Catholic Answers now finally has their own blog with posts from all their apologists. Apparently they started it yesterday.
www.catholic.com/blog
The next Catholic archbishop of Portland comes with a Twitter account, a Facebook page and the relatively youthful perspective of a person born in 1960. At 52, the youngest prelate to be named an archbishop in the United States, the Most Rev. Alexander K. Sample says he’s ready for the challenge of an unchurched state.
At a press conference Tuesday, Sample, who has been bishop of Marquette, Mich., for seven years, said some people see Oregon as a tough place to be Catholic.“I see it as fertile ground to plant the seeds of a new evangelization,” he said. The facts that Catholics account for about 14 percent of Oregonians and that almost 24 percent of the state’s population don’t identify as members of a particular church don’t discourage him.
“I want to connect those who are longing in their hearts for spirituality with the one whom I believe is an answer to that longing, Jesus Christ.”
Sample also promised to speak out on moral issues addressed by Catholic Church teaching.
“I won’t look for reasons to grandstand,” he said, “but when something has to be said, I’ll say it.” (Source)
Growing up in Portland I would say he certainly has a challenge where even the churches can be unchurched. Although my experience with “progressive” Catholicism there jaundiced my view. Although Holy Rosary in Portland is quite an amazing parish.
My advice to the good bishop is to start watching episodes of Portlandia to prepare himself. I only say this half-jokingly.
The Ironic Catholic has an amusing post on “Why Jesus Wouldn’t Have Been A Blogger”
Oh, don’t get your panties in a wad, okay folks? St Paul would have been a blogger (Man, think of those comboxes). St Francis de Sales would have been a blogger. St. Maximilian Kolbe would have been a blogger. Not bad company at all, but Jesus would have stuck to “God’s pedagogy,” parables. After all, think about it….the reasons why Jesus wouldn’t have been a blogger (beyond a lack of computers and internet):
You can see her list of reasons here.
Now I will hijack her idea with some of my own possible reasons:
- Because there is no Content Management System that allows writing in sand with your finger as an input device.
- Jesus could not find a hosting plan that would renew the site domain each year for eternity.
- Because he knew people would be annoyed at him if he was a daily blogger. “A day with the Lord is as a thousand years and a thousand years as a day.”
- The Gospel of John does not start with “In the beginning was the WordPress, and the WordPress was with God.”
- He decided the world really didn’t need skeptics asking if God could write a blog post so long he couldn’t finish it.
- Jesus living in eternity outside of time lives in the eternal now and sees all events as one. Thus making it easy to accidentally post on something that hasn’t happened yet in our experience of time. For God everything is a spoiler alert.
- He knew it would be difficult for us to always have to update the Bible with new blog posts. Plus he was totally fine with what St. John wrote “But there are also many other things which Jesus did; were every one of them to be written, I suppose that the world itself could not contain the books that would be written.”
- Jesus is perfect and thus could not be a blogger. Satan though could easily be a blog commenter.
When it comes to a plot concerning Jesus and time travel there are about a million ways this will go horribly wrong. Some authors have already explored those paths to failure. On one side you could get the skeptic concerned more about debunking than storytelling and on the other side a Christian who is just is not a good storyteller or writer. So normally a book with this premise is one I would pass by.
With those caveats being made, when a book is called “The Christus Experiment
This book is a spiritual and psychological adventure story full of wild and irresponsible religious conjecture, equally indefensible whether taken as theology or speculative fiction.
There’s really no excuse for it at all, unless perhaps it’s the same excuse Chesterton once offered for his own paradoxical religious writing: “There seems to be some sort of idea that you are not treating a subject properly if you eulogize it with fantastic terms or defend it by grotesque examples…I think [on the other hand] that the more serious is the discussion the more grotesque should be the terms…So far from it being irreverent to use silly metaphors on serious questions, it is one’s duty to use silly metaphors on serious questions. It is the test of one’s seriousness…It is the test of a good religion whether you can joke about it.” The Christus Experiment, then, is offered as a serious joke, so to speak, in the Chestertonian vein, with hopes that no one will be tempted to mistake either its “silly metaphors” for actual theology or its serious questions for mere tomfoolery.
