Qur’an Cover-to-Cover: Day 1 (“The clinging substance”, …)

unborn

As previously mentioned, I am going to read through the Qur’an in chronological order from beginning to end. I will be writing up my notes from the chapters (“suwar”) each day, starting today with the chapters which were composed at the beginning of Muhammad’s ministry in Mecca: 96, 68, 73, 74, 1, 111 and 81.

Surah 96 – “The clinging substance”/”Recite” (Al-Alaq)
This short surah accuses a man of sinning because he sees himself as “self-sufficient”. We are reminded that God made man (with a vague description of human development), that God sees everything and that if the man does not repent, God will drag him by the hair and angels will throw him into Hell.

Questions

Q1. “Created man from a clinging substance”. Is this a reference to a fetus?

Q2. “Who taught by the pen”. Is this a reference to the Bible?

Read more

Bible alone? Part 2

Yesterday I began speaking about the doctrine of Sola Scriptura. A lot could be written concerning the problems with this Formal Principle of the Reformation, but I will leave that to better minds. Instead, over the next two days I would just like to focus on the two main problems which drove me to consider more deeply the validity of the doctrine. After being involved in the Protestant world for a few years, two problems nagged at me:

Problem #1: Correct interpretation

This first problem was one that I saw first-hand. In my various non-Catholic wanderings, I had encountered some great pastors: faithful, holy and insightful. I was greatly encouraged by their witness and learned a great deal from them.

However, I began to notice that, even within the same parish, there was quite often a considerable diversity in theological opinions. Within the home groups there was also considerable latitude in belief and when a dispute arose, there wasn’t a clear path towards finding a resolution other than asking one of the church staff, and even then you couldn’t guarantee that you’d get the same answer from two different staff members. There was also a mild form of dissension in that the Pastor’s Sermon was often critiqued after the service and it would be discussed as to whether or not everyone agreed with it.

Denomination Diversity

These are only personal, anecdotal impressions, of course. However, when you consider different denominations, these interpretive disputes can be seen more clearly. Some denominations believe in infant baptism, others do not. Some denominations believe that baptism actually does something in the soul of the one being baptised, others affirm that it is just an outward symbol. Likewise, some denominations affirm some concept of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist, while others say that it is, again, just a symbol. Some denominations have female pastors, others say that’s invalid. Some affirm the Trinity, others deny it. This lack of doctrinal unity in the Protestant world concerned me greatly.

Right at the dawn of the Reformation you had Luther and Zwingli, two early leaders of the Reformation, disagreeing over the correct interpretation of “This is my body” – Luke 22:19. Each presented his own private, fallible interpretation of that passage, but with no Church Authority to resolve the dispute, there was no possible way to resolve the deadlock.

Read more

Manvotional: Essential Qualities of Leadership

It’s time for another Manvotional! A couple of weeks ago, the Art of Manliness posted an a section of a 1946 Army manual. I’ve recorded it onto MP3 below.Screen Shot 2015-10-28 at 11.04.38 AM

Manvotional (Download)

“Clenched Teeth” Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 3.0

The unaccompanied MP3 is available here.

Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 10 (“Nice People Or New Men?”)

Book-4

Picking back up my notes for C.S. Lewis’ “Mere Christianity”…

1. If Christianity is true, why are all Christians not obviously nicer than all non-Christians?

(a) Part of this question is very reasonable

“If conversion to Christianity makes no improvement in a man’s outward actions… I think we must suspect that his ‘conversion’ was largely imaginary…”

(i) Jesus told us to judge by results

“Fine feelings, new insights, greater interest in ‘religion’ mean nothing unless they make our actual behaviour better; just as in an illness ‘feeling better’ is not much good if the thermometer shows that your temperature is still going up… Christ told us to judge by results”

(ii) When we fail to live up to our calling, we make Christianity harder to believe for others

“When we Christians behave badly, or fail to behave well, we are making Christianity unbelievable to the outside world… Our careless lives set the outer world talking; and we give them grounds for talking in a way that throws doubt on the truth of Christianity itself”

(b) Part of this question is very unreasonable

But there is another way of demanding results in which the outer world may be quite illogical…. they should see the whole world neatly divided into two camps -Christian and non-Christian – and that all the people in the first camp at any given moment should be obviously nicer than all the people in the second.

There are several flaws with this kind of thinking…

Read more

Wise Men Competition

I mentioned earlier about Fr. Donald Calloway’s recent events in the San Diego area.

In one of his talks on Blessed Mary he mentioned a car sticker he saw which read “Wise men still find Him with His mother”. One of my friends commented a few days later that she had tried to find this sticker online, but to no avail.

Thinking myself to be something of an Internet Ninja, I went looking for it, but also came up empty. Not wanting to be beaten by the Internet, I decided isntead to make it:

Car Sticker

I had four of these stickers made, so I now have three to give away. If you would like to win one, simply leave a comment below with the name of a favourite speaker you’ve heard recently. Three names will be randomly selected next week and I’ll email the winners.

The article Wise Men Competition first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

Catholic Dating: Not wanting to be “that guy”

In recent posts I’ve been sharing my thoughts about the question often asked by Catholic females, “Why doesn’t that nice Catholic boy ask me out?”

In my last post I wrote about how the fear of rejection plays a significant part in the answer to this question. In addition, I suggested that a warped sense of Christian masculinity contributes to the problem and that all this is exacerbated by the close communal nature of faith groups.

Today I’d like to continue looking at this issue and examine briefly another of the reasons why Catholic guys tend not to ask out Catholic girls as often as they perhaps should. In today’s post I would propose that guys sometimes fail to do so because they don’t want to be that guy.

In each Catholic community I’ve belonged to, there has always been that guy. You know who I mean? I’m talking about the player. He’s the guy who’s always scanning the pews at the Young Adult Mass or Bible Study, keeping an eye out for any new arrivals. As soon as a new girl turns up, you can guarantee he’ll be the one jumping in to offer her a warm welcome to the parish…which’ll quite likely involve a dinner and a romantic drive by sunset beach…

Read more

Audio Rosary

So, a while back, my fiancée (back in the days when she was just my girlfriend) said she wanted me to record the rosary onto MP3 for her.

Well, our anniversary is coming up this week, so I thought now would be a good time to finally do it. So today I’m going to do four posts, one for each set of mysteries. Here’s the RSS feed:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/AudioRosary

UPDATE (10th May 2020): I have also added The Divine Mercy Chaplet.

1 … 30 31 32 33 34 … 137