Not that long ago, Scott Clark and Robert Godfrey, professors at Westminster Seminary California, posted a podcast in which they discuss the question of why some Evangelical Christians, including some Calvinists, convert to the Catholic Church. It is hard to pass up the chance to hear someone else’s reaction to one’s own story, so I tuned [...]
Like our readers, the writers at Called to Communion have many calls to answer and are in some cases extraordinarily busy in our personal lives. We are so grateful for the opportunity, in this forum, to share our faith in Christ and his Church, to engage in ecumenical dialogue with our separated brothers and sisters, [...]
Last weekend, Called to Communion’s Tim Troutman and I got together for drinks with a fellow that Tim sponsored in his parish’s RCIA program. In the course of the conversation, I mentioned that I had been reading the transcripts and other documents pertaining to the Peter Leithart trial in the Pacific Northwest Presbytery of the [...]
The Byzantine Liturgical Year kicks off with two feasts that are also observed, on the same dates, in the Roman Rite: the Feast of the Nativity of the Theotokos and the Exaltation of the Holy Cross. The latter, which we observe today (September 14), is an appropriately paradoxical feast, being also a fast.
Today is the celebration the birth of Mary, the Mother of our Lord. This feast is observed on September 8 in both the Roman and Byzantine rites. The Gospel appointed for the feast, in the Roman Rite, is Matthew 1:1-16. This passage, like Luke 3:23-38, presents the genealogy of Jesus. It is curious that both Evangelists chose [...]
Our first article at Called to Communion called attention to the sanctification of time in the Reformed tradition; namely, the observance of the first day of the week, Sunday, as the Christian Sabbath. Although there are some differences between Catholics and Reformed Protestants concerning the meaning and observance of the Lord’s Day, there is general [...]
Easter (Pascha) homily of St. John Chrysostom
Carl Trueman is encouraged by reports that a huge number of people have left the Catholic Church. When I saw this, I assumed that the data to which he refers shows that these ex-Catholics had come to embrace the Protestant doctrine of justification.
As a scholar, a writer and a theologian, C. S. Lewis was very much a medieval man. Reality was for him full and orderly and magnificent, but neither starched nor stifling, kind of like the Byzantine liturgy. With Lewis, whether we visit Perelandra or Purgatory, we feel that this too has its proper place in [...]
At a recent conference in Calgary, Alberta, Fr. Aidan Nichols OP discussed Pope Benedict XVI’s ecumenical vision that led to the Apostolic Constitution, Anglicanorum coetibus. Fr. Nichols also addressed the liturgical dimension of the new Constitution, which invites groups of Anglicans to corporately enter into full communion with the Catholic Church, bringing their distinctive patrimony [...]
