Monergists, i.e. Calvinists and some Lutherans, claim that man cannot cooperate with God in salvation, because that would detract from God’s glory. I think that by God’s glory they mean something like “God appearing very impressive to everyone.” They probably mean additional though related things, like God doing whatever he wants. But let’s stick with […]
Okay, the penny finally dropped. I kept coming across the observation that the Catholic Church has not an infallible list of infallible doctrines. [1] At first, this observation concerning the lack of an infallibly taught, exhaustive list of infallibles (which list is just one among the infinite number of non-existent infallible things) seemed to me to […]
Catholics claim that when Jesus Christ established his Church, he permanently endowed her with a Magisterium that can teach infallibly on matters of faith and morals. Protestants deny this claim, appealing instead to the sole infallible authority of Sacred Scripture. Catholics respond to the principle of sola scriptura in various ways, including the claim that apart […]
The idea that the Church is a spiritual communion, identified and unified by sharing the same faith and sacraments, while excellent as an affirmation, is inadequate as a definition of the Church that Christ founded, since this idea fails to account for the governmental and hierarchical principle of the Church, as symbolized by the keys […]
The title of this post comes from the famous pun of Pope St. Gregory the Great, which he made upon meeting children from England in the slave market at Rome, as recorded by the Venerable Bede in his Ecclesiastical History of England (Book II, Chapter I): “not Angles, but Angels.” This encounter, according to Bede, prompted the Pope to […]
Yesterday, John Henry Newman was formally beatified by Pope Benedict XVI. Newman is considered by many to be the (de facto) patron saint of converts. In what follows, I will share some of Newman’s insights on conversion, particularly as concerns the intellectual reception and expression of Catholic doctrine on the part of the convert.
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 […]
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. The whole thing is called “The Last Road.”
N. T. Wright’s Justification: God’s Plan and Paul’s Vision (Downer’s Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2009) is a somewhat polemical response to his Reformed critics, in which Wright summarizes and defends his understanding of St. Paul’s doctrine of justification. For me, the book has proven to be both illuminating and frustrating. This post began as a chronicle […]
Robert Frost’s poem “Mending Wall” was first published in 1914, near the beginning of the Great War. This coincidence suggests a double analogy which I want to draw by deploying the poem as a proxy for my conception of the complex nature of the relationship between Catholicism and Protestantism.
