea, they told us that for every so many people we get on the trip, we get a free trip for one of the leaders. The cost of those trips are built in to the price that the rest of the participants are paying. Such a deal! We knew we could fill at least one and maybe two buses for this pilgrimage and we did. Through the generosity of both the tour company and the other pilgrims, both Melanie and I could go on this trip of a lifetime.

But even through the biggest costs were covered, there’s still plenty of expenses. For one thing, we needed some new luggage. We had one large suitcase, but we needed a second one big enough to hold enough clothes for a two-week trip. And we needed some new travel-weight clothes suitable for the hot Italian summers. Then there were the costs on the trip itself. Breakfast and dinner were covered by the tour, but for lunches and other purchases we had to come up with that out of pocket. And while Rome isn’t the most expensive city, it’s still a big city. A fairly light, sit-down lunch for two was generally about 40 or 50 euros, which was about $50 to $60. And then there were the gifts for the kids and souvenirs and holy items. We didn’t splurge on those, but it adds up. I don’t know if we could do a trip like this every summer and maybe we’ll need to figure some things out if we do this again, but the reality is that even a free trip can be expensive.

There’s so much more I could write about our trip, but I’ll end for now by saying that this was an incredible experience, not just because of the amazing places we visited–and Italy is amazing–but also for the people we met and the new friends we’ve made. I would like to do more of these pilgrimages through SQPN, in part because they’re good for our community and it’s good for SQPN. We’re batting around some ideas for the future, including a possible North American pilgrimage (which might be more accessible to more people), as well as some of Trinity’s other packages, like the pilgrimage in the footsteps of St. Paul in Greece and Turkey. And one idea I’ve been mulling over is visiting Great Britain for a pilgrimage related to great British Christian writers like Tolkien, Chesterton, and Lewis.

If you’d be interested in a future pilgrimage, let me know in the comments, as well as any other questions related to this trip.

Acadia National Park, located on Maine’s rugged Atlantic coast, is a stunning natural preserve that showcases the best of New England’s wilderness. Encompassing granite peaks like Cadillac Mountain—the tallest on the U.S. Atlantic seaboard—as well as dense forests, rocky shorelines, and glacially carved lakes, the park offers a breathtaking blend of mountain and ocean scenery. Visitors can enjoy more than 120 miles of hiking trails, scenic drives like the Park Loop Road, and historic carriage roads perfect for biking and horseback riding. Acadia is a haven for outdoor enthusiasts, nature lovers, and anyone seeking the serene beauty of coastal Maine.

About 130 million people—roughly a quarter the U.S. and Canadian populations—live within a day’s drive of Acadia, and thus it is an incredibly popular park. In 2023, about 3.88 million people visited the park, making it the seventh-most visited US national park that year. Given its small size compared to the other six parks in the top seven (they are all between 4 times and 65 times larger), you can imagine how crowded Acadia can feel in peak seasons.

I’ve been visiting Acadia for more than 35 years, first with my mom and siblings, then friends, and more recently with my wife and children, and so I think I’ve acquired a good base of knowledge about the park and how to visit it effectively.

In this article, I’m going to reveal my top strategies for getting the most out of a visit to Acadia from the perspective of a large family. We’re not back-country hikers or black diamond mountain trail climbers. We’re just a regular family looking to enjoy the outdoors and relax during a family vacation to one of the most beautiful places in the world.

Where to Stay (Without Going Broke)

The most cost-effective way to visit Acadia is by camping. There are plenty of motels and inns and short-term rentals locally, but they tend to fill up quickly in the summer. There are quite a number of campgrounds on Mount Desert Island itself. Some are nearly vacation resorts in themselves with amenities like water parks. But for our purposes, we tend to favor smaller, quieter campgrounds, especially since our goal is to spend time in the park, not at the campground.

We do not own an RV, but instead stick to tent camping out of our van. As a family of seven, this can pose some challenges, especially since a lot of places have limits on the number of people that can stay on one site.

Another consideration is proximity to park entrances and Bar Harbor and all the major attractions. Fortunately, Mount Desert Island is relatively compact and even from the farthest reaches of the island, it doesn’t take more than 30 or 40 minutes to get to, say, one of the Park Loop Road entrances.

That’s why we tend to stay on what’s called “the Quiet Side” of the island. (Mount Desert has two lobes, split by a sound. The western, or left, lobe is known as the Quiet Side; the eastern side includes Bar Harbor and most of the park.) Our preferred campground is Smuggler’s Den. This small campground is reasonably priced and never full. They have several bathhouses, including a brand new, gorgeous one by the tent sites. There’s free wifi, a small shop, and conveniently placed water and trash receptacles. It’s kept clean and they ensure that it’s a peaceful and quiet place to stay. The tent sites nestled in the woods around the big field are especially quiet. Since it is comparatively far from the park entrance, it’s a nice respite. Plus there’s a convenient grocery store just a quarter mile down the street from the entrance and it’s very close to Echo Lake, which has a swimming beach.

