“What I discovered first-hand is that if you dispense with tradition, you leave the word of God at the mercy of Bible scholars. And what I experienced in Protestantism was we had a senate every year. And at any given senate of our church, some Bible scholar could get up and give some kind of revisionist interpretation and say: ‘We’ve had it wrong for 2,000 years. We should really, I don’t know, marry a male and a male; or fornication really isn’t bad; or you can have an extra wife; or divorce is okay; or whatever.’ Anything imaginable.” —Dr John Bergsma
St Jerome was an early Bible translator and scholar (circa 347–420 AD). I’ve always been intrigued by him because he wasn’t one of the “sweet” saints. He was known to be irritable and difficult. In his writings, he reveals that he had a sharp tongue and a critical attitude toward others. He apparently had a finely tuned BS detector, and so he had no patience for people who promoted BS. None at all. He was relentless in his criticism of heretics, emphasizing the importance of following the teachings of the Catholic Church.
So St Jerome was not a nice guy. There was certainly nothing “soft” about him. To the people today who place so much importance on not being offended, St Jerome wouldn’t really fit the pattern of what it means to be a saint. If he were here today, I’m quite certain he’d just read my stuff, chew it up, and spit it out. Like I said, I’ve always been intrigued by that guy.
I applaud those Christians who struggle in their efforts to follow Christ. I respect the Christians who realize that discipleship is not easy, but who believe anyway. I applaud them all the more because I find common cause with them. I also value them because, as a Catholic, I reject every form of pollyanna-ish Christianity.
There are not many advantages to growing old. Vitality and strength decline, while pain increases. And then there’s the slowing of the mind, that inevitable curse. But I have found one advantage of aging that relates in a profound way to discipleship. By that, I mean my understanding of what it means to be a disciple of Jesus Christ.
It’s simply this: When I was young and strong, I measured my experience of God in terms of days. Back then, I thought that God always moved quickly, as though he were at my beck and call. Now that I’m old (and getting older), I have come to realize that God’s work in my life and in my heart—the really important and meaningful and permanent work that God does there—have blossomed slowly through the course of decades. Those divine works took time. A lot of time (in human terms). What this realization has given me, I think, is a kind of patience that I couldn’t have imagined during the firebrand days of my youth. Now I actually cherish God’s slowness. Now I actually delight in the “density” of God’s movements and methods. Back in the day, I never would have seen that coming.
LINUX STUFF: I keep running into Linux users on Neocities. Why am I not surprised? I wonder, are there any BSD users out there in the Neocities-verse? I have this itch to install BSD on my testing laptop and…well, test it. I haven’t scratched that itch yet, though.
Your life will change if you decide to seek truth. One of the changes will be this: Your life will get harder.
Your understanding of the Bible will change dramatically when you are finally able to see it from a synoptic perspective. It will take time and effort on your part before you can begin to digest the Bible in that way. In fact, it could take years of reading the Bible before you’ll be able to see it in that way. Just know that you’ll never really understand the Bible if all you do is quote excised verses as “proof-texts” for your assumptions. The Bible doesn’t care about your assumptions, so begin by not having any. Let the contextualized text speak for itself. Then, finally, when you are able, let the whole Bible speak for itself.
A new video link: Catholicism Is Booming in Japan After Centuries of Challenges
“Catholics are like children playing in a playground. We’re free to swing and slide and throw theological sand in each other’s eyes and have all the fun we like. But there’s a fence around the playground that keeps us from wandering out into the street and being run over by every passing theological fad. That fence consists of what the Church through the ages has formally defined as being true.” —Ken Hensley
As it turns out, the Church isn’t something that’s incidental to Christianity. Not at all. The reality and necessity of the Church are integral to the Christian Faith as it is presented in the New Testament. Indeed, the founding of The Church was one of Jesus’s core missions according to the Gospels. So then, ecclesiology must, at some point, become a concern for any serious “Bible-based” Christian, even to those Christians who seek to be minimal or “mere”. After all, there are no “denominations” in the Bible. There is just The Church. So the question of The Church cannot be ignored when considering what Christianity actually is. This means that, even if you seek to be the merest of biblical Christians, at some point you will have to ask What is the Church? and Where is the Church?.
Those are very serious questions for any Christian to consider. Many Protestants who later became Catholic did so because they began to ask those questions. And they also did so because they had found their experience of “smorgasbord” Christianity to be regrettably incomplete. As later critiques of CS Lewis’s book Mere Christianity have pointed out, this refusal to deal with the question of The Church was a “blind spot” in the method Lewis used to write his book. There is no version of Christianity—“mere” or otherwise—that can exclude the question of what The Church actually is. In fact, how we answer that question will indicate what we think Christianity actually is.
