Today, August 15, is the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin Mary into Heaven. On this day, the universal Church celebrates what took place at the end of our Blessed Mother’s earthly life. “The Immaculate Mother of God, the ever Virgin Mary, having completed the course of her earthly life, was assumed body and […]

Terry Johnson Terry Johnson, senior minister of Independent Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Savannah, Ga., wrote an article titled “Our Collapsing Ecclesiology” in the March issue of the Orthodox Presbyterian Church’s magazine New Horizons. The article is well worth reading, because it examines the recent trends in Evangelicalism away from attendance in Sunday morning services, even […]

*Update* I have made finding my responses to critics easier by linking to them at the end of the post. When I first began to take interest in theology, and in Reformed theology in particular, during college, I learned the story of how the Catholic Church closed herself off to serious study of the Holy […]

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, […]

Yesterday (May 24) was the feast day of St. Vincent of Lérins, a soldier who became a monk at the monastery in Lérins, and wrote his famous Commonitory in AD 434, three years after the third Ecumenical Council at Ephesus, and seventeen years before the Ecumenical Council of Chalcedon. Because Protestants generally accept both those […]

Did Jesus provide for the continuing transmission of the Christian faith? What a simple and foundational question! And yet, oddly, it is one that Protestant apologists rarely ask. In the history of Protestant apologetics, great emphasis is placed on how we recognize the inspiration of Scripture (Church authority vs. internal witness of the Spirit), the […]

Readers of this website are by now thoroughly familiar with Keith Mathison’s book The Shape of Sola Scriptura. His thesis has already received ample criticism (see articles by Cross & Judisch, Liccione, and Judisch), and I do not wish to add to that particular discussion. In this post, I would like instead to grant Mathison […]

Today in the liturgical calendar we celebrate the Feast of the Chair of St. Peter the Apostle. According to an ancient tradition, February 22 was the day Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter, and gave to him the keys of the Kingdom of Heaven. (Matt. 16:19) The Catholic Encyclopedia article on the chair of St. […]

This is a guest post by Michael Liccione, who is well known to regular readers of Called To Communion. Michael earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania and his B.A. in philosophy and religion at Columbia University. He has taught at a number of institutions, including UPenn, St. Francis College, the Catholic […]

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 […]