Why are Christians Persecuted?
Particularly given what’s going on in Iraq at the moment, it is worth taking a few moments to consider why Christianity undergoes such persecution…
Category: Catholicism
Why palms?
Today’s post is one of those blog entries which I wrote quickly wrote and then forgot to schedule for publishing. Well, better late than never…
Tonight I went to an Eastern Orthodox parish for Saturday Vespers and I was struck by how they decorated their church in preparation for Palm Sunday:
Now, the reason for decorating with palms was obvious, given that Sunday is called “Palm Sunday” and in the liturgy we’ll hear the account of Jesus being welcomed with palm branches:
The next day a great crowd who had come to the feast heard that Jesus was coming to Jerusalem. So they took branches of palm trees and went out to meet him, crying, “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord, even the King of Israel!” – John 12:12-13
However, I got to wondering…why palms? Was there any significance to it?
Thinking about it, I realized that many of the icons in my own parish featured palm branches. What was the symbolism? I was curious, so I went looking…
Quick Apology: You don’t believe in Thor, do you?
Up until now, all of the “Quick Apology” posts have dealt with Catholic-Protestant disputes. Today I would like to address a Theist-Atheist issue. I wrote this post several weeks ago, but I heard this specific objection was just a few days ago…
Objection
Probably as a result of the writings of the “New Atheists”, I’ve heard with increasing regularity the statement:
“You don’t believe in Thor do you? You’re almost an atheist – I just believe in one less god than you”
Response
The suggestion here is that Christians are, in fact, basically atheists since they don’t believe in the gods of other religions. The atheist is just like the Christian except that she rejects the Christian God as well.
There’s the suggestion that, since Thor doesn’t exist, then neither does the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, this doesn’t really follow, does it? After all, does the existence of counterfeit money mean that real money doesn’t exist? I hope not, otherwise I’ve worked 40 hours this week for nothing! Does the existence of counterfeit love mean that real love doesn’t exist? The recently dumped may think so, but I think generally we can agree that counterfeit love doesn’t disprove real love.
So, in conclusion, the non-existence of Thor has no bearing on the existence of Yahweh. The evidence for each must be weighed independently…
The sound of tumbleweed…
Fr. Dwight Longenecker asks a very important question: why do we not hear more condemnation of ISIS by the rest of the Muslim world?
Eastern Catholics? An interview with Fr. Maximos
Yesterday I gave a brief presentation on Eastern Christianity with my friend Kate, who is Eastern Orthodox (ROCOR). It was so much fun – I had a blast talking about my love for the East 🙂
Eastern Catholicism is a bit of a mystery to a lot of people. Honestly, Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox Christians often look at Eastern Catholics and scratch their heads. Are they Catholic? Are they Orthodox? I’m sure similar questions are going to be raised tomorrow so I thought I’d post the following YouTube interview of Fr. Maximos from Holy Resurrection Monastery since it deals with many of these questions surrounding Eastern Catholic identity:
If you’d like to learn more, I’d invite you to check out these other posts:
Word On Fire 2.0…
Fr. Robert Barron’s website, Word On Fire, has just received a significant upgrade…
Vatican website designers, please take note…
Quick Apology: Chained Bibles
In today’s Quick Apology post I wanted to turn to the subject of history…
Objection
When speaking about the Catholic approach to Scripture, some Protestants will make the following accusation:
“The Catholic Church used to chain up Bibles!”
Response
The statement is absolutely true; it was not uncommon prior to the Reformation for Bibles to be chained up. When I am told this in a discussion I concede the point, but I then ask the person speaking if they know why this was done…
It is not uncommon to receive as a response, “They chained them up to stop people reading the Bible!”. While the initial statement was true, this explanation as to why Bibles were chained is completely incorrect. In fact, Bibles were chained for completely the opposite reason. Bibles were chained up so that more people had access to the Scriptures!*
You see, prior to the Fifteen Century and the invention of the movable type printing press, Bibles were hand-written. This was an colossal undertaking and therefore extremely costly. This meant that Bibles were expensive items liable to be stolen by thieves. Therefore, in an attempt to provide people with access to the Scriptures, it was common for a Bible to be made available in or around a church building, but to prevent theft, it was chained to a heavy object. If you had a Bible worth tens of thousands of dollars, would you want to leave it unsecured and unattended in a public building?!
If you visit a post office or a bank, you will often see pens chained to immovable services. Do these institutions chain these pens because they don’t want you to use them? Of course not! They want you to use the pens, but they want to make sure nobody steals them! Why? Because if they are stolen then other people won’t have the opportunity to use the pens. It is the same logic at work concerning the chaining of Bibles.
* It is probably worth pointing out that literacy rates were also extremely low even until the 19th Century. It is for this reason that the most common way of learning the Bible throughout Christian history has been the hearing the Scriptures proclaimed at the Eucharistic liturgy.