Ep 85 - Tradition, Wealth, and The Prosperity Gospel: A Conversation with Thomas Storck

James Caldwell: 0:19

Hello, all. Welcome to another episode of The Manly Catholic. This is James, your host, and with me we have a very special guest. We have Mr Thomas Storck. Thomas, welcome to the Manly Catholic, Thank you. Thank you for having me on. Yes, absolutely my pleasure. And you know, Thomas, we're going to be talking about his new book that just came out from Tan Books. It's called the Prosperity Gospel and I will leave a link, of course, in the show notes for you all. But I'm very excited. It is a very interesting read, especially for those of you out here in the United States. So I'm really looking forward to it in our conversation. But before we get going, Thomas, we'll start with a Hail Mary. So we'll start in the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen, Amen, Hail Mary. Full of grace. The Lord is with thee. Blessed art thou among women and blesses the fruit of thy womb, Jesus.

Thomas Storck: 1:13

Holy Mary, Mother of God, pray for us sinners now and at the hour of our death.

James Caldwell: 1:17

Amen, In the name of the Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. Amen Thomas, why don't you just give our listeners a brief background on you? You know where you work, where you're from, and we'll go from there.

Thomas Storck: 1:31

All right, thank you. Yeah, I'm a convert to faith back in 1978. And I've been interested in Catholic social teaching and Catholic culture for many, many years and I've been writing about it. While I was in the early 80s, and as far as this book is concerned, tanya approached me to write a book about the prosperity gospel and I said well, that's great, but I would like to write about why the prosperity gospel has found such a fertile, such fertile soil in the United States. What is it about our culture that has made it favorable, that's found favorable place to grow prosperity? Because really it's a very weird idea and a lot of parts of the world that would be looking at a scans is where did that come from?

James Caldwell: 2:24

But it has defined a lot of acceptance here among writers, especially, of course, because it flows right out of some of their principles. So let's, I guess let's just define our terms for everyone listening here too. So, I'm sure people have heard of the prosperity gospel at some point in their education. So what exactly is the prosperity gospel?

Thomas Storck: 2:49

Well, it's the idea that if God wants us to be happy in a worldly sense, he wants us to have prosperity, money, good relationships, psychological health, all the things that which are in themselves mostly good. But the thing is we can't claim them as our own. We can't say, god, I have a right to have wealth, I have a right to have even a happy marriage. I don't have a right to any of those things. And sometimes God permits us to get in a situation where we have to simply trust in him and not just say, well, gee, I'm not on, I don't have what I wanted for God's letting me down. I have a right to these things? We don't. In my book I go, Gordon Newman, how they if God wants us to be in sickness, he's with us. If God wants us to be in perplexity and doubt, well, he's still with us. We still have to trust him. And usually these prosperity preachers want you to give them money, and that's part of the bargain. If you give them money, god's going to bless you with the world living you want.

James Caldwell: 3:57

Which gosh? That's always the idea of the prosperity gospel. It's always just been. The concept is so ironic to me is that you know if you, if you're, you just need to have more faith, or you just need to give me more money and then you'll be prosperous. When I mean, god never promised riches. In fact, he promised that there you'll go through hardships in the gospel. That's all he preached. He never promised that you'll have fruit here on this earth. He said you have fruit in heaven, you'll have treasures in heaven, but never here on this earth. That was never guaranteed. So I just I guess well, we'll dive into that a little bit, thomas. So why? Because how did this become so popular in our culture when you know, as anyone with a grounding and whether you're Protestant or Catholic would understand the basic principles of this is like no, that's actually not what Jesus taught at all. It's not what the gospels teach us at all.