So as to the story itself it has many typical elements involving time travel. In this case it involves a private compound owned by a Christ-haunted billionaire and skeptic. A group of scientists are able to successfully bring Jesus into the present and the story involves the bringing in a various experts to study and interact with him. Some of the experts brought in are Jesus seminar types along with a Rabbi and a psychic. The Science Fiction side of time travel is explored as you would expect regarding changing the past, multiple time lines, time lines splitting, etc. What I so enjoyed about this book is that when I tried to guess ahead at how the story would go or how a character would develop I was almost always wrong, but it goes in a truer direction than I imagined.
Including Jesus as a character is also a difficult task to pull of right. In this scenario you just can’t resort to only scripture as he is interrogated. I liked the way this was done and how it invoked Jesus being questioned by Herod, the Sanhedrin, and Pilate. Still it goes beyond just Jesus being silent in response to hostile questioning by answering them at times. The way this was done with theological nuance was quite satisfying and never took you out of the story.
Beyond just the time travel scenario the plot contains many tensions as it builds as an adventure story. The characters are complex and so is the situation as they try to decide if they have really brought the biblical Jesus forward into time. Whether there is anything more to him than the simple man of that era he appears to be. There are also other forces at hand that reveal themselves.
This book is really not what I expected, but it is what I wanted. The ending is certainly not what I expected, but quite interesting as “wild and irresponsible religious conjecture”. There is a spiritual depth to this book and little touches I admired. Like I said at the beginning of this review, this book could easily have gone horribly wrong. Instead it went splendidly right. This novel displayed a theological deftness in regards to the plot and an authentic feel concerning the situation and the characters.
PORTLAND, OR | Sun Jan 27, 2013 4:31pm EST
(ROTO REUTERS) – Parishioners at Prince of Peace Catholic Church are looking for new members. This vibrant inclusive parish is looking to expand in the community and to bring its brand of active participation to everybody.
This Sunday it was rather awkward when they realized there was nobody in the pews to receive Communion and that everybody there was a Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion (EMHC). Normally there were a couple of people available to receive Communion since they had not yet finished training to become a EMHC. Unfortunately they were out with the flu this week.
Ms. Eve Rewon remarked “Usually each week we have fun trying to entice those couple of people in the pews to come up to us to receive. It is such an honor when out of all the EMHCs available they come to you to receive our Lord!” Another EMHC Mr Juan Per preferred the days when only half of the parishioners were EMHCs and liked each person having their own EMHC to serve them. “This was real customer service where you could come to have a personal relationship with your EMHC. Although it took quite a while for Father to give us all Communion, it was really fast afterwards when each person came up to their designated
EMHC.”
Prince of Peace Catholic Church is also currently creating plans for building a new church building. Fr. Git Along said “We have outgrown our parish since the sanctuary is super-crowded with no room for expansion. Some have suggested removing some rows of pews and expanding the sanctuary that way and perhaps that might work for now. Ultimately though we have to expand the sanctuary to accomodate EMHCs and have enough lanes of traffic along with room to grow.”
Emergency plans were drawn up after Mass to find new ways to evangelize in the Community and to find people to receive Communion. To go out into the whole world and spread the good news and to become part of the track to becoming a parishioner and ultimately also an Extraordinary Minister of Holy Communion. One anonymous parishioner told us “We are going to have to go all Mormon and JW out there going door to door to make sure this happens.”
Notes:
- Inspired by a Mass I went to this week with over a dozen EMHCs.
- The photo was cobbled together from a couple of images on the internet. No disrespect intended for the priest in the photo or the people in the group shot of actual EMHCs.
This is the 47th volume of The Weekly Benedict ebook which is a compilation of the Holy Father’s writings, speeches, etc which I post at Jimmy Akin’s The Weekly Benedict. The post at Jimmy Akin’s site contains a link to each document on the Vatican’s site and does not require an e-reader to use.
This volume covers material released during the last week for 16 – 25 January 2013.
The ebook contains a table of contents and the material is arranged in sections such as Angelus, Speeches, etc in date order. The full index is listed on Jimmy’s site.
