• The Crucifix Prayer

    Blessed are you, Lord God,
    Father all-holy,
    for your boundless love
    The tree, once the source of shame
    and death for humankind,
    has become the cross
    of our redemption and life.

    When his hour had come to
    return to you in glory,
    the Lord Jesus,
    Our King, our Priest, and our Teacher,
    freely mounted the scaffold of the cross
    and made it his royal throne,
    his altar of sacrifice, his pulpit of truth.

    On the cross,
    lifted above the earth,
    he triumphed over our age-old enemy.
    Cloaked in his own blood,
    he drew all things to himself.

    On the cross,
    he opened out his arms
    and offered you his life;
    the sacrifice of the New Law
    that gives to the sacraments
    their saving power.

    On the cross,
    he proved what he had prophesied:
    the grain of wheat must die
    to bring forth an abundant harvest.

    Father,
    we honour this cross as the sign
    of our redemption.
    May we reap the harvest of salvation
    planted in pain by Christ Jesus.
    May our sins be nailed to his cross,
    the power of life released,
    pride conquered,
    and weakness turned to strength.

    May the cross be our comfort in trouble,
    our refuge in the face of danger,
    our safeguard on life’s journey
    until you welcome us to
    our heavenly home.

    Grant this through Christ our Lord. Amen.

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  • The Prayer of St. Ephrem

    {Making a prostration}

    O LORD, Master of my life,
    grant that I may not be infected with the
    spirit of slothfulness and inquisitiveness,
    with the spirit of ambition and vain talking.

    {Making a prostration}

    Grant instead to me, your servant,
    the spirit of purity and of humility,
    the spirit of patience and neighborly love.

    {Making a third prostration}

    O Lord and King,
    grant me the grace of being aware of my sins
    and of not thinking evil of those of my brethren.
    For you are blessed, now and ever, and forever.

    Amen.

    Lord Jesus Christ, King of Kings,
    You have power over life and death.
    You know what is secret and hidden,
    and neither our thoughts nor our feelings
    are concealed from You.
    Cure me of duplicity;
    I have done evil before You.
    Now my life declines from day to day
    and my sins increase.
    O Lord, God of souls and bodies,
    You know the extreme frailty of my soul and my flesh.
    Grant me strength in my weakness, O Lord,
    and sustain me in my misery.
    Give me a grateful soul that I may
    never cease to recall Your benefits,
    O Lord most bountiful.
    Be not mindful of my many sins,
    but forgive me all my misdeeds.
    O Lord, disdain not my prayer –
    the prayer of a wretched sinner;
    sustain me with Your grace until the end,
    that it may protect me as in the past.
    It is Your grace which has taught me wisdom;
    blessed are they who follow her ways,
    for they shall receive the crown of glory.
    In spite of my unworthiness,
    I praise You and I glorify You,
    O Lord, for Your mercy to me is without limit.
    You have been my help and my protection.
    May the name of Your majesty be praised forever.
    To you, our God, be glory.
    Amen.

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  • PWJ: S4E103 – Bonus – “Season Finale” (Part 2)

    David, Andrew, and Matt wrap up Season 4 with the Season Finale. This is Part 2 of that Finale. Listener Survey: https://forms.gle/X4zq7Uk69KmYo1v3A

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  • PWJ: S4E102 – Bonus – “Season Finale” (Part 1)

    David, Andrew, and Matt wrap up Season 4 with the Season Finale. This is Part 1…

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  • PWJ: S4E101 – Bonus – “Jack vs Tollers”

    After the previously-planned interview fell through at the last minute, David sat down to record a solo episode to talk about his newborn son, Sidecar Day, blue flowers in Narnia, and also to make his tongue-in-cheek case as to why C.S. Lewis is better than J.R.R. Tolkien.

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  • PWJ: S4E100 – AH – “After Hours” with The Gray Havens

    The Gray Havens are an American Christian folk pop husband and wife duo, David and Licia Radford, from Crystal Lake, Illinois. On October 8th they will be releasing their new album, Blue Flower, so David Radford came on the show to talk to Andrew and David about how C.S. Lewis inspired their recent work.

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  • PWJ: S4E99 – AH – “After Hours” with Mike “Gomer” Gormley

    As we approach the end of Season 4, David is joined on the show by Michael “Gomer” Gormley. Among other things, they discuss Ted Lasso, tea, and the Atonement. Also, find out what Gomer would do if he ever became the Pope!

