Triablogue

The Effects Of Small Sins

2026-11-05T05:10:48.055-05:00

"Do not despise [underestimate] your sins because they are small; be afraid because they are so numerous. Truly, drops of rain are small, but they fill rivers, drag along heavy weights, and lift up trees along with their roots. I would like to know whether you who say that it is a small sin, as often as you commit such sins would want to suffer slight blows on your body, spots or rents in your clothes? If you do not agree to the blows on your body and the rents or spots on your clothes, with what kind of a conscience do you not fear to do the same thing to your soul?" (Caesarius of Arles, Mary Magdeleine Mueller, trans., St. Caesarius: Sermons, Volume I [1-80] [Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press, 2004], Sermon 44:6, p. 224)

The Roots Of Low Church Theology

2026-11-03T05:11:44.021-05:00

Pointing out how widespread something like infant baptism or the perpetual virginity of Mary was in early Protestantism doesn't address the earlier sources. I'm not just referring to scripture. Advocates of low church theology can cite support for something like credobaptism or Mary's having other children in pre-Reformation sources other than the Bible. Proponents of high church theology can cite pre-Reformation support for their views on those subjects as well. But a lot of relevant pre-Reformation sources, including medieval ones, are often neglected in disputes between proponents of low church and high church theologies. Advocates of high church theology will often rightly recognize some of the roots of Protestant theology in those earlier sources and will be aware of and make some use of the work of groups like the Waldensians and the Lollards. But the low church elements of those earlier sources will often be neglected. Just as Protestantism didn't spring out of nowhere in the sixteenth century, neither did low church theology. When a low church view of an issue is found among individuals and groups who are considered forerunners of the Reformation and is found in earlier medieval, patristic, Jewish, and Biblical sources, it's misleading to frame the discussion by making negative references to the Anabaptists and citing negative comments their Protestant opponents made about them, all the while ignoring or inadequately addressing those earlier sources.

Enfield Miscellany (Part 12)

2026-11-01T06:22:35.758-05:00

(See part 1 here for an explanation of the series. The other parts can be accessed through the following links: two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten, and eleven. I'll be citing Maurice Grosse and Guy Playfair's tapes. The ones from Grosse's collection will be referred to with "MG". Playfair's tapes will be designated by "GP". For example, MG13A is tape 13A in Grosse's collection, GP2A is tape 2A in Playfair's, and so on.)

Early Media Coverage Of Enfield

Here's a web site with the text (and some photographs) of some early articles covering the Enfield case. You can access original articles by searching news archive sites, like the British Newspaper Archive. The first site linked above will let you read some of the articles for free, though. I've checked some of them with the originals, and it looks like the text on the site I've linked is at least mostly reliable. The March 30, 1978 Daily Mirror article differs somewhat from the digital image of the original that I have. It seems that the site I've linked is using a later version that corrects some mistakes in the first edition. The articles run from 1977 to 1980. Notice that the articles from 1979 and 1980 sometimes refer to the poltergeist's ongoing activity. There are some references to occasions when Janet Hodgson was injured by the poltergeist, despite the frequent claims that poltergeists don't injure people or that the Enfield one didn't. The Daily Star material from 1980 includes an article written by Graham Morris and some comments about his work on the case. Earlier this year, Graham was at a public event during which he commented on how he went about taking his famous photos of Janet levitating. Go here for a post I wrote about Graham's comments. Some of what he said in that context hasn't been discussed much publicly, as far as I've seen, so he could be accused of making up some or all of it. But the 1980 Daily Star article includes the following comments from Graham and the editor, corroborating what Graham said earlier this year. This is from more than 45 years ago:

"One second she was lying in bed under the covers, the next she seemed to bounce in the air. The bedclothes were hardly disturbed. It was as though Janet had come through them....During the split seconds in which the pictures were taken I don't believe there is any way Janet – or any other child – could have got out of bed, smoothed the covers and bounced on the bed. The heights she reached were far beyond where a normal 'bounce' could have taken her, and the cameras would have triggered the second she sat up....He [Graham Morris] also set up a light that cast a beam across the room. When that beam was broken by anyone, or any thing, the camera automatically took a photograph."

