Courage Amidst the Collapse of Christendom

Theme: Concerning Heroes and Heroines, talk given at the 2012 SBC Conference

Founder of the Imago Dei Psychiatric Clinic, G. C. Dilsaver has authored two books, one on Catholic psychotherapy, the other on being a father,The Three Marks of Manhood. If one were to capsulize the theme of Dr. Dilsaver’s powerful presentation, it would be that, in warfare, fighters for a just cause must know themselves and their enemy. He began his talk by stating the obvious: we have been overwhelmed by a hedonistic counter-culture that is totally antithetical to the teaching of Christ and His Church. We have enemies, we have to live in a society heavily influenced by the disproportional power of anti-Christian media, Islamists, evangelicals, and war-mongering Christian Zionists. Our biggest enemy on the outside, however, is now the mammoth state. It is the enemy within, however, that we must battle relentlessly: the enemies within the Church, and the enemy within ourselves.“Technology and wealth,” he said, “keep us artificially alive and ominously allows us to decay into a decadence unprecedented.” To be a Catholic hero today, Dilsaver said, in modern circumstances, is not to shoot to be “the last man standing . . . but, rather, the first man kneeling.”  Download the talk in MP3 format here.

---