Never Accept a Label in Place of a Story

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COZ157: Faith is not just passed down through families — it spreads sideways, peer to peer, and in record numbers. At Melbourne’s Proclaim 26 conference, keynote speaker Sherry Weddell — author of Forming Intentional Disciples — gave a framework for why: five thresholds of faith, from an initial flicker of trust all the way to full discipleship, with practical tools for the “threshold conversations” that help people move between them. One phrase anchored the day: never accept a label in place of a story.

Lindsay Sant brings his conference notes to the show, walking Caroline Knight and Lino Saubolle through Weddell’s model. When someone says “I’m Catholic” or “I’m atheist,” they mean it in their terms — not yours. Their story is what matters. Weddell argues that parishes need to break a pervasive don’t-ask-don’t-tell culture: Catholics who sit next to each other every Sunday and have never once spoken about their personal relationship with Jesus. The antidote is simple and disarming — ask people to describe their faith journey, then listen.

The data is striking. At Easter 2026, France recorded more than 23,000 new Catholics. Brisbane’s Archdiocese was up 88% over last year; Melbourne up 57%. Many came from entirely non-religious backgrounds — faith traveling horizontally, one young person watching a Muslim friend fast through Ramadan, wondering what they have to offer, and ending up in RCIA.

Then Caroline takes the floor, and it hurts. A 59,000-year-old Neanderthal molar from Chagyrskaya Cave in Siberia — subject of a May 2026 PLOS ONE paper by paleoanthropologist Alisa V. Zubova and her team — carries the oldest known evidence of intentional dental treatment in the human fossil record, predating similar Homo sapiens procedures by more than 40,000 years. Someone took a flint perforator, applied 35–50 minutes of steady manual rotation, and drilled into a living, infected molar. No anesthetic. The patient survived, and the tooth kept chewing.

Lindsay closes by responding to listener feedback from the Archbishop Comensoli episode, standing behind the documented finding that Muslim friends inspired French young people to enter the Catholic Church — and asking commenters to be charitable in how they engage publicly.

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Catholics of Oz