Enfield And AI

I've noticed a significant change in discussions of Enfield over the last few years, and I think a big part of it comes from AI. I've written about the publishing of some highly unreliable Enfield books in recent years, like here and here. I don't know how much the author(s) have used AI in the process of composing the books. I use the term "author(s)" because both books come across as dishonest, and I think there's a reasonable chance that two or more of those books and others that have been published lately are from the same person. But books like those don't necessarily involve AI. They may be attempts to make some easy money without using AI in the process. However, over the last few years, I've been coming across many Enfield sources, such as articles and YouTube videos, that seem to be largely dependent on AI. Some are pro-Enfield, some are neutral, and some are against the authenticity of the case. A skeptic can use AI to analyze the case for him and give his audience the false impression that he's gone into a lot of depth in researching the case and analyzing it, even though he hasn't. I recently came across an anti-Enfield site that seems to be heavily dependent on AI, with dozens of errors (fake quotes, inaccurate source citations, wrong names, misrepresentations of people's arguments, etc.). It's difficult to see a human making some of the mistakes in question, but it's much easier to see AI doing it. There's a lot that's good about AI, but there are downsides to it as well. It's gotten to be a major issue in the Enfield context.

A Large Collection Of Enfield Photographs

Last year, the Twitter account of the Society for Psychical Research linked a Spanish version of Guy Playfair's book on Enfield. You can read it for free online. But even if you don't know Spanish, scroll to the bottom of the page containing the book, and you'll see an unusually large collection of Enfield photos in one place. They're usually scattered around a lot of locations, so it's good to have one place to go to find so many of them together. There are other images and photos in various places earlier in the book (photos of paranormal researchers involved in the case, mediums who worked on it, etc.). Whoever produced this edition of the book clearly put a lot of work into it. It's probably the best place to start looking if you want to find Enfield photos.

No Upstairs Heating

The heating system in the Hodgsons' house is relevant in some contexts, like the allegedly paranormal temperature changes I discussed in another post and the supposedly paranormal curtain movements (e.g., whether air from a vent may have moved a curtain). They had central heating downstairs, but Peggy Hodgson commented on one of the tapes that there wasn't any central heating upstairs, though there was a fireplace, which they didn't use (MG61B, 16:31). The wall with the windows in the main bedroom upstairs, where Janet Hodgson's bed was, is the most relevant part of the upper floor in this context. You can see that wall without any bed covering it if you go to about 8:17 in the "Nationwide" television program about Enfield that aired in November of 1977. As you can see, there's no vent or other relevant source of heating on that wall.

Reformation Day

2026-10-31T06:38:48.076-04:00

"They found written in the law how the Lord had commanded through Moses that the sons of Israel should live in booths during the feast of the seventh month....The entire assembly of those who had returned from the captivity made booths and lived in them. The sons of Israel had indeed not done so from the days of Joshua the son of Nun to that day. And there was great rejoicing." (Nehemiah 8:14, 8:17)

William Taylor's Pre-Reformation Opposition To Praying To Saints

2026-10-27T05:13:24.705-04:00

"In 1423 the Wycliffite scholar William Taylor had pronounced prayer to saints as idolatry." (John Davis, Heresy And Reformation In The South East Of England, 1520-1559 [Atlantic Highlands, New Jersey: Humanities Press Inc., 1983], 28)

John Wycliffe's Opposition To Prayer To Saints And Angels

2026-10-25T07:19:10.978-04:00

"Far fewer [Lollard] suspects admitted to holding to the allied opinion, but distinct article, that prayers should not be made to saints but only to God, a view propounded by Wyclif and present among the heretics of East Anglia in the early fifteenth century." (Robert Lutton, Lollardy And Orthodox Religion In Pre-Reformation England [Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press, 2011], 160-61)

For many other examples of pre-Reformation opposition to praying to saints and angels, see here.

Why is there no papacy in Ephesians?

2026-10-22T05:04:55.896-04:00

In other posts, I've discussed some neglected material in Ephesians, a portion of the Bible that's often underestimated in apologetics. See here regarding Jesus' Bethlehem birthplace and Ephesians 2. Or see here regarding Ephesians 6:1-3 as evidence against the idea that the early Christians set a false date for Jesus' second coming, for example.

