For the occasion of Gabriel Gordon’s birthday (Happy Birthday, Gabe!) John Henry Newman is, without question, the single most influential anglophone Roman Catholic intellectual. He lived and wrote in Ninteenth Century England, beginning as an influential ‘Anglo-Catholic’ priest in the Church of England until his conversion to Roman Catholicism in…
Allow me to begin this post by praising Gabriel Gordon’s remarkable ability to network with diverse speakers. In putting together the first annual Misfits conference, Gabriel communicated with and sold on attendance academic philosophers, Southern Baptists, Episcopalians, Roman Catholics, and (at least one) Eastern Orthodox. Not just any young person…
For a recent confession, I was counseled by the priest to consider God’s presence in my everyday life as a penance. I think there is genuine wisdom in that imperative. St Augustine, in the exalted Latin of his Confessions, called God, “nearer to me than I am to myself”. God’s…
There is always a lot of controversy to discuss, especially online. I don’t really want to talk about the specifics (do you remember the last time you changed your mind on a controversial topic based on a blog post?), but I do want to talk about talking — that is,…
I’m not new to atheist polemic of Christianity. I’ve been reminded my fair share of times (online and in person) that miracles are scientifically impossible, that the four canonical gospels are either parables or conspiracy theories, that religion prevents societal and scientific progress, and that God is a man in…
Gabriel and Joanne had quite the epic rap battle about biblical authority. It ended with Joanne making a poignant observation: if faced with a choice between Scripture and Jesus, “choose Jesus”. As the starting point for my question, “Whose Jesus do I choose?”, I’m going to agree with Joanne and…
The earliest promptings I felt towards Catholicism were motivated by ecumenism. The Creed says there is only one Church, not many. However, even after I decided to join the Catholic Church, certain teachings remained difficult for me to accept. I was very committed to the doctrine of apokatastasis (“universalism”), and…
Ecumenism is a colloquial term for the trend, especially in the Twentieth Century, of Christians looking backward at the scandals of our historic disagreements (and there are many of them) with the sense that perhaps our priorities were misplaced. Maybe instead of arguing about how to express the dual natures…
It’s a pretty standard narrative among Protestants that the reason Catholics used Latin in the Mass and in the Bible (specifically the Vulgate) was to keep the laity from understanding Christianity. That would be more plausible if Catholicism did not uphold principles outside of the written word, principles such as…
Catholic Mariology can be a contentious subject. The most serious criticism that is made of Catholic Marian piety — for example, praying traditional Marian prayers such as the ‘Hail Mary’ and ‘Hail Holy Queen’, including statues and icons of Mary for use in churches and shrines, etc. — is that…
