My book The Mystery of the Magi was published a few years ago, and in it I made two astounding claims: First, that the Magi really did exist. The story is not a fairytale invented by the early church. Second, that the Magi came from the neighboring kingdom of Nabatea--that is the trading nation that occupied present [...]
Conservatives like to bemoan the "liberals" but I like to bemoan the "literals". These are the Christians who insist on taking every aspect and word of the Bible literally. There are two kinds of "literals"--both conservatives and liberals, and both have their roots in the Protestant doctrine of sola Scriptura. Sola Scriptura is that man-made, late invented doctrine [...]
From the Office of Readings - a sermon by Pope St Leo the Great Dearly beloved, today our Saviour is born; let us rejoice. Sadness should have no place on the birthday of life. The fear of death has been swallowed up; life brings us joy with the promise of eternal happiness. No one is shut [...]
Last Sunday at our parish Mass, it being the first Sunday of Advent, I preached about death. I explained that there were essentially three ways to die: suddenly and without warning, slowly through a long, humiliating and painful illness and happily with a short illness, time to prepare and with family there to say good bye. [...]
This week I have been on retreat at Belmont Abbey and had the privilege of going to lunch with the editors at TAN Books which is located just a few minutes from the Abbey. The Abbey--by the way--is in the midst of what future church historians will name "the Southern Catholic Renaissance" or something like that [...]
On this day fifty eight years ago John F Kennedy was assassinated and in Oxford, England C.S.Lewis died. Lewis had a great impact on my life--in many ways saving my Christian faith. I had been brought up in fundamentalist Protestantism and, after high school, went to Bob Jones University. The education I received at BJU was [...]
The illustration for this post shows the range of light waves and the tiny proportion of which is visible. A similar chart for sound waves shows the tiny range of waves which are audible to the human ear. There is much more "out there" than we can perceive with our physical senses. The aptly named Angelico [...]
Today's blog post is an excerpt from my new book Beheading Hydra - A Radical Plan for Christians in an Atheistic Age. Rusty Reno’s recent book The Return of the Strong Gods catalogues the concerted effort after the second world war of philosophers, political thinkers, economists and theologians to exterminate dogma. They looked at the legacy [...]
A few weeks ago a report came out from the Archdiocese of Cincinnati about the new plan to "re-structure" the archdiocese. The short version is that "the restructuring process will combine the archdiocese’s 208 parishes into 60 “families of parishes...The goal, church officials say, is to eventually unite the 60 new parish families into single parishes." [...]
I've been reading a fair bit about angels and demons recently. An excellent new book The Other World We Live is subtitled, A Catholic Vision of Angelic Reality. It's a good primer written in a punchy, accessible style and outlines the reality and relevance of the angelic in the world today. I have also completed a ten module course [...]