Another context in which Ephesians is important is the papacy. Think of all the topics covered in Ephesians that are relevant, even though it's such a short letter: the church as the body of Christ, Christian unity, the church compared to a building with a distinction made between different types of stones, order within the church, etc. Roman Catholics claim the papacy is important in contexts like the ones addressed in Ephesians. Supposedly, the Pope is the head of the church, which is relevant to Paul's comments about subjects like the body metaphor for the church in chapter 1 and the comments on church order in chapter 4. We're told that Peter is a foundation of the church in a different way than the other apostles, which is relevant in Ephesians 2:20 and elsewhere. We're supposed to think that the papacy is the center of Christian unity, and Paul writes about the principles of church unity in Ephesians.

But Paul's use of the body metaphor for the church makes no mention of a papal role for Peter and the bishops of Rome. Jesus is described differently than the other foundation stones in Ephesians 2:20, but Peter isn't. Paul's comments on church unity and church order say nothing about a papacy. Ephesians 4:11 mentions apostles in the plural first, which is reminiscent of 2:20 and 1 Corinthians 12:28. Paul seems to have thought that the first rank in church leadership is the apostles, not Peter and the bishops of Rome.

I mentioned 1 Corinthians 12. The point I'm making in this post isn't that Ephesians by itself is sufficient to assess the papacy. Rather, Ephesians is part of a cumulative case, and its significance in that case is often underestimated.

For more about the evidence outside Ephesians, see here and the Papacy post label here. You can also search under other relevant post labels (Simon Peter, Church Authority, Ecclesiology, etc.).

Lollards Who Didn't Recant

2026-10-20T05:29:38.703-04:00

In a post a few years ago, I discussed the fact that many of the pre-Reformation opponents of Roman Catholicism, such as the Lollards, renounced their views when put on trial. You can read that post for a discussion of the significance of those recantations. For reasons I address there, the pre-Reformation opposition to Catholic beliefs is significant even if some of the people who held those views recanted. But not all of them did, and I want to mention some relevant categories here that could easily be overlooked.

Robert Lutton's Lollardy And Orthodox Religion In Pre-Reformation England (Suffolk, England: The Boydell Press, 2011) mentions that some Lollards fled persecution and were never found (151). If they weren't found, they presumably didn't recant under pressure or for any other reason, as far as we can tell. Lutton also refers to some Lollards who were put on trial posthumously (154). You can't recant at a trial when you're dead.

The Lollards are often thought of as followers of John Wycliffe. A few decades after his death, his body was exhumed and burned by his Roman Catholic opponents, and his ashes were thrown into the Swift River.

"They burned his bones to ashes and cast them into the Swift, a neighbouring brook running hard by. Thus the brook conveyed his ashes into the Avon, the Avon into the Severn, the Severn into the narrow seas and they into the main ocean. And so the ashes of Wycliffe are symbolic of his doctrine, which is now spread throughout the world." (Thomas Fuller, quoted here)

More Non-Divine Healings

2026-10-18T07:01:56.839-04:00

I've been writing about healings that seem to come from a non-Divine source. I've discussed UFO healing cases, for example, including ones that involve medical documentation.

While it's good to have evidence like medical records, we shouldn't dismiss cases that involve lesser forms of evidence. There's some value to testimonial evidence, there's a cumulative effect to lesser forms of evidence that aren't so significant when considered in isolation, and so on.

I've been addressing issues like these for many years. Part of what I've been responding to lately, though, are the recent claims made about miracles by people like Ethan Muse and Joe Schmid. In Joe's recent videos explaining his conversion to Roman Catholicism, he cited evidence like medical records and photographs for much of what he appealed to, but there were times when he brought up something like testimonial evidence apart from X-rays, videos, and such (e.g., his citation of the testimony of Adam Blai).

What I want to do in this post is discuss Guy Playfair's testimony about healings from an apparently non-Divine source. For those who don't know, Playfair was a paranormal researcher best known for his work on the Enfield Poltergeist. You can read a tribute to him that I wrote several years ago here.

