For those wondering what happened to the excellent Ten Reasons site by Rich Leonardi, Dale Price puts it as only he can.
With Dale, I also hope Rich reconsiders. Though I can understand his decision.
And Sometimes Tea has a nice reflection/review of AMC’s The Walking Dead. I am also a fan of the show for many of the same reasons she suggests.
People are being rather tough on Richard Dawkins over his latest statement.
“I wrote [an] article called ‘Atheists for Jesus,’ I think it was… Somebody gave me a t-shirt: ‘Atheists for Jesus.’ Well, the point was that Jesus was a great moral teacher and I was suggesting that somebody as intelligent as Jesus would have been an atheist if he had known what we know today.”
When you have a restricted viewpoint allowing no possibility of God than you are limited to only having certain opinions that flow from it. Plus all of us have some degree of belief in what we accept and think our apprehension of truth to be truth. So an atheist saying someone, even Jesus, would come to the same conclusion they had is to be expected. The problem is not with what Dawkins said, but with his underlying philosophy. The joke goes as a philosopher Dawkins is a good biologist.
When I first heard Dawkins’ statement I thought of C.S. Lewis’s famous alliteration that Jesus is either Liar, Lunatic, or Lord. Update: Actually the source is Josh McDowell and as Steve Greydanus pointed out “The traditional formulation is a dilemma, not a trilemma. (either God or bad man)”
Creative Minority Report thinking along the same lines quotes in full the relevant passage from C.S. Lewis.
Now from the famous alliteration Dawkins is limited to two options. So if he says Jesus would be an atheist that means he would either be a lying atheist or a lunatic atheist.
This type of nonsense also reminds me of the meme liberal theology explored where Jesus did not know he was God. By their perspective I guess they would also allow Jesus to be a fleeting agnostic or atheist. Pretty bad when you don’t believe in yourself or are not convinced of the evidence relating to yourself. Liberal theology gives us an amnesiac Jesus more fitting for a soap opera plot. In Jesus’s case finding yourself and finding God are the same thing. I would recommend Fr. Most’s “The Consciousness of Christ” for a thorough-going refutation of this idea and the magisterial teachings that totally contradict it.
This idea of mine started out on Twitter.
Now there has been a good amount of funny ideas parodying the “occupy” movement such as “Occupy Arrakis, the spice must flow.”
Besides how about changing the world by occupying the confessional or an adoration chapel, how about “Occupy Planned Parenthood”? This last idea would have a couple of things going for it. For one it would really annoy liberals to use the occupy meme in saving the life of the unborn. But then I realized there is already a “Occupy Planned Parenthood” and it is called “40 Days for Life” and has as a benefit actually doing a large amount of good.
Creative Minority Report links to a story about Cardinal Joseph Zen being on a hunger strike to defend the right to freedom of education.
The use of the words hunger strike rang alarm bells for me and I thought surely there is some miscommunication about this.
It comes as a response to the decision by the Supreme Court of Hong Kong to introduce a government committee in the management of a school. Now in addition to parents and students, government officials will have a say on the school governance.
With this hunger strike, the cardinal denounces what he calls “the danger of destroying Catholic education in the territory.”
The protest will last at least three days, during which the 79 year old cardinal will take only water and communion.
So he is not really going on a hunger strike he is fasting for three days. Words matter and describing this as a hunger strike is totally wrong. An actual hunger strike would be a form of suicide and would be expressly forbidden.
In fact a couple of years back a bishop went on an actual hunger strike and the Vatican intervened.
The Holy See, through the Apostolic Nuncio in Brazil, has asked Bishop Luiz Flavio Cappio of the Diocese of Barra to end “as soon as possible” the hunger strike he has been carrying out for 18 days.
Some years ago I bought a copy of the Logos Bible software for use in scripture study. Catholic Apologist Steve Ray has been a proponent of this software which was a main reason I got it. At the time they had version 2 and I was pretty happy with it and got a lot of use out of it. The ability to easily go deeper in scripture with commentaries and word studies along with tools such as maps is really quite a boon. When I switched to Mac though my use of it diminished even though I could have run it in a virtual machine. Back then they did not have a Mac version, though they were working on one.
Another of the reasons I went with Logos is that they are very Catholic friendly and some five or six years ago started developing packages specifically for Catholics. This trend has continued with Andrew Jones who is the Catholic Products Manager at Logos Bible Software. I was given the chance the review Logos 4 with the “Catholic Scholar’s Library” package.
The way Logos works is as a library system where you have access to the contents of any packages you bought along with any individual titles you may buy. It then wraps all of this content with linked and integrated search so that for example a scriptural passage you are reading can also show commentary from the Church Fathers or a wealth of other sources. There are some serious tools for those inclined to compare Bible versions with Hebrew and Greek texts along with easy access to comparison of verses using different scripture versions.
