Female priests?
Author: pilgrim
The Last Anchorite
This is a fascinating document about Fr. Lazarus, “The Last Anchorite”:
Friday Frivolity: Evolution of Worship Music
Why the Byzantine Liturgy is great For kids…
This past week, a friend of mine visited my Byzantine Catholic parish. Afterwards, she admitted that she had been rather apprehensive about how her small child was going to react to the whole experience. After all, she knew that the Byzantine Liturgy was typically ninety minutes long, rather than the forty-five minute Mass which her son had previously been used to experiencing.
Even though I have no children of my own, I offered the somewhat counter-intuitive claim that the Byzantine Liturgy is in some ways better suited to children than a Novus Ordo or Tridentine Mass. A bold claim, I know, but I stand by it! So, here are my top ten reasons why I think the Byzantine Liturgy is great if you have small children…
Read moreWise Words on Wednesday: Watch Your Thoughts
Watch your thoughts. They become words.
Frank Outlaw?
Watch your words. They become deeds.
Watch your deeds. They become habits.
Watch your habits. They become character.
Character is everything.
The most sexist Pro-Choice Argument
Yet another person on Facebook recently told me that:
“It’s not for me or any other man or woman to place their beliefs upon a woman who should have the right to choose whether we agree or not. We will all stand before our maker if the story plays out as told.”
In response to these comments, I asked my friend whether or not he would say the same thing if he knew a mother planning on having her toddler drowned. If not, why not? As I’ve come to expect, I received no answer.
Instead I was told that my question was “wholly immaterial and inappropriate to this discussion”. I asked why this was this the case? Why was it inappropriate? Why was it immaterial? Once again, I received no answer.
I think it’s pretty clear that my friend would intervene in the situation with the toddler. The question is, why? After all, by interfering, he’d be “plac[ing] [his] beliefs upon the woman”, something which he’s apparently not meant to do. So, why interfere in one situation and not the other? What is the distinguishing factor? Why does one child demand her protection but another not merit it?
The implication here is that, unless I am directly impacted by a particular issue, I cannot comment upon its morality. That’s about as nonsensical as saying that unless you’re a plantation owner, you don’t get to comment on slavery. I have neither been the victim of sexual assault nor committed sexual assault. Despite this, I do not doubt for a moment that sexual assault is wrong and should be prevented.
The main reason I wanted to briefly blog about this conversation is because there is a deeper problem with what my friend said. He was saying that, because I am a man, I’m not even allowed to express my opinion on the morality of abortion. How is this anything other than textbook sexism? What was the basis for his dismissal of my argument? Was it the argument itself? Did he find a logical fallacy or a false premise? No, it was dismissed based on the gender of the person offering the argument. That’s a variant of the Ad Hominem Fallacy and remarkably sexist to boot!
Frank Turek’s Blind Spot
I enjoy a lot of Frank Turek’s apologetics and listen to his weekly podcast, but he really does have a few blind spots. I recently came across this video which shows that the canon of Scripture is one such blind spot…
What he says here concerning the discernment of the canon isn’t entirely false, but he offers a very insufficient description of what took place. It was the Catholic Church who determined the canon in the early centuries of the Church. In fact, it’s a bit embarrassing that it’s the questioner who is the first person to bring up these councils!
His statement about the Protestant Bible lining up with the Jewish Old Testament is too simplistic, so much so that it’s misleading. The Protestant Old Testament matches the canon of the Jews today… but not of all the Jews in the First Century! After all, there were a number of different Jewish sects in the First Century, such as the Sadducees, Pharisees and Essenes. Each of these groups had a different canon of Scripture…
Now, the Protestant canon matches the canon settled by the rabbis in the Second Century, following the establishment of the Church and the destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans. However, this begs the question: why should Christians accept the opinion of this particular Jewish group? After all, these are the successors to those who rejected that Jesus was the Messiah! If they didn’t recognize the Word incarnate, why would they necessarily correctly recognise the written Word of God? Not only that, wouldn’t they have motivation to exclude books from the canon which very clearly prophesy the suffering of Jesus?
The really egregious error in this video is Frank’s assertion that Roman Catholics added books to the Bible at the Council of Trent. That claim is patently false and honestly I’d expect more from an apologist of Frank’s calibre. Catholics did not add books to the Bible at the Reformation, the Protestants removed them. This is just one of the worst arguments used against the Deuterocanon. Incidentally, Luther even tried to remove books from the New Testament, such as the Epistle of James because he couldn’t reconcile it with his novel theology of Sola Fide…
The Catholic Bible aligns itself to the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Old Testament which is the translation most often quoted by the New Testament authors themselves. The Catholic Canon was declared by the early councils of the Church, as well as later ones such as The Council of Florence (AD 1431). You don’t have to wait for the Council of Trent (AD 1545). For further proof of this, just ask a Coptic or Eastern Orthodox Christian if they have the Deuterocanonical books in their Bible. These Churches separated from the Catholic Church long before the Reformation, yet still have these Deuterocanonical books…conclusive proof that what Frank said here is incorrect.