"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
My favourite book of 2015 was New Testament Basics for Catholics by Dr. John Bergsma. So much so, in fact, that several of my friends received copies as Christmas presents!
Here is a short presentation by the book’s author on the material covered in his book:
A while ago I wrote a post talking about the exchanges you’ll commonly hear in the Byzantine circles (e.g. “Glory to Jesus Christ/Glory Forever”). In the Ruthenian Catholic Church you’ll often hear greetings and responses in Slavonic. I couldn’t find anywhere on the Internet to help learn them, so here’s my best attempt to list them all out phonetically and record them onto MP3….
“Slava Isusu Christu” (SLA-VA EE-SUE-SUE KRI-STU)
“Slava na Veeky” (SLA-VA NA VyEE-KEE)
An alternative dialect has it as
“Slava vo V’iki” (SLA-VA VO VyEE-KEE)
“Christos Razhdajetsja” (KRIS-TOS ROZH-DA-YET-SyAH)
“Slaveety Yoho” SLA-VEE-TE YEAH-HO)
“Christos Voskres” (KRIS-TOS VOS-KRES)
“Voistynu Voskres” (VO-EE-STEE-NU VOS-KRES)
An alternative dialect has it as:
“Christos Voskrese” (KRIS-TOS VOS-KRES-E)
“Voistinu Voskrese” (VO-EE-STEE-NU VOS-KRES-E)
“Chrystos Posredi nas” (KRIS-TOS POS-RE-DI NAS)
“I yest i budet” (YEST EE BOO-DET)
I hope this helps! If anyone out there is a Slavonic expert and would like to correct my pronunciation or phonetic spelling, please leave me a comment! Also, if you’d like to teach the world the responses in Greek, Russian etc, please let me know 🙂
A little while ago I was commenting on a friend’s blog where we were discussing the practice of church attendance on Sundays. Given that a lot of Protestants comment on his blog, I posed the following question to all those commenting:
What actually is the Protestant motivation for going to church on Sunday?
Now, this might seem like a silly question, but I asked it due to a certain train of thought that I had noticed during my time in the Protestant world. It’s a train of thought that I feel leads to unavoidable, awkward conclusions…
Well, this is rather cool. I recently saw Dr. Barber publicizing Maria Lextrix, a website which includes a large collection of free audio books of Catholic classics!
My friend Ash put together this little video explaining the origin of the word “Catholic”:
My friend Joe is studying at the North American College in Rome, where he’s surrounded by brilliant English-speaking Catholics from around the globe: classmates, professors, and various luminaries who pass through their halls while doing more important things. Together with some of his classmates, they’ve decided to take advantage of this fact and create a regular Catholic podcast: interviewing experts in liturgy, theology, Church history, and several other fields.
The result is Catholic Bytes podcast (CatholicBytesPodcast.com): it’s designed to be frequent (once or twice a week), short (under 10 minutes), clear (we’ve got multiple reviewers doing quality control), and orthodox. Oh, and the first episode got released today…enjoy 🙂