Tag: featured

Update on “Twelve for 2012″…

Leave a comment

listenAt the beginning of the year I posted my Twelve for 2012, the twelve books I was going to read this year. I thought I’d post an update on how I’m doing with the list.

Here are the books on the list which I finished:

The Church and the New Media
– Brandon Vogt

I’m Not Being Fed! 
– Jeff Cavins

The Passion of Jesus Christ
– John Piper

Father Brown of the Church of Rome
– G.K Chesterton

The Story of Christianity
– Justo Gonzalez

 I suppose that it’s no surprise that I was unable to restrict myself to my initial reading list! Yes, that’s right, I’ve been naughty and read some books that weren’t on the list:

The One Thing
– Matthew Kelly

Pillar of Fire and Truth
– Catholic Answers

Quitter
– Jon Acuff

I am currently reading:

How To Listen When God Is Speaking
– Mitch Pacwa, SJ

…and here are the books which I still have yet to read:

Rediscover Catholicism – Matthew Kelly
Godless Delusion – Patrick Madrid & Kenneth Hensley
The Path of Life – Cyprian Smith OSB
Jesus of Nazareth – Pope Benedict XVI
Jesus Among Other Gods – Ravi Zacharias
Philosophy For Dummies – Thomas Morris

So I have six books to read in five months. This means that I have to read at least one book each month until the end of the year. Fortunately, the books on the list which I’ve already read are generally the longer ones. All the remaining books to read, with the exception of Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, are reasonably short.

Selah?

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

Virgin Regret (Part 3): Vision of Sex & Marriage

Leave a comment

Last week I started a series in which I was commenting on an article written by a girl who regrets remaining a virgin until her wedding night. In my previous post I made some distinctions between abstinence and chastity which I think were lacking in her formation. In today’s post I would like to continue my discussion of Samantha’s article and look at the teaching she received concerning sex and marriage…

Wedding

Read more

Why should Protestants go to Church?

8 comments

A little while ago I was commenting on a friend’s blog where we were discussing the practice of church attendance on Sundays. Given that a lot of Protestants comment on his blog, I posed the following question to all those commenting:

What actually is the Protestant motivation for going to church on Sunday?

Now, this might seem like a silly question, but I asked it due to a certain train of thought that I had noticed during my time in the Protestant world. It’s a train of thought that I feel leads to unavoidable, awkward conclusions…

Read more

William Lane Craig and Catholicism

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?

1 … 12 13 14 15 16 … 137