Tag: featured

Restless Pilgrim Tour 2017

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microphoneNow that I’ve finished the Camino, the most common question I hear is: what are you going to do now?

I still have a couple more weeks in England, but after that I will be flying back to the United States in time for Thanksgiving. I’m going to be based in San Diego but I’m planning to do a little more travelling. I don’t have the moniker of “Restless Pilgrim” for nothing…

I’m intending to travel around the States, seeing friends and revisiting some of my favourite cities, as well as exploring some of the places which have remained too long on my “To Do” list…

The goal of these trips isn’t simply to be a tourist. I will have to get a job again at some point, so I will be talking the opportunity to meet with local companies and possibly do some job interviews. However, the thing I’m really looking forward to is serving at local churches along the way.

In the past I’ve spoken at “Theology On Tap” (Example #1 | Example #2), led Bible studies and organized swing and salsa evenings. I’d love to make myself useful and offer my services in these areas, free-of-change, as I travel around the States. I don’t need a stipend or travel expenses.

So, if you’d like me to come to your parish, please forward this link to the relevant person at your parish and send me an email. It could be at Diocese Young Adult event. It could be at a parish mission or at your parish’s Bible Study or discussion group. Let me know where you are in the States, and I’ll do my best to make sure that I can be in your part of the country at the right time! References are available upon request.

Catholic Life

Mass Appeal: The Liturgy is the greatest thing ever!
Do you find Mass dull? In this talk I explain why the Mass is amazing and what you can do to get more out of it.

Social Media & Your Soul
How can we use Social Media and the Internet without being used by them?

How I met your (Blessed) Mother (Listen)
I will be talking about how I came to know Mary, even after years of struggling with the Church’s teaching on the Blessed Mother. In this talk I will be offering some suggestions on how we might grow in our love for Mary and come to understand her role in Salvation History more deeply.

Evangelism

Catholics Come Home: Drawing the lapsed back to the Church
Based on a previous blog series, here I tell a little bit of my own story and discuss what you might do to try and draw people back to the Church.

Evangelization for the terrified (Listen here)
Jesus told his disciples to go out to the whole world and share the Good News. If it’s “Good News”, why does that seem so scary?! In this talk I explain why we shouldn’t be shared of doing evangelization and give some very practical tools for speaking to your friends and family about the Faith.

Apologetics for the confused
What do you say when someone asks you why you’re Catholic? In this talk I go through a few key principles to employ when being called upon to defend what you believe.

Knock, knock. Who’s there?
What do you do when a Jehovah Witness or Mormon comes to your door? Over the course of this talk, I explain the origins of these groups and give some guidance on how to speak with them in a constructive way.

No God but God: An introduction to Islam
Approximately 23% of the world’s population identify as Muslim, but many Christians know relatively little about Islam. In this talk I provide an overview of the religion, as well as its similarities and dissimilarities to Catholicism.

Church History

The Worship of the Early Church (Listen here)
What did the first Christians do when they gathered together? If you could travel back in time to the end of the First Century and attend a Christian gathering, would you feel out-of-place?

Was the Early Church Catholic?
I’ll trace the roots of Catholic thought, theology and practice in the first few centuries of Christianity.

Blood & Ink: How the Early Church conquered the world (Listen here)
How did a small Jewish sect, started in the First Century, whose founder was publicly executed, manage to conquer the might of the Roman Empire? In this talk, I explain how the first Christians witnessed to Jesus both in their writing, lives and martyrdom, thereby winning the world for Christ.

Solving today’s problems with ancient wisdom
In this talk, I look at how the problems which face the Church today can be addressed using the wisdom of the first Christians, the Early Church Fathers.

Mary and the Early Church
Come to appreciate the Mother of God through the witness of the Early Church.

Women in the Early Church
We often hear about the Church Fathers, but were there mothers too? In this talk I look at the lives of some of the most important female figures in the Early Church.

Scripture

Reading Sacred Scripture for all its worth (Listen here)
How do Catholics read the Bible? What can you do to get the more out of Scripture at Mass? If you want to grow more familiar with the Biblical texts, where do you start?

Big Picture Bible: Salvation History in 60 minutes
If someone asked you to explain the overarching story of the Bible, what would you say? In the space of an hour I run through the story of salvation history and help give a framework for making sense of individual stories.

Hidden Treasure: How the Old Testament is unveiled in the New (Listen here)
This is an exploration of “Biblical Typology”, the way of reading Scripture which was developed by the Early Church Fathers, seeing in the Old Testament foreshadowings of the events of Christ, His Mother and the Kingdom of Heaven.

References are available on request

Quick Apology: You don’t believe in Thor, do you?

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Up until now, all of the “Quick Apology” posts have dealt with Catholic-Protestant disputes. Today I would like to address a Theist-Atheist issue. I wrote this post several weeks ago, but I heard this specific objection was just a few days ago…

Objection

Probably as a result of the writings of the “New Atheists”, I’ve heard with increasing regularity the statement:

“You don’t believe in Thor do you? You’re almost an atheist – I just believe in one less god than you”

Response

The suggestion here is that Christians are, in fact, basically atheists since they don’t believe in the gods of other religions. The atheist is just like the Christian except that she rejects the Christian God as well.

