This is the third in a three part series. Part One may be read here.1 In this post, I want to make a few remarks about how language, particularly in its stylistic or aesthetic aspect, relates to reality. I will do this by way of briefly indicating how Middle Earth is rooted in language, and [...]
This is not exactly a story, though it is partly autobiographical, and partly allegorical, or perhaps just highly allusive. Mostly, it is a farrago, which I must have written after reading something by Belloc. Anyway, I found it, finished it, touched it up, and here it is. The whole thing is called “The Last Road.”
N. T. Wright recently penned a response to his Reformed critics (John Piper, in particular), in which he epitomizes and defends his exegetical writings concerning St. Paul’s teaching on justification.1 In my spare time, I have been writing down some reactions to Wright’s response. The book has proven to be both illuminating and frustrating. What [...]
Call it self-defense. So it is. For I cannot allude to Robert Frost’s “Mending Wall” without acknowledging that to do so, in almost any context, might be considered cliche. Speaking of well-explored terrain, one cannot google “Mending Wall” without soon discovering that it was first published in 1914. This coincidence is just begging for an [...]
Okay. This is really just a comment masquerading as a blog post. But its Saturday, when things get slow and standards can be relaxed a bit (right?). Anyway, this is a response to the suggestion that the Catholic Church is worse than Angelina Jolie. Like I said, its Saturday.
I want to follow up on a topic briefly raised in the current lead article (Holy Orders and the Sacrificial Priesthood, Section VI.b.) and in Jonathan Deane’s recent post, Drawn Closer by Scandal? The topic is consecrated celibacy, as required for religious life and the higher Orders of Catholic clergy.
In his recent article on the ecclesiology of the Ravenna Document, Ansgar Santogrossi, O.S.B., mentions four historical forms of relation between the Church (or some sort of religion) and the State.1 Fr. Santogrossi presents this material in the course of explaining the philosophical assumptions under-girding the “ecclesiology of communion” model which largely informs this agreed [...]
Ligonier Ministries recently posted an excerpt from the late John Gerstner’s Primer on Justification. This article, taken together with things he has written elsewhere concerning the nature of faith, manifests an interesting and important inconsistency in Dr. Gerstner’s thinking about justification. Before turning to that problem, I want to make a few comments on the [...]
Towards the end of Leo Tolstoy’s literary masterpiece, Anna Karenina, we find Konstantin Levin, the book’s male protagonist, grasping his way towards an explicit faith in God. Along the way, Levin considers the faith of the Church, but finds himself unable to fully accept her testimony to divine truth.
The Catholic Church dogmatically affirms that Sacred Scripture indeed teaches the salvific efficacy of baptism, where “baptism” refers to the sacrament in which a person is washed with water in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, and “salvation” refers to the bestowal of gifts whereby a person [...]