At 15:48 on his Enfield tape 33Ai, Playfair has a discussion with the Hodgsons (the family experiencing the poltergeist) in which he mentions that they may have an ability to heal people in the future. He comments on how people who experience a poltergeist sometimes acquire an ability to heal.

Matthew Manning, who had gone through a poltergeist earlier in the 1970s and visited the Hodgsons' house on December 17, 1977, supposedly acquired some kind of capacity for healing after his poltergeist experience. Playfair claimed that he'd been healed by Manning. Go here to listen to him discussing the subject in an interview. The claim about a healing from Manning occurs at 30:15. Go here for a discussion with more detail later in the interview. He seems to refer to how Manning healed him of a "slipped disc". He says an orthopedic surgeon witnessed the healing and that the surgeon claimed to have no medical explanation of it.

Keep in mind that Playfair had worked other poltergeist cases before he did his work on Enfield, and he was relating his own firsthand experience with Manning. So, he had some significant credibility in both contexts.

An article in the Daily Mail, written shortly after Playfair's death, discusses another healing he reported:

Later came an illustrious career in journalism working for Life magazine and, from his adopted home in Rio di Janeiro, for The Economist, Time, Associated Press, The Guardian and for the press corps of the U.S. Agency for International Development. One of his assignments was an investigation into 'psychic surgeons' in Brazil who performed operations without anaesthetics, aided — so it was said — by powers not of this world.

Playfair wasn't a believer, but, suffering from tummy troubles at the time, he found himself entering an inexplicable trance and undergoing two operations conducted by a psychic surgeon called Edivaldo.

Despite no anaesthetic, instead of experiencing searing pain, he described feeling 'a very distinct plop' the first time the medium's hands entered his abdomen and 'a sort of tickling but no pain at all'.

The operation was a success. Playfair had newfound respect for the psychic healers, saying: 'If they are magicians they could be earning a fortune on the stage.'

Shandon Guthrie's Assessment Of The Enfield Poltergeist

2026-10-16T18:58:24.954-04:00

From his recent book, Dark Apologetics (Verona, Wisconsin: Sound Faith Books, 2026):

One of the most famous and well-documented cases of poltergeist activity is the Enfield Poltergeist Case of 1977. It was the basis for the sequel movie, The Conjuring 2 (2016). This case took place in England and involved two young sisters. The phenomena included furniture moving on its own, small objects (like Lego pieces) being thrown around, and disembodied voices being heard. One of the sisters, Janet, was thought to be possessed by someone (Bill) who had died in the house prior to the current residents. Recordings of an interview with Janet allegedly while being possessed can be accessed publicly. There is also a picture of Janet being “hurled” or “hovering” over her bed.

If this is one of the best evidence-based cases of poltergeist activity, then this should be somewhat impressive even if inconclusive. But it’s quite a bit worse than that. As for thrown objects, we’re just taking the sisters’ word for it. They lack credibility in that investigators found out (something the sisters themselves admitted) that they were occasionally, if not frequently, acting as pranksters. As for the picture of Janet in the air, the image of her posture is perfectly consistent with her jumping up at the time of the snapshot (legs curled, head forward, and long hair suspended as if affected by inertia). But never mind that. We have the preceding photos of her jumping off the bed and into position. And, despite the fact that having an audio recording of a possession seems impressive to have, Janet’s voice and what she says in the recordings are something manageable by someone pretending to be possessed or functioning as a medium. The content of the conversation sometimes involves silliness in how she answers some of the questions given by the interviewer. It certainly sounds like the kind of staged conversation an 11-year-old would have and not an old man (Bill) looking to sincerely divulge his nefarious objectives. And yet this is supposed to be one of the more “extensively documented” cases.

I don’t intend to give a point-by-point assessment of each case considered to be good evidence for poltergeist activity. But I did want to profile one instance—one heralded as significant—to show that they can be inherently fraught with the kinds of data no one ought to be inclined to think is truly evidence of a poltergeist. Even if we set aside the spoiler of the Enfield sisters being pranksters, the other “evidence” given in that case is suspicious and easily accounted for by more readily available explanations. It seems that the demand for something supernatural, and so unfamiliar, is far less warranted here. Thus, unlike previous paranormal subjects that have more impressive eyewitnesses, and for the reasons given, I’m more confident that genuine poltergeist activity does not take place.