Thomas Storck: 4:51

Well, I think they were identified in my book two, two roots of the prosperity gospel where this what I wanted to go to see better, the prosperity gospel in our culture. And one is the radical kind of Protestantism that became intellectually dominant in the United States, the New England separatists we usually go to pilgrims, the Puritans, and then in the middle colonies we had similarly radical colonists, protestants. The Anglicans in the other colonies did not have as much of an intellectual outlook or influence on our culture as the New England in the middle colonies and the, even though the Puritans started out with a very rigid, hierarchical society that emphasized, didn't emphasize prosperity per se. Latent in any kind of Protestantism is the private interpretation of the gospel. Yours could have, pope, as I am, your interpretation is as good as mine and that eventually gave way to the kind of radical Protestantism that well, if I want this, then I can, and this is, must be what the Bible says. I can interpret the Bible in any way that I want. The other big influence was the philosophy of John Locke, who was a very influential English philosopher who died in the early 18th century, and he essentially privatized religion. Religion was no longer going to be a concern of society, religion was going to be private. I mean Locke said if a heathen doesn't believe in either of the Old and New Testament, what's that to you? As long as he keeps respect to your property and honors his contracts, what? do you care, it doesn't make any difference as a private matter. Now I'm not saying we go on persecute paratics when I am saying that what we believe about God and about his plan of redemption does have implications for our society is not merely a private matter. It does matter to me what you believe, what my neighbor believes, and it is a matter that needs to be addressed at the level of society and even at the level of government one way or the other. But Locke's was incredibly influential in the colonial period, and so Locke's philosophy, joined with the radical priestlyism, is what gave America's distinctive cultural gas, in which, in which, as far back as the early 19th century, foreigners were already commenting on how the Americans had lost their money. Tocqueville, for example, talked about this, and they first started a gospel soup with the latest outgrowth of that.

James Caldwell: 7:43

I guess I'm thinking of maybe an objection that maybe some readers might have, or listeners and say, okay, so the prosperity gospel primarily targeting the United States in particular? So is this like an attack or an argument against capitalism? I guess, which is obviously what the United States thrives on is the capitalistic society. So I guess, if someone were to come to you and say, well, are you just saying, like capitalism is evil? I mean, I don't think that's what you're saying at all, but how would you? How would you counter maybe an argument that someone might propose to you regarding that?

Thomas Storck: 8:21

Well, if somebody talked to me about capitalism and I've been writing about this kind of thing for a long time I would first say well, what do you mean by capitalism? Because there's really not a lot of agreement. People kind of unreflectively think they know what it is. And the best definition of capitalism comes from Pisces 11th and Sycoccal. When just in the section 100, where he calls it the economic system in which labor and ownership are separated, in other words, some people have the money, the property and they hire others to work for them, now he goes, he immediately says that this is not in and of itself unjust so long as the owner is paying the worker, the adjust wage and all the other stipulations that the papal social teaching includes are performed, then no, this is not in and of itself unjust. But as a distributist, the philosophy, economic philosophy Cheshire and Nivella advocated, I would say that this is unwise. It's unwise, it's not against private property. Private property is right and the churches always have held that. But the separation between ownership and work is not something that has to go with private property. Well, distributed private property, such as distributism advocates, is another approach to private property. So I think you have to be nuanced here. We have to say yes, the separation of ownership and work is not in and of itself unjust. Otherwise it would be unjust for me to hire the teenage boy next door to mow my lawn. I have the property, he has the supply and the labor. But when a whole economic system is organized this way, distributists would say this is probably going to lead to problems and it's going to lead to concentration on wealth and a concentration on simply whatever we'll sell. When everyone is involved, or as many people as possible are involved, with the primary economic tasks of providing what we need for a decent human life, then we tend to look on our product as a valuable thing, whereas if you're one or two steps removed from property for example, if you own stock in a company you're the legal owner of that company, but usually you don't care a whole lot about what the company is making, as long as your check comes in. As your dividend check comes in, your stock price is rising. So the further you're removed from the actual economic process of producing useful business services, the more likely you are not to really care about the quality of the product, the price of the product, as long as you're getting your return.

James Caldwell: 11:02

So yeah, I was just going to say Thomas, I really like that. I forgot that. What Pope did you say defined capitalism as a separation between-.

Thomas Storck: 11:13

Pius XI. Pius XI.

James Caldwell: 11:16

I forgot. He wrote encyclical and defined it. I forgot about that. I'll have to look that up. That was an excellent definition, so I'll post a link for everyone too, to look it up for yourselves that was good.

Thomas Storck: 11:25

Yeah, it's quite the section 100 in Quedestino. Okay, I would say Quedestino is the greatest of the social encyclicals. It's an amazing document and we haven't even begun to fulfill what he called for there. He called for a reconstruction of the social order according to the principles of the gospel, and we have not begun to do that yet.

James Caldwell: 11:48

It's funny how some popes they just seem to write encyclicals and it's just so profound and impactful, but it takes generations for it to fully come full circle. So it sounds like Pius XI is in that category as well.

Thomas Storck: 12:02

Yeah, he was amazing.

James Caldwell: 12:04

So I know in the book too you make the argument that the prosperity gospel has I mean, obviously it was you know Protestantism and John Locke was for the kind of the leaders into that. But you've also made the argument that it's crept into the Catholic church as well. Would you mind expanding it on that a little bit?

Thomas Storck: 12:22

listeners. Well, yeah, catholics. If you may remember, about 20 years ago, cardinal George of Chicago said that American Catholics were cultural products, cultural Catholics, and you don't remember that. And when Catholic immigration started in the 1840s first Irish and then German and then later Italian, polish, other Eastern Europeans the church was overwhelmed. Her resources were not really adequate to just caring for providing the sacraments, providing a Catholic education for the huge numbers of immigrants that were coming from Europe, and the church did all she could to hold on to Catholics as individuals but the idea of we live in a Protestant culture. We want to convert this culture, not just individuals. We want to make sure that the new Catholics coming over from Europe are not corrupted by the Protestant surroundings that we have. There was very little time and money to spend on that and a lot of Catholics didn't even realize the need for it. In fact, I would say it was a rare Catholic at the time who realized wait a minute. We need not only to hold on to our own and convert Protestants, but we need to convert the culture, because if we don't convert the culture, we're going to end up with the cultural Calvinist that Cardinal George spoke about. So, as a result of this. American Catholics have imbibed an awful lot of the cultural characteristics of the Protestant and enlightened culture that we live in, and this has gotten even worse since the 1960s, when discipline in the church has collapsed so much and Catholics simply look around for some kind of a secular ideology to latch on to, to give them meaning, to help them understand life and society and so on. But this is not the way to go. We have to look to the faith and to the teachings of the church in order to understand our lives, our societies and so on. So Catholics have unfortunately imbibed a lot of the, if not as bad as Protestants and their embrace of the prosperity gospel. We've imbibed a lot of the seed bed of it as a word.

James Caldwell: 14:43

Sure, sure, thomas, would you say. The prosperity gospel, at its core, at its essence, is essentially rooted in materialism, but it just, I guess, has a spin on it, and that it's more of a religious spin. Is that you're doing this for God, sort of thing, would you say. That's inaccurate.

Thomas Storck: 15:05

Well, it's rooted in materialism in the sense that all human sin comes of course from the center of our first experience. If they hadn't sinned then we wouldn't be talking about this tonight. But so yeah, that's a precondition for any kind of sin is the fact that we're descended from Adam. However, the cultural characteristics of the United States have given kind of sanction to this. So people are not ashamed to say that they want money, they want riches, whereas in other places they might maybe be just as greedy, but they would kind of hide it. They would be afraid of people with income. Greedy and materialistic, but we tend to see here no problem. We want to figure out how to mean, for example, since about 1970, while family size has decreased in the United States, the size of houses has increased Makes absolutely no sense, and we seem to have no problem with this, with seeing materialism as the defining aspect of our culture. Often John Paul II talks about this in Gentesipus, how after World War II there was an effort to defeat communism simply on the grounds that capitalism could outproduce it. And he says this is equally materialistically atheistic, in fact, because in both cases it's not making God the center of life, it's making material things. I mean communism most of it.

James Caldwell: 16:33

they could outproduce the West. They were wrong, but it doesn't make any difference, because the race was a tainted race in the first place. How interesting, yeah, I mean it really just boils down to as well, which we talked about at the beginning kind of the great irony is that the prosperity gospel is essentially telling you IG liking it to. You know, if you, like you said, give, give money to a certain preacher or certain church or things like that, and God will abundantly bless you. But you know, when I guess this kind of goes into how we can transform or kind of shift away from this is not focusing on the treasures here on earth, but again shifting our way, you know, towards the treasures in heaven. And you know, and you go back to you mentioned John Locke and his philosophy about privatizing religion and how that has, you know, subtly but now, I guess, drastically shifted the way our culture is, in that you know, if your religion is private, then you separate your religion from your public life, you know. I mean you can see that too with our politicians who who say they're Catholic or say they're Christian, right, and they say, you know, privately I might be against this, but publicly, you know, because this might be what I perceive. You know, to get me reelected, I'm going to vote on a certain policy which is totally against what the gospel teaches. You know it. Just it really is. You know, when we we've privatized religion, it really does infect us, you know, because then we almost have, you know, we're like, you know, two face. You know it's like well, privately I go to mass on Sunday, but then my public life, because I'm a politician, I'll vote for abortion or I'll vote for this or that, things like that. When you say that's an accurate kind of John Locke, and then how it's slowly creeped in and turned into our society, especially our politicians, I guess too we can. I guess we can go down that round too, if you want.

Thomas Storck: 18:31

Yeah, I would. And let me read I quoted several times in the book that infamous statement by Justice Anthony Kennedy, the land parent of the case in case, where he said at the heart of liberty is the right to define one's own content of existence, of meaning of the universe and of the mystery of human life. And that is about a radical privatization of not just religion but of any kind of meaning that you could envision, because what he's saying essentially is that it's what, what life is all about, what life means. There's, no, there's no public meaning to this is all, whatever you think. So I don't know if you would have followed, but it can lead to absurd lengths where we're, well, we see where, if I think I'm a woman, I can become a woman, if I think I'm a man thinks he's, or woman thinks his man is. Only you define your own concept of existence. But that goes deep, that goes way back to life. I don't know anything and I would argue that it's in the one that declaration of independence talks about our pursuit of happiness. That that's latent in that phrase is Anthony Kennedy's statement about, about finding meaning, because pursuit of happiness is anyway, you want to pursue it. If one thing makes you happy, you pursue that. Something else makes you happy, you pursue that, and it's a radical privatization of any kind of transcendental significance. So you're right, politicians love to separate their public life and their supposed private beliefs. Or one who has to wonder whether they really believe that. Yeah, man, that yeah, yeah so it's, it's it, but this is nothing new. I mean even as back as we a lot of people will fall. John Kennedy and I will do for his is his kind of capitulation to the when he talked to the Houston ministers in 1960 when he was running for president. But a lot of people not very many people know that back and when Al Smith was running for president the first Catholic to run a major party in 1928. He did essentially the same thing in an article that he wrote in the Atlantic the year before he ran. He essentially said Well, if he's elected, he's not going to take any orders from the church. And this is the way Catholic to have responded to this for a long time.

James Caldwell: 20:55

What happened? Forgive me, what happened to Kennedy in the 1960s with the Houston preachers?

Thomas Storck: 21:02

Yeah, when he was running for president. Of course it was still a lot of Catholicism around. The people said if he's elected, he'll take orders from the Pope. So he gave an address to the Houston Ministerial Association, essentially a Protestant body, in which he said that he was running not as the Catholic candidate but as a Democratic candidate and if there was ever a conflict between his religion and his public duty he would resign. Of course he didn't really mean that, but that's neither here nor there. The point is he was willing to make his political allegiance higher than his ecclesiastical leadership. Out of his credit, he said he would resign Again. I don't think we can credit that very much, but it's the same thing that Al Smith said when he wrote that there was no ecclesiastical tribunal that would order him around if he was president. Because back then it was even more ridiculous. There was the idea that if Al Smith was elected president, the Pope was going to come and live on the White House A really ridiculous idea.

James Caldwell: 22:13

That would be something. I wonder how people would react to that if the Pope just came to. I'm just going to live here now, guys, this is where the Cedars Peter resides. But no, that just goes back, thomas, to this whole the myth of separation of church and state I didn't even think about. You always hear life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and it's always has this positive spin on it. Well, you're pursuing the American dream and things like that. But you're absolutely right, the pursuit of happiness For who, for what, for what end? I mean, everyone defines happiness in a different light. So if your happiness, what? If your happiness infringes on my happiness, then what are we going to do? So that I mean, yeah, that's a good start, gosh, I never thought about that. But okay, so let's talk about Locke again. We'll keep coming back to this. So his big idea was you mentioned the privatization of religion, and so why? You may have touched this in the beginning, so forgive me if I'm asking you again, but why did his, I guess, ideas take root? I know you said there's the two prominent camps, but why did that? Was it just the founding fathers that came over to the US? Those were the ones who were in kind of Locke's camp, and then they obviously created the constitution and all that as well and then it took off from there. Can you expand maybe a little bit on the history of that, because that to me is fascinating, so I would love to hear more.

