"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
“We don’t know if we want to be rescued. We are so enamored with our small stories and our false gods, we are so bound up in our addictions and our self-centeredness and take-it-for-granted unbelief that we don’t even know how to cry for help”
– John Eldredge, Epic, Page 62
A while back I wrote some thoughts about the new Les Miserables movie. It might surprise some that the book by Victor Hugo once appears on the Church’s “List of Forbidden Books”. Catholic Lane has the explanation:
Since today is the Feast of the Annunication, I thought I’d post a quick response to a recent question asked by a non-Catholic:
“1 Timothy 2:5 says ‘For there is one God and one Mediator between God and men, the Man Christ Jesus’. How does Mary fit into this?”
Prepare yourself to watch the best news item this year…
As I’ve said before, the media has had a field day in recent years with the various sex abuse scandals in the Catholic Church. Of course, in contrast, they tend to get very quiet when the subject matter isn’t quite so juicy, such as the feeding of the poor all across the world which happens day in, day out without acclaim or fanfare.
Over Lent I came across this article by Brendan O’Neill talking about the McAleese Report which was recently released by the Irish government. Although it hardly paints a rosy picture of the Magdalene Laundries it does dispel many of the myths and assumptions popularized by the recent movie The Magdalene Sisters…
Just to be clear, this isn’t saying that the laundries were idyllic places with no problems whatsoever, nor does it exonerate those who, in the name of Christ, committed cruelty towards those made in the image and likeness of God. This is just an appeal to stick to the facts rather than indulging in the various “embellishments” which have been recently made popular.
The stupidity of so much of the media coverage during the recent Papal Election was almost unbearable. I tried to avoid much of it as possible.
However, this is priceless. Prior to the actual election of Pope Francis, Jimmy Kimmel sent out a camera crew to ask the American public what they thought of the new (non-existent) Pope. The results were impressive, conclusively demonstrating that knowledge is an entirely unnecessary prerequisite to the holding of an opinion…
Unfortunately the video has been removed 🙁
Quite some time ago I remember reading an article at Called To Communion where I was presented with the positive case for Catholic salvation and I had my mind blown. I hadn’t realized quite how many non-Catholic concepts had crept into my brain.
During this past Lenten season I sent an email to Nick over at Nick’s Catholic Blog. Nick writes a lot on the subject of justification so I asked him to write a post putting forward the positive case for the Catholic view of salvation. The Protestant identity is often a negative one i.e. “Not Catholic” and I didn’t want to see Catholic soteriology go in the same direction i.e. “Not Sola Fide”. Here’s what he wrote:
If you’d like to understand more about the Protestant Reformed view of salvation and Penal Substitution, Joe recently did an article on this subject over at Shameless Popery.