Considering Catholicism

Greg Smith
  • 4.9 (168)
  • Christianity
  • Semiweekly

Considering Catholicism explains the beliefs, history, Scripture, and life of the Catholic Church clearly and charitably. It's for curious Protestants, seekers, people in OCIA, and Catholics who want to know and share their faith. Host Greg Smith spent decades serving across the Protestant world, which gives him an insider's understanding of the questions people bring. Faithful to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

  1. 1d ago

    From the Vault: Unhappy Reformation Day (#491)

    For secular folks this is Halloween, for Catholics it's the eve of All Saints Day, but for Protestants it's Reformation Day, when Martin Luther nailed his complaints against the Catholic Church to a cathedral door in Germany. Today, Protestants celebrate what they imagine is a heroic and prophetic scene. But as Greg explains in this snapshot, it's nothing to celebrate. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  2. 4d ago

    Drawn to Rome, Part 5: Beauty (#490)

    A glimpse of something beautiful can put you on the road before you have a name for the destination. In this episode Greg returns to the moment in The Lord of the Rings when Sam sees a white star through the shadow of Mordor, and to the way Tolkien and Lewis kept writing the same thing: beauty is not an ornament. It is a pathway. He traces that hunger through a childhood Christmas song, the Magi following a star, and the recognition that the Catholic house had kept that beauty and given it a face — Mary, the crucified Christ, stone and glass and a line of chant that was not performing an experience but letting you into one. The Catechism, John Paul II’s Letter to Artists, and Augustine all say the same thing in different words: created beauty never fully satisfies. It stirs a nostalgia it cannot finish. The draw is not that Catholics have better art. It is that this house is thick with it, and ordered toward the One who is beauty. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  3. Oct 19

    Drawn to Rome, Part 4: Maturity (#489)

    Catholicism does not lower the bar to make the faith easier to swallow. It treats people as adults and expects them to grow up — in doctrine, in moral responsibility, in the seriousness of the sacraments, and in the long conversation the Church has been having with itself for two thousand years. In this conversation with Ed, Greg and Ed talk about what it feels like when a church stops trying to entertain you and starts expecting you to keep up. They look at the features that get criticized as bugs — the depth, the obligations, the refusal to let a sin remain a secret — and why those things can feel like a relief after years of being told that God does not really expect anything of you. The draw is not complexity for its own sake. It is the sense that Christianity, if it is true, is a serious thing, and that a grown-up faith calls people to take it seriously. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  4. Oct 12

    Drawn to Rome, Part 3: A Quiet Place (#488)

    Nine or ten at night, fog on a mountain road, and a Catholic chapel the size of a tool shed. A crucifix, a couple of benches, a place to pray. It was the first Catholic building Greg ever walked into, and it was quiet. A lot of people describe the same pull. An empty church on a Tuesday that is full of glass and saints and stories, and dead quiet. Confession lines, a candle, a priest anointing someone before surgery, five silent minutes while the vessels are purified after Communion. Not a lower volume. A room, and a week, that are not trying to fill every gap. Hell, in Lewis’s picture, is noise that never stops, because if it stopped you might hear something. The Church kept the other thing on purpose, from Benedict rationing even good speech to a parish that agrees to wait. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  5. Oct 8

    Drawn to Rome, Part 2: The Search for the Source (#487)

    A Christianity of new beginnings gets old. The megachurch was the recovery of real church, and before that the Jesus Movement, and before that some other return to the original, each one arriving as the source and aging into a period style. For a lot of people the pull toward Rome starts there: not in a proof about Peter, but in a wish to go upstream and find the water still moving. In the early 2000s that wish was unfashionable. Not arriving had become a spirituality, with books and sermons hung on an old U2 title, as if God sends people on a search he never means them to finish. Jesus says the opposite. Seek, and you will find. Once the thing you want is the source, most of the map goes quiet, and the only houses that can even scratch the itch are the ones that claim to be the thing still running from the apostles. This hour is about that draw — the weariness, the upstream instinct, and the moment the claim has an address. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  6. Oct 5

