Friday Frivolity: Church History
Tag: Church History
Early Christian Controversies that Protestantism Can’t Explain
This past Friday, Joe Heschmeyer was on Catholic Answer Live, the audio of which is available here. Joe was talking about one of my favourite subjects, Church History. In particular he was talking about how many of the early controversies in the Church can’t really be explained from within a Protestant framework.
For example, in the Early Church there was a breakaway group in AD 311 called the Donatists. These were rigorists who insisted that the sacraments administered by clergy who had been compromisedĀ during persecution were invalid. This was a major issue within the Church of the Early Fourth Century…but it’s an argument that makes no sense within most Protestant frameworks.
If you are interested, the article where he draws out these ideas is available below:
TEA: Mary and the Early Church (St. Ignatius)
Yesterday, I visited St. Ignatius Catholic Church in Los Angeles. The St. Ignatius Women’s Group invited me to give a presentation on the Blessed Virgin and the Early Church. This was a a longer version of a talk I had previously given at St. Brigid’s here in San Diego.
Over the course of forty-five minutes, I told the story of my initial struggles concerning Mary and the Catholic Marian doctrines, explaining how I eventually came to see the truth and beauty in the Catholic Church’s teaching concerning the Blessed Virgin. The audio and the handout are both available for download.
Mary and the Early Church (Download)
I was invited to speak to the group at St. Ignatius by a long-time reader of this blog. If you’re also interested in having me speak to a group at your parish or at a Diocesan Theology On Tap, please see my Speaking page for examples of other recorded talks. Just send me an email and we can work out the details! š
TEA: Worship In The Early Church (Drinks with Dominicans)
Last week I gave a talk on “Worship In The Early Church” at a local Seattle Young Adult event. I’ll be converting this talk into a series of posts later, but in case you wanted to have a listen, I recorded the first half of my talk on my phone:
Worship In The Early Church (Download)
In the latter portion of the talk we were going through some of the texts of the Early Church and the recording was a little too faint. I’ll put together a better recording at some point over the next few months.
Quick Apology: Faked Fathers
A few days ago IĀ posted a Quick Apology in response to a reader’s question on the subject of “Soul Sleep”. In that same email, he described another objection he had heard, which I’d like to address today.
Objection
In the reader’s email, he wrote the following:
I have recently encountered a non-Catholic…whoĀ states that the Church Fathers never existed, i.e. all fake
Well…that’s quite the challenge! So, how might oneĀ respond when encountering this objection?
Gay Marriage in Christian History?
In the wake of the SCOTUS decision concerning same-sex marriage, I’ve seen lots of people on Facebook making the assertion that the Church used to perform same-sex weddings in antiquity. In defense of this quite provocativeĀ assertion, typically a single authority is cited,Ā the Professor of Medieval History at Yale University, John Boswell.
I was planning on writing a rebuttal to thisĀ assertion, but after doing a little bit of googling, I came across this article by Robin Darling Young who reviews Boswell’s book and does a tremendous job on demonstrating the considerable bias required to reimagine Church history in an attempt to support such an outlandish hypothesis:
Early Church Timeline
Well this is rather cool… I recently came across an interactive timeline of the Early Church:
