I haven’t done one of these in a while, but I thought it’d be good to get into the habit of posting the recipes I’ve been trying. Here’s a really simple chicken sauce recipe I recently learned:
1. Make Sauce
Make a sauce using the following ingredients:
1 teaspoon ground black pepper 2 tablespoons lemon juice 2 tablespoons soy sauce 3 tablespoons ketchup 3 tablespoons white sugar
2. Cook Chicken
Finely chop one onion and saute in 2 tablespoons of olive oil until translucent. Add 4 skinless, boneless chicken breast halves.
3. Simmer
Pour sauce over the chicken, and bring to a boil.
Cover, reduce heat, and simmer for 25-35 minutes.
The first time I cooked this I used the measurements listed above, but the next time I attempted it, I doubled the measurements for the sauce, changed it to a red onion…and it all worked out wonderfully:
After doing so badly on my New Year Resolutions this year, I’ve decided to keep it simple next year. That doesn’t mean that it’s going to be easy though! I’ve decided that in 2014 I am going to read the entirety of the Bible, both Old and New Testaments.
I’ve spent the last hour or so looking at different reading plans online. Many that I’ve found have been Protestant and have unfortunately therefore lacked the Deuterocanon. If I were to use any of those I would have to squeeze in the extra books (Tobit, Wisdom, Maccabees, etc.) at some point in the year. Moving on…
Some reading plans, such as YouVersion, don’t actually cover the entire Bible and instead just cover the majority of the text. While practical, that also seems a bit “meh”. Moving on…
I also found one plan which has quite a mix of daily readings. Each day there there are two Old Testament readings, a Psalm and a New Testament reading. That is contrasted with the plans from Presentation Ministry and Catholic Doors, both of which assign one book at a time.
As far as I can tell, the most popular plan is one which is put out by the Coming Home Network, which is available in PDF here and which some nice person converted into hypertext format here. It has an Old Testament reading, New Testament reading and then something from the Wisdom literature, such as Psalms or Proverbs. I think this is the plan for me. It even has the option of reading through the Catechism too…but maybe I’ll think about that for 2015!
If anyone else has the same goal for 2014, please leave a message below 🙂
St. Jerome, pray for me!
UPDATE 05/20/14: Meg Hunter-Kilmer has added an article on this subject and presents an alternative reading plan.
I’ve mentioned before that in the last year or two I’ve started to pay more attention to the clothes which I wear to Sunday Mass. Not only do I find it puts me in a better frame of mind, it also has the added advantage that I get to pretend that I’m one of my favourite TV/movie characters 🙂
A friend recently expressed interest in getting to know the Early Church Fathers so I said that I would put together a brief (hah!) list of resources.
I was first introduced to the Early Church Fathers by Marcellino D’Ambrosio while I was on a retreat in England. He regaled us with some of the many colourful stories from the Early Church, such as the election of St. Ambrose to Bishop of Milan. Since St. Ambrose will be my roommate’s Patron Saint when he’s received into the Church next year I’ll make sure I write about that sometime soon…
Audio Resources
This initial introduction to the Fathers by Dr. D’Ambrosio was later supplemented by the excellent lecture series given by Dr. Lawrence Feingold to the Association of Hebrew Catholics. Dr. Feingold takes the listener through a tour of the Early Church, focussing upon the issues in that Church, such the call to martyrdom, as the relationship between faith and reason, and the Arian heresy.
If you would like to get a deeper grounding in Christian history (which is, itself, the story of the Fathers), I highly recommend the extensive series of lectures by Fr. Michael Witt. If you get through the Early Church period, don’t worry! You don’t have to stop there since he also covers Church history up until the present day… 🙂
So those are a number of audio resources, but what about books?
Websites
There are several websites which provide a handy concordance for the Fathers, such as ChurchFathers.org.
Books
Mike Aquilina has written a number of very accessible books on the subject and I would particularly recommend his book The Fathers of the Church as it gives a good, brief survey of the Patristic period. If you’re interested in the worship of the Early Church he also has a very readable book entitled The Mass of the Early Christians.