Thomas Storck: 23:39

Yeah, well, the lot of course was an early Enlightenment writer, and that was the 18th century Enlightenment, and influential in the United States because the Puritan society was breaking down. It was really unstable, was unsustainable. They found that, for example, that their children, the children of the original settlers, weren't having the conversion experience that they expected that their children would have. And then what are we going to do about this? And as, if you look at the history of 18th century in New England, you see a progressive secularization of thought and at the same time a progressive incorporation of English Enlightenment thought, which principally was the thought of Locke. The two kind of replaced each other. As Calvinism died, it was replaced by Locke, so that by, for example, 1800, roughly 1800, a lot of the congregational churches in New England were becoming Unitarian churches and there was a controversy in the first quarter of the 19th century with these congregations were adopting Unitarianism. So the old Calvinism was dead by then and so it was replaced by Enlightenment thought and very radical liberal, protestant thought of Unitarianism, for example. So yeah, it was extremely influential. The historian Louis Hart said that in the United States Locke is a national cliché. His thought is just sort of assumed as the obvious background for all thought. So in Locke, religion is a matter of opinion. Doctrines and dogmas are simply opinions, and the state has nothing to do with opinions. The state's concern is only conduct. And you can see that in the Virginia Statue of Religious Liberty that Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1786. You'll see that it's hailed as this wonderful document for religious freedom. But if you look at it carefully, you'll see that what it means is that you can do what you want as long as you don't violate any state laws, and we don't care about what you think, we don't care about what your opinions are, because opinions mean nothing. They're just simply inside the four walls of your house. And this is the way we tend to regard religion. And if you look at all the religious Supreme Court's religious jurisprudence, starting with the Mormon cases in the 1870s up through now, you'll see the same attitude, that opinion oh yeah, that's just what you think. You know who cares about that. We don't care about that, but we're going to make sure you obey the law, whatever it might be. For example, in the Smith, oregon v Smith decision that Justice Scalia wrote, he thought it's so similar to law. That's absolutely amazing. They can think it was about a member of the Native American church who took peyote as part of their religious rituals and he was fired from his job for doing so. And when he sued the state for unemployment benefits, they turned him down because he had been guilty of violating law. Well, I went to the Supreme Court and Scalia's opinion was well, you can think what you want about religion, we don't care, but the law, being a secular matter, is what is important. Now, I'm not saying that he should have been allowed to take peyote. That's not my point. My point is that we can't just relegate religion to a private matter in which I don't care what you think, but you better do what I say. This is basically the way we've acted.

James Caldwell: 27:26

Well, yeah, I mean, thomas. The great irony is, I mean, we try to separate religion, and people do to an extent, but it's being replaced by a different religion. They don't want to call it religion, but I mean they'll call it politics or consumerism, or greed, or whatever. We are influenced by something, and if you're influenced by a religion, then that's bad, but if you're influenced by the culture, which is a secular and atheist and things like that, then that's okay. Which is so ironic is that you can't privatize anything. Really, it's going to come out in one way or another. And the problem is, though, too, as you mentioned, which is what the problem we're in now is that clearly, we have this separation where, especially Christians and Catholics, they kind of like we said, they stick to Sunday, that's my day, that's what I do on Sunday, but when I'm in the world, I don't even act really like a Christian, which is the exact opposite of what God calls us to do. So we've talked so much about the history of this and where we're at, but there's got to be hope, though, right. So how can we turn this culture around, Thomas?

Thomas Storck: 28:38

Well, that's a very good question and not an easy one to answer. We would have to really start with Catholics. We have to start with ourselves and say, okay, let's, we need to teach Catholics to take their bearings on all matters, not just the dogmas of the church. I mean, there's enough. Catholics don't even believe that anymore. But starting with the dogmas of the church and thinking about the social order, the political order, where do we get our opinions from? And the church? A lot of the Catholics don't realize what a robust teaching the church has in all these things, what a robust tradition she has on all these things. So it's really a matter, I would say, starting with ourselves and teaching Catholics to look at these old and sicker girls that have never even heard of and looking at the authors who wrote these tremendous tradition. We have Catholics who were writing even in the 20th century. We had a tremendous Catholic intellectual revival that began in the 19th century and ended somewhere around the middle of the 20th century, but during that period there were a tremendous number of wonderful Catholic writers who addressed a lot of the problems that were facing the modern world and addressed them in terms of what we can still relate to nowadays. I mean, sometimes it might be hard to relate to as St Augustine or St Thomas Aquinas for the average person because they were addressing a world that was quite different from our own. But the writers like Chesterton Della, christopher Dawson, ronald Knox, they were writing for a world that was not that different from our own and they still speak to us very clearly and have a lot to say to us. So I would educate Catholics I would say read the papal, social and sicker girls and read these authors who were part of the Catholic intellectual revival and are pretty accessible to us.

James Caldwell: 30:34

Yeah, I know you mentioned Pius XI. Are there any other in sicker girls that you find particularly helpful when we talk about the things that were talked about, you know social teaching and different governments and things like that.

