In The Beginning: Not just a house, but a temple…

The other day I did a post in which I looked at the sequence of events in the creation narrative of Genesis. In verse two of Chapter 1, we are told that “the earth was without form and void” and I explained how God spends the rest of the chapter fixing these two problems.

He solves the problem of formlessness in the first three days by creating the domains of time, space and habitat. He then solves the problem of emptiness by then populating each of these realms with rulers: first sun, moon and stars, next fish and birds, and then finally land animals and humanity.

I compared Genesis chapter one to the building of a house, God first builds the structure of the house and then fills its rooms. However, at the end of the post I explained that God wasn’t just building a house, but a temple

Creation

Why do I say that God was building a temple? Well, we know that other cultures at the time of Genesis’ authorship also considered the cosmos to be something of a temple in which the gods were to be worshiped, but we also find a similar strain of thought concerning the first book of the Pentateuch…

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Horn/Chadwick Abortion Debate

Last week Trent Horn from Catholic Answers engaged in an abortion debate with Professor Cecili Chadwick. The title of the debate was “Should abortion be legal?”.

The debate was at California State University San Marcos and I managed to attend. In my “Drafts” folder I had begun a short review of the event prepared, but I saw yesterday that the video of the debate was already up on YouTube!

I found Professor Chadwick’s position rather problematic, particularly given what she was willing to admit concerning unborn. I also found it a little frustrating how, in her responses, she regularly presented false dilemmas, as though one cannot be both against poverty AND abortion. But rather than flesh out my review, I’d simply invite you to watch the debate and reach your own conclusions.

Journey Home: Brantly Callaway

Many of you will have heard of the Coming Home Network, an organization which supports converts and reverts entering the Catholic Church and shares their inspiring stories. A couple of days ago Brantly Callaway was on the show. It’s really good episode, even if Brantly’s three-year old son apparently thought it was “boring”  🙂

Brantly also has a blog. If you didn’t get a chance to read it before, I’d invite you to read the series Brantly wrote with his wife, Krista, entitled Why we’re contraception free. If you’ve ever been puzzled by the Catholic teaching concerning contraception, this is one of the clearest, methodical, yet engaging stories I’ve read.

If you’re in the mood to read even more, Brantly’s article on Total Apostasy really gets to the heart of the claims of groups such as Jehovah Witnesses and Mormons, as well as many Protestants, who claim that there was massive corruption in the Early Church.

Who’s conversion story have you found most inspiring?

St. Thomas Aquinas: Pro-Choice?

A friend of mine recently referred to the book “Good Church, Bad Church” by Tom Kane, a former Catholic priest. I read the synopsis on Amazon and read the extract on the author’s website.  In the extract, a couple came to Kane while he was still a Catholic priest and he counseled them to have an abortion, calling upon St. Thomas Aquinas as justification:

“The great Catholic theologian, Saint Thomas Aquinas, whose theological reasoning is the foundation of Catholic morality, said that a fetus does not contain a soul until several months because there is not enough development yet to hold a soul, so the fetus, Thomas says, is not a person,” I said. “Yet the Vatican and the Vaticans of Protestantism would sacrifice an endless number of lives for a miniscule embryo that resembles an amoeba.”

“But the fetus has life,” he said.

“Yes, but what kind of life? Plant life? Animal life?” I said. “A fetus has a very primitive form of life—not yet a human life.”

AquinasInTheLouvre

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