When people hear the phrase “practicing Catholic,” they tend to imagine a very specific picture: rigid orthodoxy, sharp boundaries, and perhaps a reflexive suspicion of anything outside one’s own tradition.
Which is why my recent conversation with Julia Strukely on Created in the Image of God was so theologically fruitful.
Here is a woman who:
- Is deeply Catholic—formed by Polish and Slovenian Catholicism, Vatican II liturgy, even a season of convent life with the Daughters of St. Paul.
- Teaches Scripture and theology in a Catholic school.
- And yet was trained as a spiritual director in an ecumenical program where she was the only Catholic in the cohort.
You might expect defensiveness or retrenchment. What you get instead is something else: a form of faith that is theologically serious, but not doctrinally tribal; rooted, but open; convinced, but listening.
That tension is precisely where I think much of the future of Christianity in the United States of America lies.
Here are five theological takeaways from that conversation, all of which intersect directly with the core themes of this Substack and of Created in the Image of God: the dangers of doctrinal tribalism, and the way the Kingdom of God tends to grow not by conquest but like leaven hidden in a lump of dough.
1. Spiritual Direction: Emmaus as a Model for Theological Discernment
Many Protestants have never encountered the term spiritual direction. They know “discipleship,” “mentoring,” or “counseling.” But spiritual direction has a distinct theological texture.
Julia’s controlling image is the Road to Emmaus (Luke 24:13–35):
- Two disciples walk, confused and disappointed, after the crucifixion.
- A stranger joins them and listens as they explain what has happened.
- Only later do they recognize that it is the risen Christ, present all along, “opening the Scriptures” and making their hearts burn within them.
Spiritual direction, in this Emmaus frame, is not:
- A superior dispensing answers from above.
- A doctrinal tribunal evaluating someone’s orthodoxy.
The director is more like the third traveler:
- Walking alongside.
- Asking questions.
- Helping the other recognize where Christ is already present and speaking in their own story.
Theologically, this corrects two modern distortions:
- The therapeutic distortion: where faith is reduced to techniques for feeling better.
- The tribal distortion: where faith is reduced to enforcing the distinctives of our group over against others.
Emmaus-style direction assumes:
- God is already at work in the life of the directee.
- Scripture, tradition, and the Spirit are active in that person’s concrete history.
- The task is not to import Christ from the outside, but to help the person recognize Christ where He already walks with them.
This is what leaven looks like in practice: quietly working within the dough, almost imperceptible until it changes the whole loaf.
2. Media and Pop Culture: Paul at the Areopagus, Revisited
Julia is not only a theology teacher; she studied media and pop culture. She loves music, boy bands, and film. She discerned religious life with an order whose charism is explicitly media-based: the Daughters of St. Paul, founded on the conviction that if the apostle Paul were alive today, he would be using the dominant media of our age to proclaim Christ.
That conviction raises an important theological question:
Can God speak through the artifacts of mass culture, or must “orthodox” believers keep media at arm’s length?
We have biblical precedent for a generous answer.
In Acts 17, Paul stands in the Athenian marketplace, surrounded by idols. He does not begin by condemning the Athenians for their “unknown god” inscription. He leads with praise:
“Men of Athens, I perceive that in every way you are very religious.” (Acts 17:22)
He then uses their altar “to an unknown god” as a theological bridge:
- He acknowledges a real search for God in their cultural-religious practices.
- He quotes their own poets (“In him we live and move and have our being”).
- He corrects and fulfills their groping with the revelation of the risen Christ.
Paul models what I would call theological hospitality: he listens to a culture’s own self-testimony, affirms what is already reaching toward God, and then brings that into the light of the gospel.
Julia’s instinct about media is similar. She is not naïve; she referenced Luke’s warning about not leading others into sin. She knows there are destructive currents in media, and Christians must form conscience carefully.
But because art and story are part of human creativity—and we are created in the image of a Creator—she refuses to grant the secular realm a monopoly on these things. She looks for where traces of truth, goodness, and beauty may already be hiding in the “secular” artifacts of our age.
The alternative is doctrinal tribalism: dividing the world into “our” pure, explicitly religious artifacts and “their” contaminated ones, with no expectation that God might use the latter as a pre-evangelization or a mirror.
Leaven does not stay in its own little corner of the pan; it works its way into every part of the dough.
3. The Problem of Recognition: When the Risen Christ Comes in Disguise
One of the richest parts of our conversation centered on a simple question: why don’t the Emmaus disciples recognize Jesus?
The same pattern appears in other resurrection stories:
- Mary Magdalene thinks He is the gardener.
- The disciples on the shore of the lake don’t know it is Jesus at first.
- Thomas refuses to believe unless he sees and touches the wounds.
- At one point, Jesus says, “Do not hold on to Me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father” (John 20:17), suggesting a form of presence that is unfamiliar and mysterious.
I raised these texts, along with Jesus’ own parables about the ten virgins and the sheep and goats—stories in which even the “good” side says, “When did we see you?” (Matthew 25:37–39).
Taken together, they raise a deeply theological point:
Recognition of Christ is not automatic—even for the devout.
If the first disciples—who had walked with Jesus in the flesh—struggled to recognize Him when He came in ways they did not expect, what does that say about us?
At the very least, it should produce:
- Humility about our own ability to declare definitively where Christ is and is not at work.
- Caution about treating our current conceptual image of God as identical with God Himself.
As I mentioned on the show, whatever image we hold of God in our minds is, by definition, not God. It can become an idol. Even a theologically “correct” concept of God is not God; it is a concept.
Spiritual direction, again, becomes a theological safeguard here. Instead of starting from “Here is how God must be showing up in your life,” the director asks, in effect:
- “Where have you sensed your heart burning within you?”
