Tag: featured

The Kingdom Rosary

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I know I said I wasn’t going to blog any more this month, but I found some time this lunchtime to write down a few thoughts…

Last week at “Theology On Tap” Bernadine Carr gave a talk on the subject of The Beatitudes (“Blessed are the poor in spirit…”). In the run-up to her talk I was reminded of a devotional practice I followed years ago when I was living in Cheltenham…

I found myself drawn to praying with rosary beads, but at that time I didn’t feel comfortable with praying the Marian prayers of the rosary. So what I did was to replace the “Hail Mary”s and “Hail Holy Queen”s with short passages of Scripture and pray with those instead.

An example of this is found below. It is a guide to what could be dubbed the “Kingdom Rosary” or “The Rosary of St. Matthew”.

The Kingdom Rosary (MS Word) | The Kingdom Rosary (PDF)

At the beginning of this month, in preparation for Bernadine’s talk, I began this “Kingdom Rosary” and quickly fell in love with it all over again. It’s really helpful for memorizing Scripture and it’s also much shorter than a traditional Rosary, which is ideal if I’m walking just a couple of blocks to pick up a sandwich for lunch.

If any of you end up doing one of these or have any suggested alterations, please leave a comment below 🙂

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TEA: Getting More Out Of The Mass…in ten minutes (Dodge City)

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Dodge

As I mentioned yesterday, this past weekend I was in Dodge City, Kansas for SKYAC, the Southern Kansas Young Adult Conference.

During the afternoon, I gave one of the “FED Talks”. For those of you familiar with TED Talks, it was of a very similar format. However, whereas TED Talks are short presentations on Technology, Entertainment and Design, the FED Talks in Kansas were focussed on the subjects of Faith, Evangelization and Discipleship.

My own FED presentation was a version of my talk on “Getting More out of the Mass”. Preparing for a ten-minute talk was a surprisingly time-consuming process! It’s hard to clearly communicate something of value in a restricted time window! It completely validated the quotation which is commonly ascribed to Woodrow Wilson:

“If I am to speak ten minutes, I need a week for preparation;
if fifteen minutes, three days;
if half an hour, two days;
if an hour, I am ready now” 

For those of you who would like to hear the full-length version of the talk, I should be giving it in San Diego sometime in May.

Getting More Out Of The Mass (Download)

Camino inaccuracies

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The Way is a movie starring Martin Sheen about a man’s journey across Spain, walking the Camino. While I enjoyed it, there were a few inaccuracies I feel compelled to point out:

1. Rain

If this movie were accurate, there would need to be many more scenes of them walking in the rain.

2. Flies

At no point in the movie do we see the walkers getting irritated by or swatting away flies. Depending on the time of year that you walk the Camino, this is something you have to do quite a bit at certain points.

3. Popping blisters

There needs to be at least one scene where the group are gathered around looking at a blister on someone’s foot. By the end of the scene, that blister must be popped, either voluntarily or involuntarily.

4. Arguing about the relative merits on compeed

Following on from the above scene, there needs to be a sharp disagreement as to the relative merits of compeed.

5. Food

Food is a big part of the Camino. I’d have loved to have seen Sheen’s group gathered around a table more often sharing a meal. They could be discussing whether or not Spanish Red Wine should be considered medicine and why vegetables are so hard to find on the trail. I also think we should see them drinking orange juice and eating Napolitana, two staples of the Camino.

6. Miming

Refusing to learn Spanish, at least one character has to express their sleeping and dietary requirements to a hostel owner through the medium of mime.

Just in case…

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Just in case you didn’t you didn’t realize it, yesterday was April Fools’ Day.

About a month ago, Joe Heschmeyer sent out an email to a number of Catholic bloggers inviting us to do something a little different for April Fools’ Day this year. Rather than doing the typical “fake news story”, he suggested we do some kind of satirical analysis:

…[the] Catholic issues that maybe have crossed your mind, but you think, “This is much too stupid to write a blog post about.”  It treads the fine line between the serious and the absurd.

I had shared with Joe my theories on He-Man, Christian Allegory and Transubstantiation when we got to hang out last November. It seemed to perfectly fit the criterion of “too stupid to write a blog post about”  🙂

Anyway, just in case you missed them, here are some of the other April Fools’ Day offerings out there:

Shameless Popery: How the Summa might address Zombie Uprising
The Thin Veil: “Pope To Blogosphere”
St. Joseph’s Vanguard: “The New Perspective on Peter”
Almost Not Catholic: I Relent!
Young, Evangelical and Catholic: Pope Excommunicates All Of Us!

Prepubescent Marriage in Islam

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  • Qur’an 33:49 states that a waiting period (“Iddah”) is needed if a marriage was consummated. This is to make sure that the woman isn’t pregnant.
  • Qur’an 65:4 outlines three different categories of women regarding the Iddah:
    • Pregnant women whose waiting period ends with the delivery of the child
    • Those who don’t have periods any more have a waiting period of 3 months
    • Those who have never menstruated have to wait 3 months
  • Ibn Kathir’s commentary (14th Century) confirms who this last group is:
    • “The same for the young, who have not reached the years of menstruation. Their `Iddah is three months like those in menopause.”
  • Al-Jalalayn (16th Century) says the same:
    • …and [also for] those who have not yet menstruated, because of their young age, their period shall [also] be three months 
  • Sahih al-Bukhari 5133 and Sunan an-Nasa’i 3378 (among others) confirm that Muhammad married Aisha when she was six and consummated the marriage when she was nine when she was still playing with dolls.

Catholic Dating: “Pursuit”

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Today’s post may be somewhat controversial, but I’d like to talk about this particular topic because it was an aspect of dating which most infuriated me in my early twenties.

In an earlier post, I spoke about a counterfeit, passive masculinity which one often finds within Christianity. However, thanks to writers such John Elridge and Jason Evert, there has been a growing shift with regards to the expected behaviour of men within the Church.

As a result, the ladies are encouraged to expect a lot more from the guys. Courageous valour, rather than niceness is the order of the day. Related to this, you hear constant mention of one word in particular, “pursuit”.

Pursuit

Today I would like to address some of the potential hazards with the idea of pursuit and suggest what can be done to safeguard against them.

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Saints and Sense Of Humour

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I spent the last few days in Vegas on vacation so I’ve been catching up with my blog reading and found that, a couple of days ago, Joe Heschmeyer from Shameless Popery wrote a great post entitled Preparing Ourselves as Tabernacles For The Lord. This is a subject related to my post below. I began writing this entry about a month ago and scheduled it for publishing today – I’m not copying you Joe, honest!

A couple of weeks ago it was the feast day of St. Philip Neri.

Philip was born in Florence in 1515. At about the age of eighteen he experienced a deep conversion of heart and moved to Rome with no money or plan, but simply trusted in God’s providence. He worked for two years as a live-in tutor, but otherwise led a simple life of solitude and prayer.

He studied Philosophy and Theology for about three years but then brought his studies to an abrupt close. He launched a mission to the people of Rome, which was fortunate since, at that time, both the people and the Church of Rome were in a particularly shabby spiritual state.

There are many praiseworthy aspects of Philip’s life which are worth sharing, but the episode I would like to recount here is one which demonstrates his rather cheeky sense of humour…

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