Tomorrow is Ash Wednesday. It is the beginning of Lent in the western Church, a 40-day season of penance. During this time, Christians traditionally show our sorrow for our sins by making a voluntary sacrifice, and possibly by taking up additional forms of self-discipline. These are, contra pop culture, to be done discretely, privately, without [...]

June 4 is the feast of St. Optatus, a fourth-century bishop of Milevis, in Numidia, about ten miles from the Mediterranean Sea on the coast of northern Africa in what is now Algeria. He was a convert to the Catholic faith, and an African by birth, according to St. Jerome. He died around AD 385, [...]

The great Anglican liturgical historian, Gregory Dix, published this fantastic study of the history of the Christian liturgy (though he humbly refers to it as an introduction) in January 1945 while World War 2 was still raging. At over 750 pages in small print it’s not one of those books you finish over the weekend [...]

In honor of the great Marian feast tomorrow, the Immaculate Conception, I would like to repost some material from my personal blog: a book review on one of the best popular level historical surveys of Mary available. “Mary Through the Centuries,” published in 1998, was written by one of the preeminent Church historians of the [...]

Within the Reformed blogosphere there has lately been put forth some pretty bold claims regarding the structure of the church in the first century, particularly the structure of the Roman Church. Basically the argument is that in the first century the church did not have a monarchical bishop and was instead ruled by a group [...]

If you could travel in time and attend a Christian worship service in the first century, what would it be like? Would a Presbyterian feel at home? How about a Catholic? The following is a re-recording of a lecture I gave to a group in Charlotte, NC last year on the subject of “liturgy in [...]

The period of persecution under Decius in the middle of the third century and the subsequent controversies in Italy and Northern Africa is one of the most confusing periods of ante-Nicene Church history. So much writing has survived that we are able to bring a lot of characters into play. To make things more confusing, [...]

At the heart of the separation of Catholics and Protestants lies a disagreement about the ecclesial hierarchy. Who are the rightful shepherds of Christ’s flock? This article will examine the Catholic Church’s doctrine of the sacrificial priesthood, and in doing so, will lay the foundation for our subsequent discussion on the critical issue of apostolic [...]