"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Quite some time ago I wrote a short post about the “health and wealth gospel” that gets kicked around some congregations these days. “Lutheran Satire” do a wonderful job of conveying the ridiculousness of this having the martyrs of the Early Church read some of Joel Osteen’s tweets:
Theology On Tap is an initiative in the Diocese and throughout the USA where young adults gather in a bar or restaurant to listen to a speaker, to fellowship with one another and grow in their faith.
Earlier in the month, I gave a talk at Theology On Tap about Sacred Scripture. The series continues, this time with the talk being given by Jamie Cleaton.
Jamie is a fellow resident of San Diego, where he lives with his wife and three children. Jamie has been a youth minister for four years. He has been involved with all kinds of youth events and he has been a professional speaker since 2008.
Here is the audio for his talk entitled “Making tough decisions: Listening to God’s voice as you make daily life decisions”:
Main Talk (Download)
Q&A (Download)
Trent Horn’s new book Answering Atheism has finally been released. My copies actually arrived yesterday which I’ll be giving away. Today, Trent responds to another common atheistic claim:
The next time someone tells you that “Religion is the cause of all the war in the world”, I’d invite you to point them at the statistics below which compare the atrocities perpetrated by theists to atheists.
To be clear, this in no way excuses the abuse of religion as an excuse to perpetrate evil, but hopefully it should provide a little bit of perspective…
This is one of my new favourite websites, The Catholic Gentleman:
This last month has been barmy. I’ve been to Seattle, San Francisco, Palm Beach, as well as a Cursillo retreat. Life has been far to busy, to put it mildly. As such, I’ve kinda dropped the ball on Halloween…
Several of my friends have been sharing Why we don’t celebrate Halloween posts on Facebook. I had planned to write a blog post explaining why I celebrate Halloween, but all I’ve managed to do is post a couple of comments on one such blog.
So, rather than let this holiday pass unmentioned, I thought I would provide a few links to a few websites which offer the other side of the debate:
One essential difference which divides Catholics and many Protestants is the question of faith and works in salvation. The disagreement began at the Reformation. In fact, the “material principle” of the Reformation was that we are saved “Sola Fide”, by “Faith Alone” and that works have no place in our justification whatsoever.
This subject often comes up when speaking with Protestants. I think most Catholics have had the experience at one point or another of being told by a Protestant that Catholicism doesn’t preach the Gospel, teaching instead that we have to earn our salvation. St. Paul’s epistles to the Romans and Galatians are often cited during such an exchange.
When this has happened to me in the past, I tend not to dwell too long upon the person’s interpretation of Paul’s epistles. I usually simply point out that in those letters St. Paul is contrasting faith in Christ with the works of the Mosaic Law. I turn then to the Epistle of James, since it presents a bit of a problem if someone wishes to say we’re saved by faith alone…