Tag: featured

Christian Hypocrites: The Sanctuary and the Stage

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The word “hypocrite” is used to describe Christians so regularly these days that it’s practically a cliché. What people intend to communicate when they describe Christians in this way is that Christians say one thing and yet do another.

In particular, they object to the fact that Christians say that one should not sin and yet they sin! As a result, some people think that the moniker of “hypocrite” is both justified and appropriate. Unfortunately, that’s not what the word means…

You keep using that word

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Remembering the Jewish Feasts

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WeirdSometimes I forget I’m a bit weird…

Do you have habits which have been part of you for years? Do you have personal traditions which you’ve been following for so long that you forget that they’re not universally shared by the rest of the world?

Well, last month I was chatting with a friend online and he highlighted for me one of my personal eccentricities. Our discussion prompted me to write this post so as to share my weirdness with the world, and in the faint hope of discovering others out there who have similar quirks…

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Knowing the New Mass Translation “By Heart”

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For those of you who are unaware, the Mass in the English-speaking world is soon to change.  The text of the current Mass which we’ve used for the last fifty years is a paraphrase of the original Latin, which itself had been in use for the previous 500 years. The English translation is being revised and replaced with a translation which is much more faithful to the original Latin text. You can hear a BBC recording of the new translation here.

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Great Apostasy Questions

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A while back, I produced a post in which I listed some Canon Questions, some specific questions I ask when talking to non-Catholics about the Table of Contents found in their Bible. Following my post concerning my recent encounter with a Jehovah’s Witness, I’ve decided to do another post similar to my Canon Questions, but this time concerning the “Great Apostasy”, the belief that that the Church effectively disappeared from the earth some time after Christ’s death.

Apostasy

Groups like the Mormons hold to the Great Apostasy and use this as an explanation for the significant differences between their doctrine and the doctrine of historic Christianity. Muslims hold to this narrative too, to justify the teachings of Muhammad which stand in stark contradiction to the New Testament. Additionally, most Protestant groups, while typically not holding such a radical version of this doctrine, usually hold to some variation of it, saying that somewhere along the line the Church went off-track in a rather major way.

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Lectionary Notes: The Seed of Life

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15th Sunday In Ordinary Time: 10th July, 2011

Each week I produce notes for the upcoming Sunday Gospel for the Bible Study at St. John’s.

It’s a mixture of my own random thoughts, combined with what I’ve found in commentaries, sermons. I’m toying with the idea of publishing them here each week, so this is a bit of a test-drive…

If you think you’d find it helpful if I posted this each Monday evening, please let me know.

The Readings for this week focus around Jesus’ “Parable of the Sower”…
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Christian Nation?

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The other week I saw this on Facebook:

christian-nation

Now, I don’t have a particular dog i this fight. Whether the United States was founded on Christian values doesn’t make an iota of difference as to whether Christianity is true. Having said that, I was rather dubious about the claims of this meme, so I did a bit of a googling…

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