Jesus Christ, “given unto us” (Isa 9.6): This true Man has been the subject of the mostsublime contemplation, worship, and love imaginable for over two thousand years. Even agnostics marvel over his Person and teachings. And His enemies, of whatever variety, obsess over Him to this very day. For in that crib, the Church attests,… Read More Jesus Christ, Light of the World
First, the Problem. The famous Thomist philosopher Etienne Gilson writes, surely accurately, in his Christian Philosophy of St. Thomas Aquinas, “… at the very place where the Summa of Alexander and the Commentary of St. Bonaventure undertake to show that the existence of God is evident, St. Thomas devotes an article to proving that it… Read More Gilson, Saint Thomas and The Self-Attesting God
Biblical Interpretation in Crisis. On the Question of the Foundations: and Approaches of Exegesis Today by Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 1988 In Wladimir Solowjew’s History of the Antichrist, the eschatological enemy of the Redeemer recommended himself to believers, among other things, by the fact that he had earned his doctorate in theology at Tübingen and had… Read More Biblical Interpretation in Crisis — Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, 1988
Full length presentation below. “A fascinating new look at the biblical, historical, and scientific evidence for Creation and the Flood. Learn from more than a dozen scientists and scholars as they explore the world around us in light of Genesis. St. Alphonsus Liguori: “It is a certain rule, received in common by all, that the… Read More Is Genesis History?
…he seems to express a kind of anxiety or apprehension here about the obvious problem of the magisterium as he “comes out of the closet” and reveals himself to be an eschatological “universalist”. Dear Dr. Chapp: A point towards the clarification of thought from a layman and obvious non-theologian: Despite making many interesting —even profound—… Read More A Note to the Always Interesting Dr. Larry Chapp on Hell
I arise todayThrough a mighty strength, the invocation of the Trinity,Through a belief in the Threeness,Through confession of the OnenessOf the Creator of creation. I arise todayThrough the strength of Christ’s birth and His baptism,Through the strength of His crucifixion and His burial,Through the strength of His resurrection and His ascension,Through the strength of His… Read More The Prayer and Breast plate of St. Patrick Against All Harms
Updated. “If you like Wokeism then Michel Foucault is your Guy… I confess I find challenging Foucault’s later work on sexuality…Can we be a little more modest about the claims we make? … The very people who gave us our Natural Law morality, it’s clear in the platonic dialogues, sex between an older man and… Read More Barron Sketches Michel Foucault
He rescued Adam and Eve from obscurity, devised the doctrine of original sin—and the rest is sexual history. By Stephen Greenblatt.The New Yorker.June 12, 2017. Note: the italics in the above title of this essay were not in the original but have been supplied here. SH. One day in 370 C.E., a sixteen-year-old boy and… Read More How St. Augustine “Invented” Sex
Jesus Christ Shows That Suffering and Peace are not Opposites. We have all been brought up in a culture—which is increasingly becoming a global culture—which says that, through some uncanny stroke of good (?) “luck, ” or “chance” we have been born into theworld; we exist; so now we have to squeeze every last pleasure… Read More Suffering: Breaking With Sin. 1 Pet. 4.
Is A Personal God Improbable? Or is it we who are improbable?Atheism has traditionally scoffed at belief in a God who is Personal or SupraPersonal. I’ve always found their position to be a counterintuitive curiosity. One of the reasons why is that I find myself, a personal being, to exist. I am here. You are… Read More I Am Therefore I Think
Weaponizing Jesus, Flowers, Rainbows… It was never a controversy about skin color for Catholics, despite NCRs disingenuous claims. The problem went much, much, deeper. “First unveiled on NBC’s Today Show in 2000, Janet McKenzie’s painting, Jesus of the People was the first place winner of the National ‘Catholic’ Reporter’s global competition to identify an image of Jesus… Read More Why NCRs Androgynous ‘Jesus 2000’ Was a Problem
“Only the God of Jesus Christ is the living God [Jn. 14:16]. As has also been stated in the Dogmatic Constitution on Divine Revelation Dei Verbum (no. 3), the first God mentioned above—the God of the philosophers—is the fruit of human thought, of human speculation, and capable of saying something valid about God . In… Read More John Paul II on the Only Name Under Heaven
“Abortion is often talked about as a grave act. But bringing a new life into the world can feel like the decision that more clearly risks being a moral mistake…The fact that a quarter of women, regardless of their beliefs, also decide to end pregnancies at some point in their lifetimes: are they not acting… Read More The New Yorker: Is Abortion Sacred?
