This article originally appears in the book NEW NARRATIVES FOR OLD The Historical Method of reading early Christian theology essays in honor of MICHEL RENÉ BARNES ———————- The soteriology of Athanasius, bishop of Alexandria from 328 until his death in 373, has been the focus of much scholarly attention. His doctrine of salvation defies easy […]
I grew up in an irreligious family. It’s not that my parents didn’t have religious beliefs; they did. They both grew up in nominally Catholic families but rejected their Catholic faith in their early teens. My dad eventually came to believe that religious people were mostly superstitious idiots, and my mom — on the other […]
When I first became a Christian, my King James Bible had as the title for the book of Acts, “The Acts of the Apostles.” Soon after this, I found myself in the Charismatic and Pentecostal traditions and learned that it should hr-hr-rEEeeally be called “The Acts of the Holy Spirit.” In some early Greek manuscripts […]
I am interviewing ChatGPT about a variety of things as though it was a real person. Thus, the way I input my questions is conversational, dialogical, and interactive just as I would attempt to do if I were talking to another person in a conversation. Here is the first conversation we just had regarding the […]
One of the things most people notice about converts to the Catholic Church is that they have almost always discovered and become very familiar with the Church Fathers and their incredible writings. Because of this, many of them come to learn (and often quote) what St. Cardinal John Henry Newman discovered in his own deep […]
Since my family and I first began our journey into the Catholic Church in 2018 (completed at the Easter Vigil in 2019), we have spent hundreds (and hundreds) of dollars on books. We were already spending money on books to help us grow in our Christian faith before that, but we discovered so many treasures […]
Everyone has reflexes and automatic responses and even triggers in response to physical, psychological, emotional, and spiritual inputs. In this drive-time monologue, I share what I am calling the “Protestant Reflex.” That is, the automatic response that most Protestants have when discussing theological ideas with Catholics. As someone who spent 33 years in Protestantism and […]
It happens every day in conversations, social media exchanges, and even in media publications; an ex-Catholic, believing (and insisting) that by virtue of their personal experience with Catholicism, presents himself or herself as an expert in discussions about Catholicism. In this drive-time monologue, I propose a different way of understanding what may be happening with […]
Below is a list of 35 things that every Protestant and/or Evangelical Christian I have ever met would agree are true. And, before you read the list of 35 things, please note that the following three things are true about every single one of them: There is not a single verse anywhere in the Bible […]
This seemed like a good way to get content out the door vs. trying to do an entire video production with edits, etc. The genre here is a “Drive Time Monologue,” but I invite the listener to imagine a scenario in which we are driving together. Perhaps my passenger is a Catholic who wants to […]