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 47 – ePub (supports most readers)
The Weekly Benedict – Volume 47 – Kindle
There is an archive for all of The Weekly Benedict eBook volumes. This page is available via the header of this blog or from here.
LarryD on 10 New Names For The NCReporter
In his most recent column published in the diocesan paper, The Catholic Key, Bishop Finn of Kansas City has stated in no uncertain terms that the National Catholic Reporter should not be calling itself Catholic. I encourage you to read it if you haven’t already. It’s excellent stuff.
Now, they won’t be obeying Bishop Finn any time soon, but still, if by chance they come to their senses and do the right thing, they’re gonna need a new name.
And guess what – I have 10 suggestions (of course I do, right?)
- The Nullified Conscience Reporter
- The Midwest Journal of Religious Emasculation
- Theological Masturbation & Review
- Screw You, Rome Reports
- New Age Apostate & Chronicle
- The Weakly Faith Weekly
- The Apostolic Underminer
- The Sixth Circle Times-Union
- The Poor Man’s Unitarian Almanac
- Heretic Herald & Heritage
Got any other suggestions?
Well here are a couple.
- Itching Ears Weekly
- National Tares and Chaff Reporter
- Heretic’s R Us
- The New Sodom Times
- National Compost
- False Christianity Today
- White Washed Tomb Times
- Apostolic Editorial Board (at least that seems to be how they see themselves)
- Dissent of Man
- Reverse Tardis Times (The ideas are even smaller than they appear on the outside)
- Fishwrap (Really Father’s Z’s description fits the best)
Really it would be nice to not confuse “National Catholic” — “Reporter” and “Register”. To have to differentiate between the good NCR and the bad NCR.
Michael Baruzzini of “The Deeps of Time” posts on Sir David Attenborough’s recent comments on humanity as a plague. In his post he talks about “someone else whose philosophy and theological understanding was poor” and references a comment by Walker Percy on Carl Sagan “There is too little malice and too much ignorance.”
As they say read the whole thing along with the extended quote from Walker Percy.
Maureen at “Aliens in This World”:
Because if we give up believing in the Trinity, everybody will like us, the Jews will admit that Christianity was right, and there’ll never be any arguments again.
Yeah, and that’s why everybody in the world is a Jewish Unitarian Jehovah’s Witness! Because eliminating theology and the Trinity is such a great recruiting tool, and produces instant Judeo-Christian unity!
Anyway, read the review. It’s a very strong takedown of the whole idea that early orthodox Christianity came up with its theology as some kind of “total global political dominion” technique, or at least of the facile way that people assume this without ever adducing any evidence. (Which is a shame, because personally I’d think such a conspiracist would enjoy making bizarre connections between imperial politics and Trinitarianism. It would be silly and not prove anything, but at least you’d have tried.)
Archbishop Wuerl responds to the petition posted on the White House Web site to label the church a “hate group”. Here are a couple of nice snippets from a good article.
… Although these precepts may be misunderstood by many today, the fundamental vocation of the Catholic Church is to provide the witness of love and truth to the world, including offering the voice of an informed conscience. Catholics are taught to respect the fundamental, inherent dignity of every person, each made in the image of God, and to work to establish a just society. The church teaches that it is our obligation to manifest love of neighbor, to provide charitable service to others, and to promote truth, genuine freedom and authentic humanism. We work for the poor, the oppressed and the suffering, because that is what our faith teaches we must do. There is thus a positive side to being dogmatic: The teachings and works of the church advance the common good throughout civil society. Just as our dogma is constant, so is the work it commands.
… The church is dogmatic, and that is good — even if it means that the church is a sign of contradiction in the world and the object of animus and disdain. It is a positive, attractive feature that what we profess is unchanging and unchangeable — the good news of a love and truth that we are called to share with the world. It is good for Catholics and non-Catholics. Were the church to compromise its creed, if we were to simply go along with today’s secularized culture, not only would the church cease to be the church but the common good would suffer greatly.
Archbishop Wuerl calls this petition “beyond the pale” and as I noted in a previous post that the petition the White house considered “beyond the pale” was the one against Beyonce which got pulled.
“In truth, there are only two kinds of people; those who accept dogma and know it, and those who accept dogma and don’t know it.” — G.K. Chesterton