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  • PWJ: S4E98 – AH – “After Hours” with Patti Callahan

    New York Times bestselling author, Patti Callahan, returns to the show to talk about her forthcoming book, “Once Upon A Wardrobe”, which will be released on October 19th.

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  • PWJ: S4E97 – AH – “After Hours” with The Tolkien Road

    A few months ago, John and Greta from The Tolkien Road podcast did a series of episodes on religion in Tolkien’s Legendarium. David invited him onto the show to talk about those episodes and to encourage the Pints With Jack listeners to listen to them.

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  • PWJ: S4E96 – AH – “After Hours” with Rod Bennett

    Author Rod Bennett joined David to talk about a presentation on he gave at a big Christian rock festival about C.S. Lewis’ relationship to “Pulp Fiction”.

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The PhD Thesis of Dr. Joshua Little

That Hadith are unreliable—that any given matn cannot be taken at face value as an accurate datum from the 1st Islamic Century, and that any given ʾisnād cannot be taken at face value as an accurate record of a matn’s provenance—cannot be seriously contested, for multiple reasons.

Firstly, there is an overwhelming prior probability based upon the ubiquity of fabrication and pseudepigraphy in Late Antique and Mediaeval religio-historical (pagan, Jewish, and Christian) ascriptions.

Secondly, there is the high frequency of contradictions within the Hadith corpus, which necessitates the occurrence of a huge amount of fabrication, interpolation, and/or mutation and, therefore, skepticism towards any given hadith.

Thirdly, there is the ubiquity of fabrication and interpolation—both reported and demonstrable — in the Hadith corpus, which again casts doubt upon the rest of the corpus.

Fourthly, there is the rapid, extreme mutation and growth of reports that evidently took place over the course of a century or more of oral transmission, which means that any given matn—regardless of the ʾisnād—is likely at best heavily distorted and at worst obliterated beyond its original form.

Fifthly, there is the belated emergence of Hadith as a genre and corpus, largely during the 8th and 9th Centuries CE, which straightforwardly precludes the authenticity of most ascriptions to the 7th Century CE.

Dr. Joshua Little, PhD Thesis

It is available from his own site, or from here:

Calvin on his continuity with the Fathers

Further, even though the Greeks above the rest – and Chrysostom especially among them – extol the ability of the human will, yet all the ancients, save Augustine, so differ, waver, or speak confusedly on this subject, that almost nothing certain can be derived from their writings. Therefore, we shall not stop to list more exactly the opinions of individual writers; but we shall only select at random from one or another, as the explanation of the argument would seem to demand.

Calvin’s Institutes 2.2.4

Mathematical Miracles for everyone!

One of the arguments I have always found extremely bizarre is the argument for the divine origin of the Qur’an based on “mathematical miracles”. Numeric patterns are found in the Qur’an and it is argued that this proves it could have only have come from God.

I recently saw this post and response on Reddit which perfectly explains why this argument doesn’t work…

Your very post is a mathematical miracle. If you count the number of characters without spaces, you get 380, which is 19 x 20!

The first part of your comment has 19 words. The second sentence that mentions the 19 code has 19 words if you count 1% as a word. The sentence inbetween them is also 19 words!! How could this be a coincidence?!

If you count the number of words between the first mention of code and the last mention of code (inclusively), you get 38, which is 19 x 2!

If you count the number of characters (spaces included), you get 209, which is 19 x 11! Amazingly, if you add 2 + 0 + 9 = 11, a clear hint at the factor 😉

There are 38 (19 x 2) monosyllabic words in your comment.

Notice the constant reoccurrence of 38 (380, 38, 38). Surely this indicates deliberate intention. The odds of this happening by chance are in 1/38 * 1/38 * 1/38, which is 1 in 4,332!

There’s more! Up to the 19th word ‘even’ there are exactly 114 (spaces included) characters (19 x 6). Amazingly, till the very end of your comment after the 19th word are 266 characters (spaces included), which is 19 x 14! Interestingly, if you add 2+6+6, you get the factor again: 14. Same goes for the 114, 1+1+4 = 6 – and it’s 19 x 6.

Between the first mention of ‘code’ and the second mention of ‘human’ are 23 words, a clear hint at a code underlying human chromosomes.

can’t be done by a human being, or something..

need I go on?

now think about this very carefully: if this can be done so easily with your comment, couldn’t Rashad have done it with an infinite amount of varied counting methods till he got what he wanted? And we KNOW that he tried many different counting methods, this is not disputed.

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