I am currently in the middle of Trent Horn‘s latest book, Hard Sayings. In his book, he spends some time discussing the objections raised by critics of the Bible as they interpret Genesis’ account of creation. Just as I was finishing this section of the book, my friend Len shared the following video his Facebook wall:
This video is a 2015 episode of FocusToday, an interview programme which is part of a Christian apostolate. In this particular episode, Jimmy Akin, apologist at Catholic Answers, is interviewed concerning the Catholic interpretation of the first few chapters of the Book of Genesis. As usual, Jimmy discusses the issue in a clear and measured way.
At around the twenty-eight minute mark, the interviewer and Jimmy are joined by John Mittendorf who is associated with the ministry Answers In Genesis. He takes about ten minutes to respond to Jimmy’s position, after which Jimmy has an opportunity to respond, marked as always with his characteristic gentleness.
As many of you know, I recently moved back from Seattle to my old stomping ground of sunny San Diego. Unfortunately, I didn’t manage to get back in time for the Catholic Answers Summer Series where the speakers from the local apologetics apostolate give talks at different parishes around the Diocese. Fortunately, they’re available online!
A friend recently expressed interest in getting to know the Early Church Fathers so I said that I would put together a brief (hah!) list of resources.
I was first introduced to the Early Church Fathers by Marcellino D’Ambrosio while I was on a retreat in England. He regaled us with some of the many colourful stories from the Early Church, such as the election of St. Ambrose to Bishop of Milan. Since St. Ambrose will be my roommate’s Patron Saint when he’s received into the Church next year I’ll make sure I write about that sometime soon…
Audio Resources
This initial introduction to the Fathers by Dr. D’Ambrosio was later supplemented by the excellent lecture series given by Dr. Lawrence Feingold to the Association of Hebrew Catholics. Dr. Feingold takes the listener through a tour of the Early Church, focussing upon the issues in that Church, such the call to martyrdom, as the relationship between faith and reason, and the Arian heresy.
If you would like to get a deeper grounding in Christian history (which is, itself, the story of the Fathers), I highly recommend the extensive series of lectures by Fr. Michael Witt. If you get through the Early Church period, don’t worry! You don’t have to stop there since he also covers Church history up until the present day… 🙂
So those are a number of audio resources, but what about books?
Websites
There are several websites which provide a handy concordance for the Fathers, such as ChurchFathers.org.
Books
Mike Aquilina has written a number of very accessible books on the subject and I would particularly recommend his book The Fathers of the Church as it gives a good, brief survey of the Patristic period. If you’re interested in the worship of the Early Church he also has a very readable book entitled The Mass of the Early Christians.
I know a lot of people were first introduced to Patristics through The Four Witnesses by Rod Bennett, which focusses just four Fathers: Clement, Ignatius, Justin and Irenaeus. Likewise, if you would like to focusses more in depth on specific Fathers, Dr. Howell has a great couple of books which focus on Clement, Ignatius and Polycarp.
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A new excellent reference book came out recently from Jimmy Akin entitled The Fathers Know Best. It is a book which arranges the writings of the Church Fathers by topic. For example, have you ever wanted to know what the Fathers thought about contraception? Well, with Jimmy’s book you can just flip to that topic and read, in chronological order, extracts from the Fathers on that subject.
Ad Fontes!
Finally, I would invite anyone wishing to get to know the Fathers better to actually get down and read the works themselves. I have several works available on this website in my Patristics section, together with MP3 recordings of the text. If you want to see what the Fathers thought about the Gospel readings at Mass each week, I’d suggest consulting the Catena Aurea. For further reading, I would recommend the Ancient Christian Writers series. The translation is excellent and there are a good number of explanatory endnotes.
So there you go! Hopefully that wasn’t too overwhelming! Pick which way works best for you and get stuck in! Get to know your Christian family 🙂
You may have been hearing recently about a guy called Joseph Atwill who is going around saying that he has proof that Jesus was a piece of Roman fiction. If any of your friends post about this on Facebook, I’d invite you to post in response a link to the following article by Catholic Answers apologist, Jimmy Akin.
Jimmy decimates Atwill’s hypothesis. Jimmy can do this because, quite frankly, Atwill’s assertions are utterly ridiculous and probably the worst “mythist” theory I’ve ever heard…
Did you know that Catholic Answers are having an apologetics conference in September? You’ve got until the end of the month to qualify for the early bird discount!
Hippolytus was an Early Church Father who lived in 3rd Century Rome and the story of his life is a particularly colourful one. He was the first Anti-Pope of the Catholic Church, setting himself up as Bishop of Rome in competition with with Pope Callixtus, and later with his successors Urban and Pontianus.
Yet, despite all this, we also call him Saint Hippolytus. How did the first Anti-Pope also manage to be declared a Saint of the Catholic Church? Good Question! Jimmy Akin has the Catholic answer…
Quite some time ago in the JP2 Group we read through Apostolic Tradition, a work attributed to St. Hippolytus. I have just finished recording the text onto MP3:
One of the posts I was working on in my draft folder was the Catholic conception of salvation. I’ve got a bit of writer’s block at the moment (more due to lack of time than anything else), so I’ll just let Jimmy explain it…
I am currently in the middle of Trent Horn‘s latest book, Hard Sayings. In his book, he spends some time discussing the objections raised by critics of the Bible as they interpret Genesis’ account of creation. Just as I was finishing this section of the book, my friend Len shared the following video his Facebook wall:
One of the posts I was working on in my draft folder was the Catholic conception of salvation. I’ve got a bit of writer’s block at the moment (more due to lack of time than anything else), so I’ll just let Jimmy explain it…