Tag: featured

Quick Apology: Potential Life?

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In January there was the annual “March For Life” in Washington DC. Unfortunately, I couldn’t go this year, but thanks to Facebook, I got to defend life in a different way, through Facebook. Many of my pro-life friends posted about the March on Facebook, and these posts were not without their detractors…

unborn

The Objection

As I browsed my newsfeed, one objection which was made repeatedly was some variation of the following:

“The fetus is a potential life”

Is this true? How might we respond to this statement?
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USCCB appoints new spokesman for Meatless Fridays

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Two days ago, Cardinal Dolan gave his presidential address to the US Bishops. In his speech, he focused on the need for penance and suggested the possible reintroduction of the traditional Catholic practice of abstaining from meat on Fridays:

What an irony that despite the call of the Second Vatican Council for a renewal of the Sacrament of Penance, what we got instead was its near disappearance….

The work of our Conference during the coming year includes reflections on re-embracing Friday as a particular day of penance, including the possible re-institution of abstinence on all Fridays of the year, not just during Lent.

It appears that Cardinal Dolan is moving forward with this initiative, since we have just heard on Facebook that the bishops have appointed a new advocacy spokesman, Gollum:

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Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 8 (“Is Christianity Hard Or Easy?”)

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Book-4

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

1. Becoming a “son of God” is the entire point of Christianity

What I want to make clear is that this is not one among many jobs a Christian has to do; and it is not a sort of special exercise for the top class. It is the whole of Christianity. Christianity offers nothing else at all.

2. Becoming a “son of God” is not the same thing as “being good”

And I should like to point out how it differs from ordinary ideas of “morality” and “being good.”

(a) A person typically begins by recognizing the demands of the Moral Law upon his desires

We take as starting point our ordinary self with its various desires and interests. We then admit that something else call it “morality”… has claims on this self: claims which interfere with its own desires… Some of the things the ordinary self wanted to do turn out to be what we call “wrong”: well, we must give them up. Other things…turn out to be what we call “right”: well, we shall have to do them.

(b) We secretly hope that once we have met these demands, the natural self will be free to do what it wants

But we are hoping all the time that when all the demands have been met, the poor natural self will still have some chance, and some time, to get on with its own life and do what it likes.

(c) However, this will not work

…if you are really going to try to meet all the demands made on the natural self, it will not have enough left over to live on. The more you obey your conscience, the more your conscience will demand of you. And your natural self, which is thus being starved and hampered and worried at every turn, will get angrier and angrier.

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TEA: Evangelization For The Terrified (SPC Retreat)

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Terrified

I know I said I wouldn’t be posting during Lent, but this weekend I gave a talk, “Evangelization for the terrified”, at the San Pedro Calungsod Young Adult Retreat in San Diego and promised that I’d upload the audio the following week, together with links to the resources I mentioned in my talk.

The Talk

Evangelization For The Terrified – Extended Edition (Download)

Unfortunately, the original recording has the last ten minutes cut off… 🙁 Fortunately, I just re-recorded the entire talk here at home. Since I didn’t have the time restrictions I had on the retreat, this recording is a little longer. Think of it as the Director’s Cut or the Extended Edition, which includes ten minutes of never-before-heard material!

Referenced Resources

David and SarahI began my talk by referencing the Papal Encyclical Evangelization In The Modern World.

When I speak about learning your faith, I mention a number of low-cost services which will help you learn the Catholic Faith:

FORMED (Catholic Answers)
ClaritasU (Brandon Vogt)
New St. Thomas Institute (Dr. Taylor Marshall)

I also mentioned recommend the following sites which are completely free:

Institute of Catholic Culture
St. Paul Center for Biblical Theology

I mention that you can buy cheap books/CDs/DVDs to give away from Dynamic Catholic.

For staying up-to-date with Catholicism in the media, I recommend listening to Hearts & Minds and the Don Johnson Show.

If you would like lots of good examples of how seasoned apologists engage non-Catholics, please check out Catholic Answers Live.

The talk was concluded with a retelling of the story of the Sun and the Wind from Aesop’s Fables.

“Is there life before marriage?”…the video

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A few weeks ago I gave my presentation on “Is there life before marriage?” to the Goretti Group. The audio for that evening is available here, but I just saw that the video has been posted on the Goretti Group’s YouTube Channel:

If you would like the audio version of this presentation, you can download it from the feed on iTunes and Google Play.

You also might be interested to hear the discussion of some of the ideas raised in this talk between myself and Nessa on recent episodes of The Restless Heart podcast (Episode 4 and Episode 6). The podcast itself is available on iTunes and Google Play.

Mere Christianity – Book IV – Chapter 3 (“Time and beyond time”)

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Book-4

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

1. Some people struggle with the idea of prayer

(a) It relates to how God hears prayer

“A man put it to me by saying ‘I can believe in God all right, but what I cannot swallow is the idea of Him attending to several hundred million human beings who are all addressing Him at the same moment.'” 

(b) Specifically, how God can hear prayers at the same time

“Most of us can imagine God attending to any number of applicants if only they came one by one and He had an endless time to do it in. So what is really at the back of this difficulty is the idea of God having to fit too many things into one moment of time”

2. Our trouble stems from how we experience life in time

“Our life comes to us moment by moment One moment disappears before the next comes along: and there is room for very little in each. That is what Time is like”

(a) They assume that God experiences things in the same way

We tend to assume that the whole universe and God Himself are always moving on from past to future just as we do. But many learned men do not agree with that. It was the Theologians who first started the idea that some things are not in Time at all: later the Philosophers took it over: and now some of the scientists are doing the same.

(b) However, God is not in Time

“His life does not consist of moments following one another. If a million people are praying to Him at ten-thirty tonight, He need not listen to them all in that one little snippet which we call ten-thirty. Ten-thirty-and every other moment from the beginning of the world-is always the Present for Him”

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