(approximate Kindle location 6962, links to internet sources he cited added)

Regarding a photo sequence he mentions that's found on the web page here, Shandon writes:

If you direct your attention to the neighboring bed with the other children in it as well as Janet’s own bed, the photos are inconsistent with a singular set of shutter bursts. It looks like a hodgepodge of separate sets of photographs that were put into a singular sequence. This indicates that the scenario had more than one take and the photographs in the sequence were deliberately put in the sequence.

(n. 26 at 7271)

To his credit, Shandon allows the photograph he initially cites (and others, by implication) to involve "hurling" or "hovering". That's better than what you typically get from skeptics of the case, who assume a certain form of levitation and show no awareness of other possibilities.

However, he goes on to note that Janet's hair can be seen moving in a sequence he later cites. The hair movement isn't a problem, since these photos are of throwing incidents, which would be expected to involve the movement of hair. And the web site he appeals to for the photo sequence doesn't tell us where the sequence originated, as far as I can tell. So, who is he blaming for the "hodgepodge of separate sets of photographs that were put into a singular sequence"? Graham Morris, who took many of the photos associated with these throwing incidents, has shown some of the original sequences in public. For example, go to 30 minutes and just after in episode 2 of Apple TV's 2023 Enfield documentary. Go here for a still shot of two photos in one of the relevant sequences, apparently showing Janet going from lying in bed to an upright position over the bed in about a sixth of a second. That same page has links to discussions of many of the lines of evidence for these throwing incidents and levitation in the Enfield case more broadly. Graham appeared at an event earlier this year at which he discussed the Enfield case, and much of that discussion involved the photos of the throwing incidents. He mentioned that he used photosensitive beams and pressure switches in the process of taking some of his photos. Go here and here for a couple of posts in which I discuss Graham's comments.

Whether the photos show Janet "jumping off the bed and into position" is disputed, and Shandon has given us no reason to conclude that Janet was jumping. My material linked above provides a large amount of evidence to the contrary.

The events involving the throwing of objects don't require "just taking the sisters' word for it". Many others claimed to have witnessed the apparently paranormal throwing of objects (Graham Morris, Vic Nottingham, Maurice Grosse, etc.). Far more than the testimony of the Hodgson sisters is involved. Peggy Hodgson alone probably witnessed at least a triple-digit number of incidents involving throwing, sometimes without any of the children in the room or even in the house.

The occasional joking, hoaxing, and such done by the Hodgson children are common in other contexts in life (cheating on tests in schools, the use of banned substances in sports, etc.). It's a poor explanation of the case as a whole. It would be like dismissing all of the test results for every student in a school because some of the students were sometimes caught cheating. For more about the fraud issue in the Enfield context, see here, among other posts in our archives.

After briefly discussing the poltergeist voice, Shandon commented, "yet this is supposed to be one of the more 'extensively documented' cases". If he's going by little more than the video he cited that's about five minutes long, then whose fault is it that the evidence he's considering isn't "extensive"? There's much more evidence pertaining to the voice than Shandon addresses, which I've outlined here. The low intellectual content of much of what the voice said is consistent with multiple paranormal scenarios: a conscious manifestation of the mind(s) of one or more of the Hodgson children, an unconscious manifestation of one or more of their minds, the use of their minds by an independent source, an independent source with a malfunctioning mind, etc. The voice does seem similar to the children in some ways, but also different in other ways. The primary issue here is that the voice seems to be paranormal as well.

Since an article by Chris French is one of the sources Shandon cites, go here for a collection of my Enfield posts that includes responses to French and other skeptics. That page also discusses many lines of evidence for the authenticity of Enfield that Shandon doesn't get into (the scientific tests done on Janet Hodgson to evaluate her paranormal abilities, the acoustic properties of the knocking phenomena, etc.). The case involved a quadruple-digit number of events witnessed by a triple-digit number of individuals over a double-digit number of years, with around two hundred hours of audio recordings, dozens of signed witness statements, and so on. The documentation for the case is extensive, and explaining it in a normal manner isn't something that can be done "easily".