I admire much that Jordan Peterson has done and said. Very much. But I cannot accept his thought entirely regarding the question of Meaning in our lives and times, which he and others have publicly discussed, and which many admire. To the contrary, it is Jesus Christ, “the same yesterday, today and forever” (Heb. 13:8),… Read More Jordan Peterson on Meaning
“One body, one Spirit, one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one Father of us all” — Eph. 4: 4-6 Every ecclesial community brings its tradition(s) to bear in the exegesis and understanding of Scripture. Even independent Protestant Fundamentalist pastors and larger Protestant denominations employ their traditions [i.e., their received community understanding of texts] as a… Read More Catholicism, Tradition and Protestantism
John E. Fagan “Faith and reason are like two wings on which the human spirit rises to the contemplation of truth; and God has placed in the human heart the desire to know the truth — in a word, to know himself — so that by knowing and loving God, men and women can come… Read More John Paul II on Faith, Reason and Nihilism
The Figures Behind the Evangelists. By Frederick W. Marks.The New Oxford Review.Dec. 2021. One of the most powerful arguments for the reliability of the Gospels is the fact that two of them were written by eyewitnesses: Matthew and John. There is another fact, however, that is equally important. The other two evangelists, Mark and Luke,… Read More The Gospels of Peter & Mary
Regis Martin.Crisis Magazine. What would you call someone who lives off the substance of a faith he no longer believes in, a faith every detail of which he despises, including the Church founded by Christ to give it expression; one who makes, by the way, a very good living teaching theology at a Catholic University… Read More Hijackers of the Word
Recent discoveries are making Jewish, secular and agnostic scholars reconsider a century’s worth of skepticism towards the New Testament accounts of Jesus. (Pinned Dec. 18, 2022) By Robert Hutchinson, via The Blaze.com. The entrance to the Mary of Nazareth International Center in central Nazareth doesn’t look like much. It’s just a simple doorway off narrow… Read More New Discoveries About Jesus of Nazareth
Note: Mary Daly died in January 2010 It is good to be tolerant, even of incoherent things, we are told today. The devil himself ought to be given a seat at the table. So the courts have ruled. But that can’t stop us from noticing that Mary Daly represents the meltdown of the dissident transgressive… Read More Mary Daly: The Witch of Boston College
John Waters, IrelandDec 5 The desecration implicit in the proposal to reconstruct the basilica of Notre-Dame in the image of Woke may announce the culmination of a shift in human consciousness that began centuries ago. I remember well the morning of April 16th 2019, waking up in a hospital bed, to a message from a… Read More Burning Down God’s House. The Age of Unreason.
” a thing cannot be and not be at the same time”— St. Thomas (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book 1, chap. 84) “…reason’s first principle is the principle of contradiction. He who denies this principle affirms a self-destructive sentence. To deny this principle is to annihilate language, is to destroy all substance, all distinction between things, all… Read More Reason and The Law of Non-Contradiction.
Whatever our expressed agreements with some of the moral aspects of issues on either side, like Jesus the Lord very many of us Christians refuse political zealots on both the Left and on the Right. We seek no partisan revolution. In the final sense we know we are pilgrims. We know our Kingdom is not… Read More Our Kingdom is Not of This World
“What is man, that thou art mindful of him: or the son of man, that thou visitest him? Thou hast made him a little lower than the angels: thou hast crowned him with glory and honour, and hast set him over the works of thy hands: Thou hast subjected all things under his feet”—Heb 2:5-7… Read More The “Scientific” and Philosophical New Order
In 1954 the famous Thomist, Josef Pieper wrote: “Once, and as soon as, world dominion in the full sense has become possible, the Antichrist has become possible. To this corresponds the other coordinate fact that the Christian gospel must have reached the totality of the peoples of the earth, who have been rendered accessible to… Read More Thomist Josef Pieper on the Pseudo-Order and World Dominion of the AntiChrist.
The Gospel of John. Chapter 1. [The divinity and incarnation of Christ. John bears witness of him. He begins to call his disciples.] [1] In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God. [2] The same was in the beginning with God. [3] All things were made… Read More The Revolutionary Mosaic Law
Cardinal Gerhard Mueller (Former CDF Prefect) on the New TLM Restrictions: Unity is not sterile uniformity. “The clear intent is to condemn the Extraordinary Form to extinction in the long run.”
outlook “The Philosophy of Science challenges a fundamental facet of the modern outlook: that science as such can answer ultimate questions about ourselves, the universe, and God. Disdaining mere discussion or mordant criticism of purely scientific conclusions, Sheen opens science to a realm of thought commonly diminished at best and denigrated at worst: the metaphysical.… Read More Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, The Philosophy of Science
“Truth is declarative being” LAST week, I began what I intend to be a three-part study of the cardinal virtue of prudence using the insights of the German Catholic philosopher, Dr. Josef Pieper, with an eye to current events. There is a lot of repetition in Dr. Pieper’s book, The Four Cardinal Virtues, but it… Read More Knowing the Real, Doing the Good. Bro. Andre Marie.
Bishop’s Encyclopedia of Religion, Society and Philosophy Jesus Mythicism As Dan Brown in his book The Da Vinci Code writes, “Nothing in Christianity is original.” Much is meant by Brown’s words. It is in recent times that a number of people are claiming that Jesus is simply a rehash of older pagan secretive religions, and… Read More Mythology: Reasons Why Scholars Know Jesus Is Not A Copy Of Pagan Religions
Jesus Christ the Lord, Life, Death and Creation Romans 5: 12 Therefore, just as sin entered the world through one man, and death through sin, and in this way death came to all people, because all sinned— 13 To be sure, sin was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not charged against anyone’s account… Read More A Mature Universe
Jesus Christ is “the image of the invisible God.” — Col. 1:15 St. John Damascene, b. 675, Damascus; d. December 4, 749, near Jerusalem. He writes to Christians against the iconoclasts, “The Scripture says, ‘You have not seen the likeness of Him [the Holy Trinity: one God three Persons].’ How then depict the invisible? How… Read More St. John Damascene Against the Iconoclasts
Catholic Critique 