Thomas Storck: 30:47

Well, of course, ram the Rhyme was the first modern social and sicker girl, leo XIII and in fact Leo. Leo was really remarkable when he became Pope in 1878. The church was kind of in a bad shape, I mean, the Papal States had been lost a few years before and Catholicism was kind of in contempt, held in contempt by a lot of Europeans, thinkers. But Leo had a remarkable revival, instead of remarkable revival, partly by sponsoring the revival of the philosophy of St Thomas and then by issuing a series of the sicker girls that dealt with the foundations of the church vis a vis the world, for example, brown the warm I mentioned subunit Christianity, mortality day about the church and state, church and politics, and there were remarkable series of the sicker girls. So those, those major sickle girls were Leo, which go beyond simply the economic and into the political and into the like that, the state as such as a duty toward God. It's not simply you have a duty to God and I have a duty to God, but the state as such as a duty to worship God, to to, because, after all, if I, if we have a group of people getting together, and they're all Catholics, when they get together, what do they somehow forget their Catholics. What do they? You know, the organizations that they sponsor have duties also. Now, it's true, I'm not saying the United States government is not Catholic, has never been Catholic and it's not going to sponsor Catholic worship. But still, the question of what is, what is truth, what is transcendent truth, is not simply a matter for individual reflections, matter for societal reflection. I mean Leo 13, for example, one of us in Chicago is dressed to the American bishops said Well, the church is doing very well in your country at that time. Nonetheless, the church would do even better if it enjoyed, if she enjoyed, the sponsorship of the government, the favor of the laws.

James Caldwell: 32:55

So you know the, the, the separation of truth to stay, as you said, has never been the gathering ideal. Right, yeah, because, like we we've talked about so much, it's impossible really to separate it. I mean, our society has tried so hard but it's it's literally impossible, you know. Well, yeah, we are are good, yeah, no, I'm sorry.

Thomas Storck: 33:18

You. I was going to say something before when you talked about how, if we didn't have religion, we had some kind of a substitute for religion. And I don't know if you know the book that came out in the 50s by the Jewish sociologist Will Herbert called Protestant Catholic Jew. It's a very important book and in the book he says that essentially the religion of the American people is the American way of life, and being a Protestant, being a Catholic or being a Jew is simply a different way of participating in the American way of life. And so there's freedom, that that we celebrate now and celebrated in different ways by people we call conservatives and people we call liberals. They both celebrate freedom and different, different aspects of freedom, different freedom applied to different areas of life. But that is, you can see, slogging is reapplied in the 20th century. Freedom and what you believe is not really important, because the real religion is the American way of life and the celebration of freedom, which is why people will look upon religion as simply a prop to morality, because the what's really important is a national, secular welfare and religion can be a religion can help that. Less good, but if not just forget.

James Caldwell: 34:39

Yeah, push it to a side because it's not helping what we want.

Thomas Storck: 34:42

Yeah, it's not, and it might be nice to you if it helps you cope. That's fine. We want to take away from you, but it doesn't have any influence on our conduct as well, as you said before. For example, politicians. I can pretend I'm a Catholic and I can do everything. Contrary to that.

James Caldwell: 35:04

Well, Thomas, we're running up out of time here, but I do want to give you one last blurb for the book. Where can we find it? Where can people find out more about you? And then we'll we'll wrap up here.

Thomas Storck: 35:17

Well, of course I go to the website TAN TAN books and you'll find. You'll find the book there or you can get it on Amazon. I have a book page on Amazon that has most of my books are all my books on it. You can find lots of articles of mine on the web or references to them.

James Caldwell: 35:39

Probably the best way is to please you to Google my name, thomas Stork, in quotation marks, like phrases on Amazon, and you'll find a lot of articles and references to books of mine Excellent, and I will leave links to all this for you guys as well and you're part of. Was it the Chesterton review?

Thomas Storck: 35:59

I'm going to remember the editorial board of the Chesterton review and the contributing editor of New Yorkshire review.

James Caldwell: 36:05

Wonderful. Yeah, Chesterton, what a giant man. That man was a genius. Yeah, he was Well, Thomas, thank you so much for your time. I really appreciate it, and then we'll. We'll finish with with the St Michael prayer. Amen, Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen, St Michael, the Archangel Defendants in Bellow, be our protection against the wickedness and snares of the devil. We humbly pray and do thou Prince and help us with the power of God cast in the house of Satan and all your spirits who are proud about the world seeking the ruin of souls. Amen and Father, Son, Holy Spirit, Amen, Thomas, thank you again so much for your time. Thank you all so much for tuning in. So until next time, go out there and be a saint.