The Catholic Church in France is reeling with a report that over the last sixty or seventy years tens of thousands have been abused by priests, nuns and religious. The response, of course, is one of shock, dismay and horror. We condemn all forms of abuse--especially sexual abuse of minors. However, it is fair to ask [...]
The Scriptures promise that God sends to each one of us a guardian angel. What is the guardian angels' role and what is our proper relationship to our angel? First we should reject false understandings of the guardian angel. The angels are not gods or goddesses, neither is your guardian angel your "spirit guide", your soul, [...]
In the quest for purity it is easy to think the goal is simply to stop being impure in our thoughts and actions, but the goal is more than that. To stop doing bad things is laudable, but we are called to actually do good things. It is good to stop committing adultery. It is better [...]
One of the features of my blog is the archived articles section. This is where I post articles that have been written for other websites, magazines and journals. I haven's posted more of these for some time because my writing was slowed down due to the stroke I suffered in January. Also, i have been writing [...]
Some time ago at a conference for priests we were sitting around the lunch table swapping stories about weddings and marriage discipline and the subject of the "marriage" of people with same sex attraction arose. The impossibility of this was agreed but one priest pointed out that this was not the only difficulty facing Catholic priests [...]
Readers of this blog may have noticed a marked decline in quantity of blog posts. They have not yet begun a search for a missing blogger, but I have not been idle. Most of you will remember that I suffered a slight stroke back in January of this year. This had an impact on my typing [...]
The lives of these two shed light on the role of our bishop and especially the Pope in every age. In the third century the church was divided over the Novatian heresy. Novatian was a Roman priest who stood up against the rightfully elected pope Cornelius because he thought Cornelius was too liberal in his treatment [...]
Scientism is the mask of atheism that states that no knowledge is possible that is not scientifically verified. In. my new book Beheading Hydra I point out that this is a mask of atheism because it follows logically from materialism--the belief that there is no reality other than this physical material world. There is no heaven, no [...]
Regular readers of this blog may have noticed a marked decline in the number of blog posts. For more than fifteen years I have been writing blog posts here and articles for a range of websites, journals and papers. This sort of small scale journalism is rewarding but time consuming. It has been supplemented with the [...]
I was brought up in Evangelical Protestantism which has always been strong on individualistic religious experience, and often that experience was highly emotional, and whenever the emotions are involved, manipulation of some sort is always around the corner. We've all experienced the emotional blackmail imposed within families: "All I've done for you and this is the [...]