I know a lot of people were first introduced to Patristics through The Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett, which focusses just four Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus. Likewise, if you would like to focusses more in depth on specific Fathers, Dr. Howell has a great couple of books which focus on Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.
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A new excellent reference book came out recently from Jimmy Akin entitled The Fathers Know Best. It is a book which arranges the writings of the Church Fathers by topic. For example, have you ever wanted to know what the Fathers thought about contraception? Well, with Jimmy’s book you can just flip to that topic and read, in chronological order, extracts from the Fathers on that subject.
Ad Fontes!
Finally, I would invite anyone wishing to get to know the Fathers better to actually get down and read the works themselves. I have several works available on this website in my Patristics section, together with MP3 recordings of the text. If you want to see what the Fathers thought about the Gospel readings at Mass each week, I’d suggest consulting the Catena Aurea. For further reading, I would recommend the Ancient Christian Writers series. The translation is excellent and there are a good number of explanatory endnotes.
So there you go! Hopefully that wasn’t too overwhelming! Pick which way works best for you and get stuck in! Get to know your Christian family 🙂
Today we have something of a rather odd Catholic Bucket List item:
Catholic Bucket List #6: Read some CS Lewis
This is something of an odd Bucket List item since CS Lewis isn’t, in fact, Catholic. However, he is an absolutely terrific writer. This year I have read four C.S. Lewis books and have been so impressed by his depth of thought and refined style. His insight into spiritual battle and temptation in The Screwtape letters is so insightful. His articulation of the Christian faith in Mere Christianity is just superb.
However, you don’t have to read this theological works to fulfill this bucket list item though. Lewis was a writer of some wonderful fiction. I grew up with my mother and sister reading The Chronicles of Narnia to me and they were some of the first books I read myself when I was able. In fact, I would go so far as to invite you, if you have not yet read them, to read The Chronicles of Narnia. In the past few years I have made new friends who have never read them before. When I discover this to be the case, I immediately go out and buy a set for them.
If you’ve been reading this blog for a while, you may have noticed that I’ve been slacking for a while. I haven’t really written anything substantial for at least a month. Sure, I’ve published every day, but the posts have been extremely brief.
At the beginning of October I began a new series, The Bogwash Epistles, a spin-off of C.S. Lewis’ Screwtape Letters. Despite having notes for the next ten or so letters, I only completed a few. I had also intended to do a series of posts to supplement the talk I gave at Theology On Tap, expanding on some of the areas I had to truncate due to time constraints. That didn’t happen. I had wanted to do a post examining the logic of those who oppose Halloween. Nope, that didn’t happen either… 🙁
The last two months have certainly been busy, so time has been at a premium, but even though now my time constraints have relaxed a little I feel like I don’t have the “head space” to do much writing.
This is all a long-winded way of saying that I’m going to take another blogging hiatus. I’m going to take a break from writing for all of December. As before, quotations from the Desert Fathers are scheduled to keep you company while I’m away.
I’ve been studying Hosea recently and in that book the Lord speaks through His prophet saying that He will draw Israel back out into the desert, to the place where she first encountered Yahweh. It is there that He will speak tender words to her, restore her and rekindle the Divine Romance. I’ve booked myself a weekend silent retreat, blocked Facebook and cancelled a bunch of activities I had planned for December. I think t’s time to head back to the desert…
Quite some time ago in the JP2 Group we studied the Liturgy of St. James. Today I finished recording the text onto MP3::
Liturgy of St. James
Part of my reason for putting these documents onto MP3 is to make it easier for people to understand how the Early Church worshiped. Unfortunately, there are a lot of myths out there about what these early services looked like. Personally, I find it really interesting looking at the development of liturgy through the centuries, growth and continuity:
Quite some time ago in the JP2 Group we studied the Liturgy of St. James. Today I finished recording the text onto MP3::