While I was very satisfied when I was using Logos 2, Logos 4 is certainly a large step forward in ease of use while having access to even more advanced features. It is sort of a personal internet containing scriptural and related resources since there is so much interlinking. Since Logos works with a variety of publishers including Ignatius Press to bring their works to their format their is an amazing wealth of what is available.
Though Logos does not come cheap and is rather pricey, but that is to be expected when you have so much source material licensed from various publishers. Currently there are three Catholic specific packages ranging from $395 to $669. One of the advantages of Logos is that if you go with one package you can still upgrade to another one at a later date.
A very important consideration for just how useful is this if you can only use it when sitting down in front of your computer? The answer is quite a lot. I’ve been using the iPad version of Logos which has access to all the same content from my account. This is my preferred mode for scripture reading and still having access to some of the advanced tools such as the multi-functional Passage Guide and text comparison. I do wish that there was an ability to tag something you are reading to be research later in the non-mobile version. For example favorites should really be synched. You can share a passage via the typical social networks. Logos apps are available for the iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad and Android along with mobile web.
You can look through the various Catholic specific packages here. The amount of Catholic specific material is quite high and ranges from the Early Church Fathers, Sts. Augustine & Aquinas, Councils, Scott Hahn, Peter Kreeft, G.K. Chesterton, Blessed Cardinal Newman along with Catholic specific commentaries and versions of the bible including the RSV-CE and various versions the Vulgate. Granted you can find a good amount of this in the public domain. A Cardinal Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI is coming at a later date. The amount of material makes my inner and outer bibliophile jump for joy. Also included are Protestant sources and I found in the past many of these are quite worthwhile as long as you don’t mind an occasional “papist” thrown in as a slur. Commentaries from certain periods run rather anti-Catholic, but if anything they often confirmed my faith as they went out of their way to deny common Catholic exegesis.
The install for my Mac couldn’t have been easier. I downloaded the main program and then it started to download close to 5 gigabytes of content. The mobile versions download content as you need them. Of course the software and various packages also comes on DVD. I’m very happy with the multiple OS support, though as usual Linux users are left out – but hey they are use to that.
Now if only I can find a place to connect a chain to this application. Us Catholics love to put chains on bibles don’t you know.
Enter for a chance to win a copy of the Catholic Scholar’s Library.
Other Reviews:
First Things
Michael Barber
Taylor Marhall
Beirut Arab news agency al Nashra reported on Saturday November 22, that [White House Muslim envoy] Dalia Mogahed has succeeded in canceling a meeting between the Maronite Patriarch of Lebanon and President Barack Obama. Writing in al Nashra, the reporter said “an unnamed US source told the news agency, that those who sought canceling a visit of (the spiritual head of the Maronite Church) Patriarch Beshara Rahi to the White House are Dalia Mujahid (Mogahed), the highest adviser on Arab and Islamic Affairs in the State Department, who is from Egyptian origins. And that,” according to al Nashra, “heeding a request by the higher leadership of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, who consider that US Administration must support the Islamist Sunni current facing the Iranian current in the region.”
The al Nashra report, circulating now widely in the Middle East, but also in the United States and across the Lebanese Christian Diaspora confirms what was already known about the impact the so-called “advisors on Arab and Islamic Affairs” in the White House on Middle East issues in general and on US policies regarding the Christians in the Middle East.
Maronite Patriarch Bechara Rahi
An excellent post from Rev. Fr. John Trigilio, Jr. as he reflects on a recent a symposium on the priesthood at Catholic University of America. A very worthwhile read with much to think about.
[Source]
I had seen this in regards to the recent Ad Limina visits for the Australian Bishops, but didn’t realize this is now the norm.
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In a quiet modification of a traditional format, the Vatican has dropped most of the individual private meetings between Pope Benedict XVI and bishops making their “ad limina” visits to Rome.
The unannounced change was instituted earlier this year, apparently in an effort to reduce the scheduling burden on the 84-year-old pope and to help cut through the backlog of “ad limina” visits, which are supposed to be made every five years by heads of dioceses.
In place of one-on-one meetings, the pope now usually holds more freewheeling sessions with groups of 7-10 bishops at a time, lasting about an hour. That is expected to be the format for U.S. bishops when they begin their “ad limina” visits in early November.
Several bishops who have recently come through Rome on “ad limina” visits had good things to say about the new practice.
“The Holy Father welcomed us, he sat down and made us comfortable, at home and he chatted with us. He said, ‘Now tell me,’ and he listened very attentively and made a comment here or there. At the end, he summed up beautifully what was said,” said Archbishop Felix Machado of Vasai, India, who met the pope with a group of eight others in early September.
“It was very spontaneous, a heart-to-heart talk. And that’s what it should be. It was a real sharing between him and us,” the archbishop said.