Yesterday, in Part I, I shared how I became Catholic in my heart during a Holy Mass with Pope Benedict XVI. Today’s story is less exotic. It happened about a year before I visited Rome and it happened in Fort Worth, Texas.
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.
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 […]
My eldest son is an altar boy. His job sometimes seems mostly symbolic, but there are times when I can tell that his work for the Church is important. In an Eastern parish, we have a clear delineation separating the altar from the rest of the church building. This stock photo from my church website […]
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 […]
On a recent feast in honor of the Mother of God, (I think it was the commemoration of her Dormition), my priest made a great point about Tradition as it is compared to Protestantism. Many times we as Catholics and Orthodox try to explain how it is that our honor which is given to the […]
Becoming Reformed after a six year sojourn in the evangelical world of Calvary Chapel, I was pleased to give up speculations about the end of the world via the notion of an imminent Rapture. There was a lack of historical support for thinking this way, and there was also a pleasing emphasis on Scripture as […]
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 […]
With a title like this, the reader might initially expect a long list of patristic quotes, but I’ll take a different route. In fact, I intend to write this without quoting the fathers even once. Let’s see if I can withstand the temptation. The ante-Nicene Church was, from a political perspective, an illegal network that […]
