I fear I’m really wandering off my topic here, but maybe I can tie this back in somehow. In my continued reading about Protestant theology, I’ve really been struggling with the definition of the term “evangelical.” This seems relevant to understanding where I’ve come from and consequently who and where I am now. Certainly the …
Tag Archives: Roman Catholic Church
Charles Colson’s “Ecumenism of the Trenches”
This morning in the National Catholic Register, I was saddened to learn of the death of Charles Colson a few days ago. (The NCRegister piece is moving and worth reading.) Even in the far orbit of the evangelical sphere I’ve been in for so many years, I knew and admired Chuck Colson. He was one …
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The Scholar’s Prayer
Creator of all things, true Source of light and wisdom, lofty origin of all being, graciously let a ray of Your brilliance penetrate into the darkness of my understanding and take from me the double darkness in which I have been born, an obscurity of both sin and ignorance. Give me a sharp sense of …
What was I before?
I’ve been doing some reading lately. Feeling slightly ashamed, I used to admit to my Catholic friends that I was reading a Protestant book, but I don’t anymore. No one has ever said anything. Whether a book is Catholic or Protestant has little bearing on its read-worthiness; both Catholics and Protestants have worthy things to …
Emotion and the Leap of Faith
I wondered if receiving the Real Presence would feel any different than any other time I’d taken Communion in my life. I wondered if the Sacrament of Confirmation would evince any inward or outward change in me — if I would feel that, too. Through the years of confusion I experienced as a Pentecostal, I …
Birth of a Catholic
Tonight, I go to bed a Catholic, having been sealed by the gift of the Holy Spirit, welcomed into the arms of the Mother Church, and communing in the true Body and Blood of my Lord. I am entirely overwhelmed.
The Passion of the Lord
The liturgy of the past two days has been intense, emotional, overwhelming — more moving than any Christian service I’ve ever been a part of. I have been in some truly ecstatic, sensational services in my day — experiences routinely described by the people around me as “powerful” and “awesome” — but even then, it …
Nearing the Altar
Tomorrow begins the Triduum, the three days leading up to Easter: Holy Thursday (or Maundy Thursday), Good Friday, and Holy Saturday. And then, the Easter Vigil — at which I will be initiated into the Church through Confirmation and receive my first Holy Communion. It seems surreal that this moment has come. All of the …
Wisdom and the Deuterocanon
I’ve never read much of the Deuterocanon (also called the Apocrypha by Protestants) before — just the occasional Mass readings from those books. I’ve been unsure of their role in the canon. Catholics attest to their canonicity and divine inspiration; but then, why did Protestants exclude them? (I know, for one thing, that the Deuterocanon …
Community and Communion
In the year or so before I moved to University, I began making an earnest, systematic effort to find and join a church. I wrote a lot of lists to myself about what I was looking for in a church (I am a maker of lists). And always near the top of the list was …