Recently I was contacted by someone who just had a relative die.
The family will be getting together this Friday and, as most of the family is not Catholic, they do not observe abstinence from meat during Lent.
Furthermore, this person knew for a fact that a meat dish was being prepared for the family gathering.
What are this person's options?
Option 1: Don't eat the dish
There are several variants here:
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Unlike most converts from various strains of Protestantism, I never had much of a problem with the Blessed Virgin Mary. Perhaps it was because my Christian background was more or less nominal and lacking a good deal of Christian catechesis. Or perhaps it was because I had a natural attraction to the idea of saintly intercession and the communion of the saints.
Whatever the reason, I did not have difficulty accepting the Marian dogmas, and I enjoyed the folk piety of ordinary lay...
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I admit it. I’m eBook phobic. Thin metal tablets that can hold hundreds if not thousands of books scare me. It’s not the technology that I find so scary; it's our obsession with it. For most of us, our need to carry around a small library in a container the size of a small book is not so much out of need but just because we can.
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How should one respond to the old schoolboy retort, “If everything needs a cause, who caused God?”
First, philosophers and theologians do not maintain that whatever exists needs a cause. Instead, they propose that certain things need causes, such as things that have a beginning or things that don’t have to exist.
If something came into existence at a certain point in time—that is, if it had a beginning—then there needs to be a cause, an explanation, for why it came to be. But...
"Finding the large-print version of "The Imitation of Christ" was one of my greatest discoveries."
