Church Life Today

Once when my eldest son was about five years old, we happened to be reading the first chapter of Mark’s Gospel when we came upon the account of a man with an unclean spirit. My son asked me what that meant. I didn’t know how to answer so I said: “What do you think?” He didn’t know. So we read it again. He noticed that the unclean spirit did not want to be near Jesus, and he knew that Jesus was God with us. I asked my son, “well, what do you think an unclean spirit is now?” And he replied: “I guess it is wanting to live in the world without God.”My guest today on the show is not a five year old child, but rather Gary Anderson, the Hesburgh Professor of Catholic Thought in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame. We are going to talk about his read of the show Breaking Bad and its central character, Walter White, whom Professor Anderson sees as a profile in the determined resolution to live in the world without God. But unlike the unclean spirit in Mark’s Gospel, Walter White doesn’t even ack