Tomorrow marks the thirty-third anniversary of my first Holy Communion, a day that I remember vividly and with great fondness. My firstborn son, Joshua, is preparing for his first Communion, and over the last few months we have been engaged in some wonderful conversations as he explores the mystery of the Eucharist.
For years now, our family bedtime ritual has included time for Scripture reading, followed by some basic theological reflection and prayer. I have always marveled at how...
Forty-five years ago, a quiet gentlemen from Northern Italy named Giovanni Battista Montini caused a big stir with a little pamphlet. The stir was not because his pamphlet said anything new but because many people were hoping that it would say something new, and it did not. Instead, it courageously restated what the world had known for (I do not exaggerate) thousands of years. History remembers Giovanni Battista Montini as Pope Paul VI and his pamphlet as Humanae Vitae,...
I was never fed in the Catholic Church.
How many times have you heard a former Catholic say this? When I was an Evangelical Christian it was probably the most common response I heard from Catholics when asked why they had left the Church. The sad truth is that most of these lapsed Catholics were never properly catechized, so they became easy targets for Protestants who were only too eager to help them abandon the sacraments and join a church that "feeds you...
My blog post "Should I Attend the Wedding or Not?" prompted several questions and comments last week that I would like to address.
One reader asked about the validity of a Catholic marrying an Orthodox Christian in an Orthodox Church without a dispensation from his bishop. In the interest of ecumenism, the Code of Canon Law is less rigid in such a case. The Catholic party still has a...
Many atheists say that all arguments for the existence of God are just fallacious “God-of-the-gaps” reasoning. They claim that any evidence offered for the existence of God, such as the beginning, contingency, and fine-tuning of the universe, are nothing more than appeals to ignorance. These arguments are supposedly on par with primitive explanations of natural events (such as lightning) that erroneously included God as a direct cause. Modern arguments for theism are likewise lampooned as...
"What a man is in the sight of God, so much he is and no more."
