Tag Archives: Christianity

Meeting Mark Shea

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MARK.JPGTonight I got to listen to fellow St. Blog’s parishoner Mark Shea speak. Some of his speech material came from his essay "The Critics Rave". It was a fun and interesting talk about countering the Church’s detractor’s questions with another question, "Who do you say that the Church is?", a play off of a question Jesus posed to the apostles.

After the talk, I introduced myself and chatted for a bit. I’m not entirely certain he actually knew what blog I write, but he was polite enough to pretend he did. 😉 I bought a copy of "Making Sense Out of Scripture" and got him to autograph it. Then Donna Lewis and I talked his ear off for almost as long as he’d lectured. Poor fella.

Anyhow, check out his blog and see what the fuss is all about. 🙂

Violating Inviolability

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Last month, Daniel Nichols over at Caelum & Terra blogged an entry entitled An Open Wound, in which he shared the news of couple that he and his family knew and with whom had once been close having received an annulment. They had been married over twenty years and were blessed with nine children, whom they homeschooled. The couple had in all manner been devout, articulate, exemplary Catholics. After some amount of time, however, the wife left her husband and eventually applied for and obtained an annulment. An annulment is a finding from the Church that sacramental marriage, which Catholics hold to be unviolable, never happened. And Mr. Nichols’ reaction to this news, and any sane person’s reaction would have to be,

[I]f they can get an annulment, anyone can!

…

That the Church has come to this–providing excuses for sins against God and man–is a scandal, an open wound in the Body of Christ.

Lord have mercy.

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John Henry Newman on Faith (and Doubt)

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Today, Pontificator posts an 1848 letter of John Henry Cardinal Newman to one Mrs. Froude, which reflects deeply on conversion and faith. It resonated with me as one in the midst of a not altogether smooth conversion to a church that audaciously claims it is the One and Only Church founded by Christ from a church that, finding no virtue in audacity, believes no such Church exists.

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Blog Awards

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It’s award season in the blogophere. First, I give you Adrian Warnock’s call for Warnie Award nominations.

Its almost the season of goodwill. Now we are actually in the month of December I am happy to start speaking of Christmas. The Warnie awards are my own thank you gift to the Christian blogosphere for giving me such a lot of fun and for continuing to surprise me with the level of appreciation links and readership that comes the way of this blog.

Well, Christmas has come early this year! I have decided to give out one more warnie award this side of the new year, but I am going to do it a bit differently. I am for the first time opening nominations – so, people here are the rules:

1. You cannot nominate yourself (although you can pursuade someone else to nominate you!)
2. You cannot nominate a blog with a higher ecosystem ranking than me as they dont need the extra attention as much.
3. This is not a totally democratic contest and I will decide which of the blogs nominated to give a warnie to, and reserve the right to decide not to give anyone a warnie
4. Nominations should ideally be done via a post on your own blog thanking your favorite blogger for their blog, stating why you think they deserve a Warnie Award and linking back to this post.
5. Nominations will remain open for at least a week and possibly longer

Let the nominations begin! Previous Warnie winners are especially encouraged to enter a nomination. I hope that this will be a fun way for a bunch of bloggers to thank those blogs that they enjoy reading and explain what it is about particular blogs that they like so much.

I nominate UnSpace. Rob doesn’t always write about specifically Christian topics, but I believe he always attempts to write as as Christian. I believe he does an admirable job of this. He and I sometimes disagree on matters of dogma and doctrine, but I take great comfort in knowing that our disagreements do not get in the way of us being brothers in the Body of Christ. He takes "Love thy neighbor" very seriously and endeavors to treat his neighbors with respect and dignity, no matter how badly they treat him. More importantly, he undertands that love is a verb, and he does what all Christians must, and so few of us do: feed, clothe, visit, etc Christ in the least of His brethren (c.f. Matthew 25), as a paramedic years ago and more recently helping out folks in New Orleans. Is Rob perfect? Is he a living saint? No. Certainly not. He’d be the first to tell you that. What matters, though, is that he strives to be a saint. Shouldn’t we all?

With the important stuff out of the way, I can now point out that voting for the 2005 Wizbang Weblog Awards begin December 5. Be sure to vote for your favorite blogs. Hopefully, I’ll be a finalist for either Best Religious Blog or Best of the Top 501 – 1000 Blogs. We’ll see when the finalists are announced December 4.

Sitne Salus Extra Ecclesiam?

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I can hear the fundies shrieking and hissing about this already…

"Whoever seeks peace and the good of the community with a pure conscience, and keeps alive the desire for the transcendent, will be saved even if he lacks biblical faith, says Benedict XVI."

On a side note, can anyone verify that my title is correct Latin? Instead of "Extra ecclesiam nulla salus [est]", i.e., "Outside the Church there is no salvation", I wanted "Might there be salvation outside the Church?".