"We are travellers…not yet in our native land" – St. Augustine
Today I finished Tolkien’s Ordinary Virtues: Exploring the Spiritual Themes of Lord of the Rings by Mark Eddy Smith. It’s an extremely readable book, riskly through The Lord of the Rings, drawing out important life lessons and the importance of virtues from Tolkien’s magnum opus.
I’ve been getting through lots of books recently. I’ve been intending to write reviews for each of them, but have been procrastinating. Therefore, over the next few days I will be publishing a review for each of the books I have recently read.
Today I’d like to begin by talking about “The Way of a Pilgrim”. This review is also published on Amazon.com.
This book is well-known in eastern Christian circles and had been recommended to me by Eastern Orthodox and Eastern Catholic friends for several years, but I somehow never never quite managed to find the time to read it.
However, soon after returning to San Diego last month, it was announced that my parish would be beginning a study of this book during the Advent season. This gave me the extra bit of motivation I needed to buy this book and was subsequently very quickly hooked, finishing it in just a few days. Here’s how the book begins:
“By the grace of God I am a Christian, by my deeds a great sinner, and by my calling a homeless wanderer of humblest origin, roaming from place to place”
– The Way of the Pilgrim
I’m sure you can understand why this Restless Pilgrim loved these opening words!
As I previously mentioned, over the next few days I’m going to be publishing some posts in response to a discussion which took place on my Facebook wall while I was at the March For Life in Washington DC.
Some of my friends had reacted negatively to the fact that I was at the March, while others defended my presence at the demonstration, as well as the pro-life position in general.
As I sat in Ronald Reagan Airport at 1am, catching up on this Facebook thread, it was clear that there had been a certain amount of miscommunication between my friends. Now, I think a certain amount of miscommunication is somewhat inevitable, but I would suggest that we can be proactive in ensuring the discussion is productive. This is the subject that I’d like to address in this post.
Our penultimate chapter of Book I of “Mere Christianity” is Chapter 4 and is entitled “What lies behind the Law”. In this episode, Jack digs into the consequences of the Moral Law and, in particular, what we can know about the universe in which we live.
Unfortunately, there were some small issues in this episode with my microphone, a bit of a crackle, but hopefully I’ll have it sorted out by the next time Matt and I record agin.
If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe using iTunes or Google Play. As always, if you have any objections, comments or questions, please send us an email through my website or tweet us @pintswithjack.
Episode 6: “What lies behind the Law” (Download)
David was invited onto “Ready to Stand” by host Cullen Herout to talk about Lewis’ views on humility and pride.
The other day a friend asked me how, in my experience, non-Catholic Christians memorize Sacred Scripture. This is a very reasonable question. It is common to hear Catholics say how impressed (and intimidated) they are when their Protestant work colleges or classmates quote Scripture at them chapter and verse.
I responded initially with the suitably vague answer saying that, in my experience, it varies from denomination to denomination and from congregation to congregation. There are certainly some groups which emphasize Scripture memorization more than others.
“Memory! All alone in the moonlight…”
Personally, I’ve never been very good at Scripture memorization, at least as an activity in its own right. When I quote Scripture, it’s usually a rough paraphrase and it’s pretty rare that I can give the chapter, let alone the verse.
I’ve just received the video from a talk I gave earlier this week at Theology Uncorked on Our Lady. The video is available on Vimeo:
…and it’s also available on YouTube:
If you would like an audio version, I recorded an MP3 of this talk last year when I spoke in Los Angeles.