The Bible in a Year Podcast

with Father Mike Schmitz

I came across The Bible in a Year Podcast with Father Mike Schmitz from Ascension Press a while ago and decided I would chronicle my progress as I made my way through it. So, I bought myself the Catholic Adventure Bible and the Bible in a Year Notebook and here I am.

The Catholic Adventure Bible uses the Revised Standard Edition - Second Catholic Edition version of the Bible with Jeff Cavins’ biblical timeline and color-coding (which has already proven quite helpful). Ascension Press has a ton of great materials, so check them out.

A bit of background on me:

I’m a believer, albeit a more recent one. I didn’t grow up in a church; I was baptized non-denominational kind of ad hoc on an Air Force Base when I was a baby. Since then, I hadn’t thought a lot about religion—in fact, I made a point not to think about it. I was at a point in college when I would internally (and sometimes externally) mock religion, and in particular Christianity. When I did so, though, something pulled inside of me. I knew it felt wrong. Much later, after I had met my wife (who is Catholic) and we’d baptized our son (also Catholic), I started with some soft research of my own. I did what a lot of people might do. I bought a Bible and started reading Genesis, losing my way somewhere in the middle of Exodus. It was sometime during Covid that I guess I started to believe, though it was a more ethereal believe than anything concrete. I had gone from Agnostic to some kind of Deist.

In the fall of 2023 my cousin told me I should read some C.S. Lewis and see what I thought. I checked out Audible and, sure enough, almost everything he’d ever written on religion was included with a membership. I think I listened to Mere Christianity first, and followed it with The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce and the Abolition of Man, and about a dozen other works mostly on religion but also some of his history and literature essays. As of right now I’m over 3,600 pages into his works and I’ve found it extremely helpful to me. C.S. Lewis uses logic and reason to work out for himself and to debate with others what “the answer” is.

Around the fall of 2023 I was looking for a church to attend (though I wasn’t set on a denomination). Thanks to Covid a lot of services were actually held or livestreamed online, so I could see what it was like. What I found was a cornucopia of denominations and styles. It was entirely too confusing. I spoke with a man at the Catholic church down the road and they only officially accepted newcomers once a year and that time had just passed (you’re free to attend, but conversion requires classes). I put my name down for the following year, not sure if I was going to follow through or just keep reading on my own—after all, that’s what I’m best at. In the fall of 2024 I started the classes, but in the interim I kept learning, eventually listening to James Earl Jones read me the King James Version New Testament, devouring C.S. Lewis, and reading Why We’re Catholic by Trent Horn (another good one).

All of this has led me here: to listening to Father Mike Schmitz’s podcast and reading along with the Great Adventure Bible and blogging about my journey. Hopefully reading about my misadventures through learning the scripture and finding faith will help you in your own situation.

Blogs:

Week 1 (Genesis 1-15; Job 1-4; Psalms 1, 2, 19, 104, 136; Proverbs 1:1-19) (coming soon)

Week 2 (Genesis 16-28; Job 5-18; Proverbs 1:20-33, 2, 3:1-4) (coming soon)