- “Where is the text suddenly alive?”
- “Where is there a trace of resurrection where you expected only tomb?”
The work of the Kingdom is often the work of recognition—learning to name Christ’s presence where we had not expected to find Him.
And that is not something tribal dogmatism is good at.
4. Catholic and Ecumenical: A Living Antidote to Sectarianism
Here is where the cognitive dissonance sharpened in a productive way.
Julia is unmistakably Catholic:
- Formed by Catholic schools.
- Teaching Catholic theology.
- Deeply attached to the liturgy, including the inculturation Vatican II made possible (vernacular languages, diverse musical expressions).
- Familiar with older forms (Latin Mass) through her parents and grandparents.
Yet her spiritual direction training took place in an ecumenical environment:
- Eight students, multiple Christian traditions, one Catholic.
- Shared reading of spiritual classics that happen to be largely Catholic in origin, but received and applied by non-Catholics.
- Conversations that revealed deep common ground beneath denominational labels.
Theologically, this is significant for at least two reasons.
First, it exposes the poverty of sectarian certainty.
It’s easy, within our own enclave—Catholic, evangelical, Orthodox, Pentecostal—to imagine that the health of the faith consists in sharpening the distinctives of our group and defending them against all comers. There is a place for doctrinal clarity; the ecumenical councils themselves testify to that.
But if you never pray, read, and listen with those who confess the same Christ but articulate Him differently, you will inevitably confuse:
- The eternal Word with the particular way your tribe pronounces His name.
Second, it hints at what true catholicity (small “c”) looks like.
Julia described attending a Mass where:
- Some of the liturgy is in Swahili.
- African Gospel music is integrated.
- More “traditional” English hymns share space with these elements.
Her comment was instructive: “This is what heaven looks like.”
That vision resonates deeply with what I’m exploring in my Facets of One work: the recognition that across cultures and even across major world religions, we find recurring affirmations of one ultimate reality, one God. The language and liturgical form differ; the facet you are looking at differs; but the Light is one.
Catholicism at its best—when it is both confident in its own doctrinal heritage and genuinely open to the gifts of others—embodies a kind of structured unity that resists the tribal temptation to define oneself primarily against the other.
It is no accident that Julia’s practice of spiritual direction is open to non-Catholics and even non-Christians. She is not diluting her convictions; she is enacting them. If Christ is truly the Light that “enlightens everyone” (John 1:9), then we should expect to find His traces beyond our own boundaries.
Leaven, again, does not remain in one denominational corner of the loaf.
5. Listening as Leaven: A Quiet Antidote to the Online Religious Wars
One line from Julia stayed with me:
“People go to social media because we want to be heard.”
That is a profound anthropological and theological observation.
We are created in the image of a God who speaks and listens, who calls and responds. There is something in us that longs to be seen and heard, to have our stories acknowledged and interpreted within a larger narrative.
In the absence of genuine listening communities, we shout into the digital void.
- We post takes.
- We hurl prooftexts.
- We form factions and pile on.
- And in religious spaces online, we often reenact the worst forms of doctrinal tribalism—declaring who is “in” and “out” based on secondary or tertiary issues that even the earliest councils did not attempt to define.
Spiritual direction offers a stark contrast:
- One person speaks at length.
- Another person listens deeply.
- The director resists the urge to rush to judgment or quick fixes.
- Together, they discern where God might be inviting, convicting, consoling, or redirecting.
Imagine, theologically, what would happen if this practice spread like yeast through our churches:
- Pastors and elders trained not only to preach, but to listen.
- Laypeople quietly accompanying one another, helping each other recognize Christ’s presence in daily life.
- Cross-tradition spiritual directors helping seekers—not to jump ship from one brand of Christianity to another, but to deepen into Christ wherever they are planted.
Over time, this kind of listening would inevitably undermine the logic of tribalism:
- It is hard to caricature “the other side” if you are actually sitting with a real person, hearing them describe their relationship with God.
- It is hard to write someone off as a heretic when you can see their genuine struggle to follow Christ, even if some of their conclusions differ from yours.
The Kingdom of God does not advance primarily by winning arguments on X or by out-mobilizing rival factions. Jesus compared it to:
- A mustard seed—small and unimpressive.
- Yeast—hidden in the dough until it leavens the whole lump.
- A farmer scattering seed, much of which falls on soil that initially looks unpromising.
Spiritual direction—Emmaus-style listening, media-savvy discernment, ecumenical humility, and patient recognition of Christ’s disguised presence—looks to me very much like leaven.
Quiet. Hidden. And potentially transformative.
Underneath all these takeaways is the conviction that animates this Substack and my show:
You are created in the image of God.
Others are, too.
And the Kingdom is growing—often in places and ways that our tribal instincts are not trained to see.
If we can recover practices like spiritual direction, learn to recognize Christ in disguise, and resist the temptation to confuse our concepts of God with God Himself, we may discover that the path to Him is, in fact, wider—and more beautiful—than we thought.
Coming Up Next on Created in the Image of God
If this reflection on spiritual direction and recognizing Christ in unexpected places resonated with you, you’ll want to join me next Sunday. I’ll be talking with veteran film critic Josh Larsen about his new book, Fear Not: A Christian Appreciation of Horror. We’ll explore why followers of Jesus might have more to learn than to fear from the horror genre, how Scripture itself contains profoundly “horrific” images (including the cross), and what it means to face evil and anguish with theological honesty instead of denial. If you’ve ever wondered whether Christians have any business watching horror films—or how these stories might illuminate the gospel—you won’t want to miss it.
