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March For Life Discussion: Introduction

February 4, 2014 pilgrim Leave a comment

As my friends (and Twitter followers!) will know, I was in Washington DC last week for the March For Life. While I was there, I posted the following meme on this blog:

The blog entry in which the picture was posted was shared on Facebook and received a certain amount of negative feedback from some of my friends. A lively discussion ensued. Since I had quite a full itinerary while on the East Coast, I didn’t really have much time to monitor the conversation thread over the course of the week.

My final night in Washington DC concluded with an Audrey Assad concert and a night of swing dancing, after which my mate John dropped me off at Reagan Airport to catch my 6:30am flight home. Now with some time on my hands, I was able to review the Facebook discussion thread…

Coming a little late to the party, it was clear that some tempers were already frayed. Although I offered a few comments on the thread, I decided that it would be good to sit down and write a series of blog posts, addressing some of the features of the discussion and some of the issues which were raised.

I’ll be posting these posts over the next few days…

Catholicism

My favourite meme from today

January 28, 2014 pilgrim Leave a comment

Today was the feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest scholastic minds in the Church’s history. Despite his intellect, when he studied in Cologne his size and quiet nature earned him the nickname “The Dumb Ox”…

Humour

Selah?

January 28, 2014 pilgrim One comment

A very quick post today. As I mentioned before, I’m trying to read through the Bible in a year. At the moment in the plan, each day I a section from Genesis, a psalm and a section from Matthew’s Gospel. As I’ve been reading the Psalms, I noticed a curious word occasionally interspersed within the text, “Selah”:

O Lord, how many are my foes!
Many are rising against me;
many are saying of me,
there is no help for him in God. Selah

But thou, O Lord, art a shield about me,
my glory, and the lifter of my head.
I cry aloud to the Lord,
and he answers me from his holy hill. Selah

I lie down and sleep;
I wake again, for the Lord sustains me.
I am not afraid of ten thousands of people
who have set themselves against me round about. – Psalm 3:1-6

I wasn’t sure what this meant so I did a bit of googling…

It turns out that the exact meaning of “Selah” is somewhat disputed, but Wikipedia suggests that “It is probably either a liturgico-musical mark or an instruction on the reading of the text, something like “stop and listen”. Selah can also be used to indicate that there is to be a musical interlude at that point in the Psalm”

The_More_You_Know_2011

Catholicism

William Lane Craig and Catholicism

January 27, 2014 pilgrim 9 comments

If any of you have watched or listened to debates on atheism, you will have, no doubt, come across William Lane Craig. He is an analytic philosopher, Christian apologist and the driving force behind ReasonableFaith.org.

If you’ve ever heard him debate, you’ll know that he’s very clear, calm and persuasive. In fact, noted Atheist Sam Harris described him as “the one Christian apologist who seems to have put the fear of God into many of my fellow atheists”.

It was therefore with great curiosity that I listened to an interview where he discusses Catholicism:

The interview was rather interesting. Catholics were praised for seeming to read the Bible more these days, and Craig spoke about Catholic liturgy in exalted terms. On the whole he was pretty positive about Catholicism, although he of course still disagrees on certain points, otherwise he wouldn’t still belong to a Protestant denomination.

Objections

In the interview he raises two objections to Catholicism. The first is a classic, Justification. When speaking about this topic, Craig fails to understand how Catholics can speak about the involvement of works in salvation, yet at the same time assert that we are justified by grace.

The other issue raised was another old favourite, the Blessed Virgin. The interviewer, Kevin Harris, tripped up early on, saying “There was a move a while back to really elevate Mary, to almost equality with Christ, co-redemtrix. I don’t think that ever got off the ground in the Catholic Church, but there was a move there…”. This is misleading on two points. Firstly, although it’s not dogma, you’ll still find that title used a lot in reference to Mary, even although it isn’t as established as other titles, such as Mother Of God. Secondly, co-redemtrix does not indicate equality with Christ, simply that Mary has a role in redemption, much in the same way a pastor who leads a person to Christ participates in that person’s redemption.

On both of these issues, Craig seems to find a gap between official Church teaching and the belief of the Catholic faithful, some of which I find understandable.

I’d invite you to have a listen. What do you think of the interview?

How to make sure you don’t forget your Novena

January 25, 2014 pilgrim One comment

Have you ever tried to do a novena and failed? Maybe it slipped your mind for a few days, or maybe you did remember, but only at inconvenient moments when you didn’t have the novena text with you? If what I’m describing has happened to you, then I have a suggestion for you: use Google Calendar as your prayer buddy.

When I intend to do a novena, I create a repeating event in Google Calendar to remind me. The wonderful thing about it is that you can synchronize the calendar with your cell phone so you have you’ll see the reminder wherever you are. If you include the text for the novena in the event’s description, you won’t even have to go hunting around to find the prayer for that day. Google Calendar will work with both iPhone or Android devices.

Setting Up A Novena

If you’re not sure how to do this in Google Calendar, here are the steps necessary to setup a novena reminder:

1. Create new event
Click at the first day when you’ll be doing the Novena. I’d suggest picking a time when you know you’ll be consistently free over the course of the nine days. Enter the name of the novena and then click the “Edit Event” link:

2. Enter event description
In the “Description” field, enter the text needed for the novena, or include a link to a website which contains the text. Then click on the checkbox next to “Repeat”:

3. Setup Repetition
Clicking on the checkbox next to “Repeat” will cause a new dialog to appear. On this dialog you can setup how this event repeats. Since we’ll be praying a Novena, set it to “Daily” repetition and to end after nine occurrences. Once this is completed, click “Done”: