A Christian's Road Home to Rome and Journey Onward
Hi! No, I haven’t abandoned my blog. Real life has been keeping me pretty busy, but I do have some ideas in pots boiling for articles to share. A few months ago, I friend asked me to tell my conversion story. On the fly, I came up with what I thought was a pretty good, …
Continue reading “The Church, Lost and Found: My First Concise, Complete Conversion Narrative”
Part of an ongoing discussion at Reformation500. As I’ve been arguing, I think Protestants, in thinking about “Tradition,” fail to see the forest for the trees. You (and I presume these historians) are looking for “traditions,” “hidden doctrines,” something concretely novel or different from the Word of God in Scripture — but given that, according …
Continue reading “Some Early Testimonies to the Authority of Apostolic Tradition”
The broken WordPress app misdated my last entry, and rather than break all the links I’ve already made, I thought I would share a link to it. When Protestants read the history of the early Church, do they understand the faith of those early Church Fathers to be the fruit of the Apostles, or rather …
Continue reading “Reading Church History as a Protestant: The Early Church, Apostolic or Apostate?”
Cardinal Newman famously stated, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.” If any single sentence could sum up the reasons for my conversion, that would be it. Yet there are many, many well-educated and thoughtful Protestants, who seem thoroughly versed in the facts of the history of the Church, for whom …
Continue reading “Reading Church History as a Protestant: The Catholic Church, Dead in “Religion””
[Part of a series on Baptism in Depth] One of the clearest evidences to me of the existence of Sacred Tradition — of the idea that the Divine Revelation of Christ is not contained wholly and exclusively in Sacred Scripture, and that essential elements of Jesus’s teachings were not written down explicitly by the Apostles …
Continue reading “Baptism in the Early Church: Proof of Extrascriptural Tradition”
Part of a series on Baptism in Depth. Get ready, y’all! I have a burst of inspiration, and thoughts coming out my ears — both to finish my thesis and to share on Baptism. The Acts of the Apostles, the continuation of St. Luke’s Gospel narrative recounting the earliest history of the Christian Church, is …
Continue reading “Believe and Be Baptized (Baptism in Depth)”
This started out as a response to someone’s blog, but I got carried away. Here are some answers to some common misunderstandings regarding the Sacred Tradition of the Catholic Church, especially with reference to the Protestant doctrine of sola scriptura. Pardon me for just dumping it here with so little introduction or conclusion, but I …
Continue reading “What Sacred Tradition Is and Is Not: 7 Answers to Common Misconceptions”
Part 2 of a series on Indulgences. Part 1. So last time, I showed you the basic idea of indulgences: First, that sin has temporal consequences, apart from the guilt which Jesus forgives by His grace — the misery that our sin causes for us and others, called the temporal punishment, which we still must …
So, my last post, in addition to being fascinating exegesis, had a point. I didn’t even realize the point at the time, but our dear brother Eugene has brought up an important question that just happens to fit with the direction I was moving in. May we thank the movement of the Holy Spirit! As …
Continue reading “Is Infant Baptism an Unscriptural Practice? Part 1: Understanding Baptism”
Yes, I have a thesis to write, but inspired by Laura’s brilliant and succinct one-post conversion story, I figured I had better get on the stick and get to the end of mine, and thought I would spend a few minutes on another chapter. If you’re new here, here’s the story so far. I’ve written …
Continue reading “Corpus Christi: The Latin Corpus of Christ; and the Real Schism (in my mind)”