    Drawn to Rome, Part 1: No One Gets Argued into Love (#486)

    Nearly five hundred episodes of this show have been about why the Catholic Church is true. That work was real, and it is not being retired. It was also incomplete. Most people do not start down the Road to Rome because they won an argument. They start because something draws them — a longing, a story, a seriousness, a beauty — before they can give the thing a name. In this short introduction to Drawn to Rome, Greg tells the part of his own conversion he usually leaves out: Tolkien, read as a kid who did not know the word Catholic, planted a hunger that Calvary Chapel, Calvin Seminary, and a long shelf of arguments never quite replaced. The books came later. They kept him from feeling crazy. They did not put his feet on the road. No one gets argued into love. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  7. Sep 28

    Beyond and Behind the Four Spiritual Laws (#485)

    Four true sentences became, for a lot of us, the entire gospel. They were a trailer. They were never the film. God loves you and has a wonderful plan for your life. You are a sinner. Jesus is God’s only provision. You must receive him as Savior and Lord. Whether or not anyone still uses the name, those four sentences are the unexamined scaffold of a great deal of conservative evangelical Christianity — the invitation at the end of the sermon, the question that ends the conversation, the prayer after which you are told you are in. This episode is not a dunk on Bill Bright or on the first yes those sentences have actually produced. It is a look at how a short evangelism pitch became the whole movie for so many people, and at what the New Testament still holds beyond a decision: a Church, sacraments, repentance as a life, and a country that opens the further in you go. If you have ever felt that there must be more than the youth-group or Bible-church version of the gospel, this hour is an invitation to go further up and further in. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

  8. Sep 21

    Romans Road or Road to Rome? (#484)

    The Romans Road is the gospel many of us first learned: all have sinned, the wages of sin is death, Christ died for us, confess and believe, call on the Lord. Those verses are true. This episode asks why a handful of lines from Romans 3, 5, 6, and 10 should be the front door of the whole Bible, and why Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount so often has to be managed after the fact. Greg traces the habit from Luther’s claim that Romans is the “purest Gospel” through the revivalist “plan of salvation,” and tells the story of preaching Matthew for fourteen months until a colleague wanted a six-week Romans reset so nobody would think they had to do anything. Justification gets you off the ground. The New Testament is about the trip: becoming like Christ. No popes, no councils — just the question of which page you start on. SUPPORT THIS SHOW Considering Catholicism is free and ad-free for everyone, thanks to listeners like you. Become a patron for a Q&A video every other week, the Podcast Albums (50 topical playlists), Deep Dive courses, and a monthly live session: https://patreon.com/consideringcatholicism Or give a one-time or recurring gift with PayPal: https://www.paypal.com/donate/?hosted_button_id=5LGR5E89Z7Y2Y CONNECT WITH US • Website & contact form: https://consideringcatholicism.com • Email: consideringcatholicism@gmail.com • Leave a comment on Patreon (I read every one!) RATE & REVIEW If you enjoy the show, please leave a rating (and even better, a review) on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen — it really helps new listeners find us. SHARE THE SHOW Know someone who’s curious about Catholicism? Send them a link or share an episode on social media. Thank you! Christus vincit, Christus regnat, Christus imperat.

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4.9
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About

Considering Catholicism explains the beliefs, history, Scripture, and life of the Catholic Church clearly and charitably. It's for curious Protestants, seekers, people in OCIA, and Catholics who want to know and share their faith. Host Greg Smith spent decades serving across the Protestant world, which gives him an insider's understanding of the questions people bring. Faithful to the Catechism of the Catholic Church.

Information

  • Creator
    Greg Smith
  • Years Active
    2022 - 2026
  • Episodes
    498
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Copyright 2022 All rights reserved.
  • Show Website
    Considering Catholicism

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