Tag: featured

A little Latin anagram

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I remember some time ago I was reading a book (possibly Bill Bryson’s “The Mother Tongue”) and found out that Latin anagrams were, at one point in history, all the rage. Well, what can you expect? These were the days before YouTube… Anyway, the author then gave an example of a Latin phrase which sounded rather familiar:

“Quid est veritas?”

This is the (rather cynical) question asked of Jesus by Pontius Pilate; what is truth? Well, it turns out that there is a rather appropriate anagram for Pilate’s words:

“Est vir qui adest”

The translation for this is “It is the man who is here”. Cool, huh?

Pilate

The article A little Latin anagram first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

Introduction to Islam (Part 2 of 5: Revelation)

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In yesterday’s blog post I began a brief introduction to Islam.  I focussed primarily on the founding of Islam and Muhammad.

Today I would like to look at the divine revelation which Islam claims to have received, which is found principally in the Qur’an/Koran.

As I said yesterday, I have done my best to ensure factual accuracy in all these posts and have used Islamic sources as much as possible to ensure that I’m not propagating Christian misconceptions of Islam.  I did send this to some Muslim friends for comment, but I have yet to hear back. If you are a follower of Islam and believe that I have misrepresented your religion, please drop me an email and I will remedy the situation.

The Qur’an

As mentioned in my previous post, the Qur’an (literally, “the recitation”) is a compilation of the messages given to Muhammad.

Christians and Muslims understand the concept of scripture differently.  Christians describe the Bible, in the words of St. Paul, as being “God breathed” (theopneustos).  As Dei Verbum explains:

“In composing the sacred books, God chose men and while employed by Him they made use of their powers and abilities, so that with Him acting in them and through them, they, as true authors, consigned to writing everything and only those things which He wanted” – Dei Verbum, Chapter 3

Muslims, on the other hand, view the Qur’an as the word of God in the most literal sense, believing that the text bears no imprint of the writer’s character whatsoever. Rather, they believe that the Qur’an is the literal word of God, dictated to Muhammad, written down verbatim.

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PWJ: S3E21 – TWHF (Pt 2 – Ch 2) – “Troubled Vision”

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Orual has a vision of the King which help her begin to see clearly…

S3E21: “Troubled Visions” (Download)

If you enjoy this episode, you can subscribe manually, or any place where good podcasts can be found (iTunes, Google Play, Podbean, Stitcher, TuneIn and Overcast), as well as on YouTube.

If you’d like to support us and get fantastic gifts, please join us on Patreon.

The Season 3 roadmap is available here.

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Integrating Google Calendar with my Blog

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Hey everyone, this is just a little post to test Google Calendar integration for something I’m working on for a parish website. Below is embedded calendar of the JP2 Group, the young adult community which I used to lead:

Screen Shot 2014-12-03 at 4.11.40 PM

Despite what all the tutorials say, it’s not exactly straight-forward embedding a Google Calendar on a WordPress blog. The calendar is shown in an IFRAME which, unfortunately, WordPress automatically removes when you try to save it. To get around this, I installed an IFRAME plugin and this seemed to do the trick. Thankfully, this issue wouldn’t exist on a regular website 🙂

The article Integrating Google Calendar with my Blog first appeared on RestlessPilgrim.net

New Podcast: Catholic Bytes

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My friend Joe is studying at the North American College in Rome, where he’s surrounded by brilliant English-speaking Catholics from around the globe: classmates, professors, and various luminaries who pass through their halls while doing more important things. Together with some of his classmates, they’ve decided to take advantage of this fact and create a regular Catholic podcast: interviewing experts in liturgy, theology, Church history, and several other fields.

The result is Catholic Bytes podcast (CatholicBytesPodcast.com): it’s designed to be frequent (once or twice a week), short (under 10 minutes), clear (we’ve got multiple reviewers doing quality control), and orthodox. Oh, and the first episode got released today…enjoy 🙂

Qur’an Cover-to-Cover: Day 9 (“The Criterion”)

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muslim

I was on a plane flying to Atlanta today, so I’m a little late, but here are my notes for Surah 25.

Surah 25 – “The Criterion” (Al-Furqan)
The title of this chapter is significant. The “criterion” here is identified as the Qur’an itself. This is principal means by which Muslims “distinguish truth from falsehood and right from wrong”. This definitely is in accordance with my experience of speaking with Muslims: everything is viewed through the lense of the Qur’an.

There are are quite a references to other religions in this surah and, I would say, it identifies Christianity in particular. For example, we are told that “[Allah] has not taken a son and has not had a partner in dominion… But they have taken besides Him [Allah] gods”. This seems to be a fairly clear reference to the Christian belief in the Divine Sonship of Jesus. It is also possibly a reference to His mother, Mary, whom we will encounter in later suwar. A little later we are told that on Judgement Day, those false deities will testify against those who worshipped them, saying that none is worthy of worship but Allah. Those who “commit injustice” in this way are guilty of the sin of Shirk and will therefore “taste a great punishment”.

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