There’s the suggestion that, since Thor doesn’t exist, then neither does the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. However, this doesn’t really follow, does it? After all, does the existence of counterfeit money mean that real money doesn’t exist? I hope not, otherwise I’ve worked 40 hours this week for nothing! Does the existence of counterfeit love mean that real love doesn’t exist? The recently dumped may think so, but I think generally we can agree that counterfeit love doesn’t disprove real love.

So, in conclusion, the non-existence of Thor has no bearing on the existence of Yahweh. The evidence for each must be weighed independently…

Thor-the-Dark-World

captain-american-one-god

Jesus would never call other people wrong

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I just had a very strange interaction on Facebook… A friend of mine posted the following video of the Protestant evangelist Todd Friel:

One of his friends, a man called Simon, responded with the following curious assertions:

His response struck me as a strange for several reasons, but first and foremost because it demonstrated very clearly that Simon was rather unfamiliar with the New Testament! I responded by pointing out that Jesus would absolutely call other people wrong. In fact, at times He could be quite mean, even to the point of calling people names:

“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites… You fools and blind men… For you are like whitewashed tombs which on the outside appear beautiful, but inside they are full of dead men’s bones and all uncleanness. Even so you too outwardly appear righteous to men, but inwardly you are full of hypocrisy and lawlessness… you brood of vipers” 

Matthew 23:15, 17, 27-28, 33

He was even known on occasion to flip tables!

And making a whip of cords, he drove them all, with the sheep and oxen, out of the temple; and he poured out the coins of the money-changers and overturned their tables – John 2:15

John 2:15

Naturally, there are many other Scripture passages which I could have quoted, not least Jesus’ exclusive claims about Himself:

“I am the way, and the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.”

John 14:6

With wearying predictability, rather than adjusting his statement, Simon immediately accused me of “judging” him. Some folks really love to jump to play the victim card even at the mildest of challenges. I wonder if he would have said exactly the same thing if I had pointed out an error in his arithmetic…

Amusingly, he then tried to quote Romans 2 to me:

You, therefore, have no excuse, you who pass judgment on someone else, for at whatever point you judge another, you are condemning yourself, because you who pass judgment do the same things. Now we know that God’s judgment against those who do such things is based on truth. So when you, a mere human being, pass judgment on them and yet do the same things, do you think you will escape God’s judgment?

Romans 2:1-3

At this point I suggested to him that, while I’d be happy to discuss that passage with him, it probably isn’t a good idea to quote the Bible at a Christian right on the heels of making a demonstrably false statement about Jesus. He then said that he didn’t want to discuss his beliefs with me any more, so I closed by saying that hopefully I had at least disabused you of the notion that “Jesus would never call other people wrong”. I concluded with a passage which denies this explicitly:

“[Jesus said] ‘You are in error because you do not know the Scriptures or the power of God'”

Matthew 22:29

…and, for good measure, I also included a passage where Jesus teaches His followers about judgement:

“Stop judging by mere appearances, but instead judge correctly”

John 7:24

Needless to say, he wrote with the following:

…and then thirty seconds later deleted the thread.

Leading a Bible study: Part 6

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Today is the final post in my series on leading a Bible study (Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5). Here are my concluding Do’s and Don’ts:

DON’T: Forget the heart
I’m a very “head” oriented person. When I study the Bible I like to pull apart texts, examine the words, look at the historical background and get straight to the meaning of the text. It is only after I’ve done all this that I’m ready to engage with the Scripture on a “heart” level. However, I know that in this I am an oddity! I find that most people engage with Scripture on an emotional level much earlier in the process. Therefore, to lead an engaging bible study I must accommodate this and allow people to respond emotionally to the Scripture before we’ve dissected every technical detail of the text.

DON’T: Forget the head
…having said that, don’t neglect the exegesis. I have been to Bible studies before which have been nothing more than a “feeling sharing group”. That was all anyone ever talked about, how they felt about the text! The actual meaning of the text wasn’t even examined.

DO: Keep the hippy, tree-hugging stuff to a minimum… 😉

A balance must be struck between head and heart.

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Beginning Ignatius’ letter to the Ephesians

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This week in the JP2 Group we will be continuing our study of the letters of St. Ignatius of Antioch, martyr of the early 2nd Century.

Last week we read his words to the Trallians where Ignatius presents unity with the bishop as a defence against heresy. This week we move on to the letter he wrote to the Ephesians, the community in which Paul lived for three years and to whom he wrote a letter which we find in Sacred Scripture.

In this letter Ignatius pulls together all the different topics we have seen him address in his letters thus far: unity, the episcopacy, heresy, the Eucharist etc. However, as well as being a nice revision of all we have seen thus far, he also gives us some advice on how to deal with those outside the Church.

After looking at several different translations, I have, again, created my own abridged version so that we will be able to complete our study of this letter in a single evening.  The letter to the Ephesians is quite long so unfortunately I had to cut quite a bit. Anyway, here it is:

“St. Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Ephesians” PDF
“St. Ignatius of Antioch’s letter to the Ephesians” Audio

IC XC

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This past weekend I was visiting a friend in Washington State and, at the church we visited, saw the following cross hanging above the altar:

Cross at St. Paul’s Cathedral, Yakima

…and this reminded me of something else which I came to understand through studying Greek that I had meant to share…

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