Purify Your Bride

The prayer of a righteous man is powerful and effective. James 5:16b
This was a verse, or half a verse, that we frequently quoted in a few protestant fellowships I was in. This is a good thing. We need to understand there is real power in prayer and that power is tied to our own righteousness. [...]

David Waltz has a post that links to a bunch of writings around the issue of how what protestants are to say about Catholics. It is a hard question for Protestants. Matthew Heckel wrote a good article back in April pointing out that R.C. Sproul’s position was quite problematic. Certainly disagreeing with Sproul is something [...]

This is the title of a series of articles in a major Canadian paper. The linked one is actually the best of them written by a Catholic columnist they have. The rest are quite scary. Not because of what they say but because they don’t dare say anything. They gave 40 reasons pro and con [...]

There was a NY Times article that was linked by Mark Shea about the “war” between science and religion. He does notice that many scientists and many religious thinkers are not commenting much. He wonders why but soldiers on. The why is simple. The war only exists if you make a basic philosophical category error. [...]

A Canadian paper did a story on the apostolic visitation of the female religious orders. It kind of misses the point.
But no sooner was the investigation announced than the accusations began to fly that the Vatican had an ulterior motive: it was using the apostolic visitation to bring to heel those nuns who had broken [...]

Atheists brag that they don’t accept anything on faith. Protestants say something similar. That they won’t accept anything on faith that is not in scripture. There is something humiliating about faith. We love to reason. It makes us feel smart. To accept revealed truth makes us feel small. This is a good thing but we [...]

Without faith it is impossible to please God Heb 11:6
Faith alone or Sola Fide was the great rallying cry of the reformation. Sure Sola Scriptura was the biggest mistake but the motivation for the mistake was Sola Fide. That is the best thing and the worst thing about Sola Scriptura. It allows you [...]

I was writing a post about how Catholicism is logical and beautiful and Calvinism is logical and ugly. I had ditched it because it was not going anywhere but then I ran into this. He says it a bit different but I think he is talking about the same thing. There is something soul destroying [...]

In the 60’s and 70’s many religious communities lost their charism. They just dropped Catholicism and embraced popular psychology. Why did they do that. Rachel posted an interesting interview with one guy who was there. He gives a lot of details on what the process was and how disastrous it was for order after order [...]

Saw a post that David Waltz linked called Ecclesial Deism. I liked the point he makes. Especially when he talks about the trouble Albert Mohler has when responding to a Mormon. Mohler is a fine evangelical Christian. His phrase “traditional Christian orthodoxy” is an attempt to describe what every Christian knows exists but protestant Christians [...]

One of the things I understood as a protestant was that the sacraments of Lord’s Supper and Baptism were meant to give us unity. St Paul talks about one Lord, one faith, one baptism. In another place he talks about us being one body because we eat of the same loaf. The problem I saw [...]

Mark Shea said on his blog:
It works like this: the enthusiast for the doctrine of the “perspicuity of Scripture” reasons “God always does what is best. Having a Bible that is perspicuous is best. Therefore, God has done that.”
(You can play that game with anything you like, by the way: “God always does what is [...]