Tag: featured

Blessed are the Gifts

One comment

A couple of days ago on Facebook, my friend Rachel referred to the “seven gifts of the Spirit”. These are the gifts mentioned in the Prophet Isaiah:

And the Spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him,
    the spirit of wisdom and understanding,
    the spirit of counsel [right judgement] and might [fortitude],
    the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the Lord.
And his delight shall be in the fear of the Lord [piety]…

– Isaiah 11:2-3

I commented briefly on Rachel’s Facebook posting, saying that St. Augustine associated these seven gifts with Christ’s beatitudes in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:3-10). In today’s post I wanted to explain in a little more detail what St. Augustine taught about the relationship between these gifts and the beatitudes…

Sermon on the Mount Copenhagen Church Alter Painting
Read more

In The Beginning: Adam Restored

3 comments

Last week I published a post in which I examined the different roles of Adam, as part of my In The Beginning series. I demonstrated from the Scriptures how Adam was a son of God, bridegroom, priest, prophet and king.

I explained that it’s important to understand these different roles of Adam because in understanding Adam, we come to understand the blueprint, God’s original design, the original state of affairs before everything started going all askew. Salvation History is the story of our redemption and the return to that original state of affairs.

In today’s post I’d like to look at how Adam’s various roles are taken up once more…

icon-of-the-resurrection

Read more

In The Beginning: The many roles of Adam

12 comments

The creation accounts found in the first and second chapters of Genesis are portions of the Bible with which most Catholics are typically pretty familiar. We actually had a portion read at Mass a couple of weeks ago and we’ll hear a further extract at the Easter Vigil in a couple of weeks’ time.

Creation Of Adam

In today’s post I’d like to draw out a few things we learn about Adam in Genesis. In particular, I’d like to look at the five roles essential to Adam’s identity…

Read more

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

Leave a comment

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…

Read more

St. Thomas Aquinas: Pro-Choice?

6 comments

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

Read more

In The Beginning: When God builds a house…

Leave a comment

In Bible study we’re currently doing a whistle-stop tour of the Bible. Last week we looked at the opening verses of Genesis. It often goes unnoticed what God is actually doing in the account of creation found in the opening verses. Today I’d like to do a short post covering the first part of our discussion and speak about the literary structure of the first chapter of Genesis.

Chaos

In Chapter 1, verse 2, after affirming that “God created the heavens and the earth”, the author says that “the earth was formless and void” (Hebrew: “tohu wabohu”). The rest of the chapter sets about explaining how God solved both of these problems…

Read more

1 … 101 102 103 104 105 … 172