Another cost-effective camping option is the park-managed campgrounds Blackwoods and Seawall. (There are also two other park campgrounds on parts of the park off Mount Desert Island on Schoodic Peninsula and Isle au Haut.) Both Blackwoods and Seawall are accessed from outside roads so you can get in and out even when the Loop Road is closed at night. Each offers flush toilets, picnic tables, fire rings, and paved roads—but no hot water or electricity. These campgrounds do fill up quickly. The best part is their remoteness inside the park. I stayed once at Blackwoods and you can walk down a trail that takes you to the Loop Road and the water’s edge. At night, there are no artificial lights in the sky because you’re in the middle of the park, and all you can see on a clear night is the swell of the ocean and stars from horizon to horizon.

Getting Around the Park

We’ve found that if you plan your days right, you can see most everything worthwhile in just a few days, leaving you plenty of time to hang out and relax. As I said, we’re not big backwoods or mountain trail hikers, but if you are, try to find the trails that aren’t on the Park Loop Road to avoid the big traffic jams in parking lots. Everyone wants to go to the Precipice trail or hike up Cadillac Mountain, but there are lots of trails in the park that won’t feel like rush hour in the city as the popular trails often do.

If you’re looking for a more relaxed pace, Acadia’s carriage roads offer a unique experience. Bring or rent bikes and you can travel along 45 miles of these old well-maintained rustic roads that meander through the hills and forests. You can also hike them or rent horses or horse-drawn carriages. The vast majority of visitors to the park don’t go beyond the Park Loop Road or major sites accessible by car, so this is your best bet for easy access to serene natural experiences.

Even if you just want to stick to the Loop Road, you can still avoid the worst crowds and have fun. First, make sure to get your park pass in advance. You can buy it online and then put the pass in your smartphone wallet (Apple Wallet or Google Wallet). The basic pass is good for a week.

What to Skip (Trust Me)

What should you see on the Park Loop Road? My recommendation is to avoid Sand Beach. Yes, it is the only Sand Beach in the park. Yes, you are visiting the ocean. However, this is coastal Maine and the water will be cold, if not frigid. If you wanted to go sunbathing on a beach, you would have gone to Florida or the Outer Banks or Cape Cod. The problem is that everybody goes to Sand Beach when the sun is out. The parking lot fills up immediately, leaving people to park along the loop road and then it’s a long, long walk to the beach. Trust me, it’s not worth it. If you get any inclement days during your trip, go then and see the beauty of the beach, but it’s not a must-see.

This next tip may also be controversial advice, but I’m going to give it: Don’t go to Thunder Hole. If you’re not aware, Thunder Hole is a natural formation in the rocky coast, which when the tide and waves are right, cause a loud thundering sound as the waves crash in. This popular spot has walkways and steps and railings to make it easy to get right next to Thunder Hole. Maybe too easy. Thunder Hole is always crowded and once again, parking is at a premium. Plus, all the viewing spots along the railing get crowded and it’s hard to see. And the upshot is that on a beautiful summer day, there’s not much happening. The best time to see Thunder Hole is when it’s rainy and/or windy and the waves are crashing, because then it lives up to the name and then nobody else will be there.

On particularly stormy days, the National Park Service may close the lower walkways because the waves crash over them and it becomes very wet and dangerous—but from above you can still see and hear plenty and it will be a lot drier. However, when it’s stormy and windy enough to cause some wave action, but not so stormy as to close things down, that’s ideal.

And that’s one of the best bits about Acadia: Even when the weather is “bad”, there’s plenty to see and do. Even in the midst of summer, coastal Maine is still relatively mild. Yes, there are hot, humid days, but there’s always cool ocean breezes. And yes, there are rainy days to cool things off. Nighttime sleeping is always comfortable in Acadia.

Instead of Thunder Hole, continue driving on the Loop Road until you find a section where there’s not a lot of people, where you can park on the side of the road (parking and no parking areas are marked), and where you have easy access onto the boulder strewn water’s edge areas. Much of the coastline is piles of massive granite boulders strewn around by the forces of weather and erosion over the course of millions of years. Kids, especially, love to clamber about, looking in dark crevices and poking into tide pools. For myself, I love to just sit and listen to the waves and hear the gulls and relax. Just keep an eye on the kids and yourself—wet rocks are slippery and may shift underfoot. We often spend an hour or more in one of these spots, climbing around or just sitting.

Another quiet spot, if you’re still craving a beach experience of a sort, is Otter Cove. This quiet spot also requires you to park along the road, but then it’s a nice walk right onto a gravel beach. At low tide, there are many more tide pools, but at any time, it’s a pleasant place to sit. If you’re brave or especially warm, you can even dip your feet in the water here. I recommend water shoes to protect your feet from the gravel, if you do that.

Another popular spot that is always packed is Jordan Pond. There’s a restaurant and shop here and their famous popovers and tea on the lawn overlooking the pond and the far hills known as the Bubbles. It’s a gorgeous spot, but the wait for a table is often long. Don’t bother with the main parking lot as it’s always full and head over to the secondary lot. If there’s a space, hike back to the main site along the pond-side trail. Lay out your own blanket and a picnic lunch, save yourself some time and money, and enjoy the view. If you can’t find a parking space, try again on a rainy day or skip it. While the pond is pretty, it’s far from a must see as it is just one among many beautiful places to see.

Cadillac Mountain and Other Must-Sees

One place you really must see, though, is the summit of Cadillac Mountain. Cadillac is the highest Atlantic coastal peak in the U.S. and for part of the year is the first place in the US to see the sunrise (early October to early March). If you’re an early riser you can go and see the sunrise from the top of the mountain, but even if you visit at a more civilized hour, the views are spectacular. You can drive to the summit, but you’ll need a reservation with a 30-minute window. This system, recently introduced, has made parking much easier. Like the other popular spots, the parking lots fill fast and it was frustrating to spend forever waiting for someone to leave so you could park. Now, parking is much easier. There’s plenty of open space on the mountain to climb around. Later in the summer, you can even find wild blueberries growing in the crags. This is dramatic scenery and while it’s always crowded–even with the new reservation system–it’s always possible to find a quiet place to sit.

The gift shop at the top of the mountain is nice place to visit. In addition to the welcome bathrooms, you can buy a coffee mug or t-shirt or, my favorite, blueberry soda.

Meal times can be challenging for families on a budget. We always pack a cooler full of sandwich fixings and then picnic. A particularly nice location is the Fabbri picnic area, just before Otter Cove, with bathrooms, and several picnic tables tucked into a lightly wooded area. Bear Brook picnic area is at the other end of the Loop Road, also in a wooded area.

We prefer to cook most meals in our camp site, although our first night we always stop by Beal’s Lobster Pier in Southwest Harbor. It’s close by Smuggler’s Den and the harbor side dining is incredible. It isn’t cheap, but hey it’s vacation.

Visiting Bar Harbor

What about Bar Harbor itself? You’ll want to visit at some point. Parking is always crowded. All street and public lot parking is paid via an app. There’s lots of restaurants, often very busy, and well, eating out anywhere these days is expensive. There’s no fast food options. You’ll find souvenir shops, a charming bookstore, and just about everything you’d expect from a bustling tourist town.

Final Thoughts (and Your Turn)

It is possible to visit Acadia with your family without breaking the bank or spending all your time in traffic or big crowds with a little advance planning. I hope my article has been helpful in that regard.

If you’ve got your own tips or questions about Acadia, I’d love to hear them in the comments

When I volunteered in youth ministry many years ago, I remember having a talk with a young man on a retreat. He had heard me discussing openness to vocation, that God is calling each of us to a vocation. He was conflicted because he had a plan for his life, things he wanted to do and become, but what if God was calling him to something different. What if God is calling him to something he doesn’t want to be and it makes him unhappy?

If I could explain it to him then how I understand it now, I would start with some questions.

Do you believe God is good? Do you believe God is all-knowing? Do you believe God loves you unconditionally?

If God knows everything—your past, present, and future—and if He loves you unconditionally and completely, more than anyone else ever could, then He will only call you to what fulfills you and brings you joy

You, with your limited knowledge and inability to see the future, have an idea of what would make you happy and you are very sure that this is what you want. But if we could talk to yourself 20 years from now, I wonder how you would look back on your life. Were you right? Maybe you were. Maybe you weren’t.

But God already knows what your life looks like in retrospect. He knows every twist, detour, and fork in the road—even the ones you haven’t seen yet. That doesn’t mean following God’s will guarantees a life without pain, loss, or failure or a life that’s always rosy. We live in a universe broken by sin. But it will be a life with more joy, more peace, and more love; less despair, less regret, and less fear.

What I told that young man then was that God’s plan for your life is not necessarily different from your plan for your life. When praying to discern God’s will, He’s not going to flash a neon sign in the sky telling you what to do. You pray for His will to be done, you stay in right relationship with Him, and then you act according to your conscience and good judgment. And then you pray that if the path you choose isn’t the best for you, that He will redirect you. Pray for Him to open the doors that lead to growth and joy and shut the ones that lead to regret or harm.

If I recall correctly, the teen wanted to enlist in the Navy, but was afraid God would call him to the priesthood. I don’t remember if he felt promptings to become a priest or whether it was just his very devout mother’s promptings, but I do recall telling him that there were many young men who went to seminary and later left because it wasn’t what God wanted for them. But maybe God wanted them to be there to receive something specific, but not to become a priest. That happens.

But as I said, we don’t know the future. We think one path will bring joy. But maybe that path only leads to pain, sin, or even loss and death. Winning the lottery sounds great, but talk to people who have hit it big and you’ll often hear stories of how their lives became filled with new and bigger problems.

God calls us, but His invitation is not in opposition to our heart’s desires, at least if we’re striving to love God. He loves us and wants us to be happy. He gives us promptings in our hearts. He has formed us as the person we are today.

He doesn’t ask us to blindly rush into the future. What He wants is for us to say to Him, “I know You love me. I know You want joy for me. I love You and want to do Your will. I’m going to do what I think is right for me. Please help me to understand. Help me to do what is best.”

That’s all He asks. And really, it’s all we can do.