I made a “button” or “stamp” or whatever you call it. It’s located at the bottom of my Info page.
The biblical metaphor is this: As Christians, we have to start with milk before we can move on to solid food. We begin as infants in the faith. That’s true for everyone, of course. But Christian faith is designed to be active, not static. We’re supposed to learn, to develop, to grow, to mature, to experience, to go deeper. So yes, we begin with what some might call “mere” Christianity, but we’re not meant to stay there. That beginning is meant to develop into copious Christianity.
If young adults in America are suddenly turning to the Catholic Church, there must be a reason, right? Well, I think sometimes the “analysts” over-think these kinds of things. I think these new Catholic converts are hungry for God. Period. They are abandoning those insipid churches that have become “me-centered” instead of “Christ-centered”. It’s a cautionary tale for the Catholic Church. And we Catholics had better understand that before we start celebrating too much.
“The concern arises when worship becomes dominated by emotional expressiveness and romanticized intimacy—when feelings replace reverence, truth, and theological depth, and also when subjective experience outweighs doctrinal truth. In this context, feminized worship refers to a noticeable shift in tone: Music that portrays our relationship with God, especially Jesus, in romantic or therapeutic terms. It focuses on personal longing, vulnerability, and emotional dependency, often mirroring the language of love songs. This isn’t about asking if having emotion is wrong. That’s the wrong question. It’s about asking: Is this the full picture of who God is, or are we shaping worship to reflect our feelings more than God’s truth?” —Mackenzie Morgan
America needs a new alternative to Hollywood, probably located somewhere in Texas. I wonder, are there any billionaires out there who might be interested in such a project? Oh, and while we’re at it, rock music needs to make a comeback too. I mean, like, as soon as possible.
The Romans didn’t crucify “safe” people. Jesus was crucified because he was offensive. Today, a lot of people seem to want a harmless Jesus, a sentimental Jesus; that is, they want a Jesus who has been Hallmark-ized.
What is it about our culture that makes so many people think they have a “right” to go through life without being offended? Too many people have become laughably fragile in our day, and they’ve made themselves so uninteresting in the process.
“I believe there are things in life that matter. I love the Lord, I love my neighbor, and I love myself. I will not, for any f~~~ing reason, let anything in this life take those commands from my heart no matter what. I am a small, but necessary part of God’s good and perfect plan, and so I’m going to put the work in that I feel upholds the commands He gave me to execute on this earth, nothing less or more.” —noahie
CS Lewis published Mere Christianity in 1952. Not so long ago, really. Lewis was still able to identify some shared themes among the (fewer) Christian sects of his day. But that book couldn’t be written today, since Christianity has become so atomized in our time. The plain things aren’t the main things anymore.
This has saddened many Christians (like me). Other Christians remain blissfully unaware of the breakdown because they have no knowledge of church history. But the fracturing was always inevitable. The seeds of dissolution were planted in the 1500s, and even before that. We’re just living to see the results.
I was surprised to learn that there are still people who push “inclusive-language” Bible translations. After all, with the ever-growing list of “gender pronouns”, inclusive-language Bibles would be impossible to produce today.
The “protestant impulse” lurks deep in every human heart. In yours. In mine. Why? Because we are a “stiff-necked people”—willful and narcissistic by nature. That’s why humility is a virtue. It doesn’t come naturally to us. Pride comes naturally to us. But humility has to be cultivated.
“Breaking away is, well, it’s a pattern disruption. Most people aren’t going to do it. The majority of people are going to be like water. They’re going to take the path of least resistance. It’s easier to be foolish than wise. There’s risk that comes with breaking away from the group.” —Warren Smith
A new essay: You’ve Lost That Lovin' Feelin'
Yes, I love America, and I love being an American. Best country in the world, bar none. And our history is mostly pretty damn glorious, to be honest. I’m not saying America is a perfect nation. We have our problems, yes, but I’ve never believed in the possibility of a utopia this side of heaven. So I’ll take what we have. Gladly. Thankfully.
When it comes to what the Pope has to say to reporters on planes, I really don’t care. I’m not a Catholic who places much importance on papal one-offs. And I certainly don’t place any importance on whatever the agenda-driven pundits want to make of off-the-cuff papal sound-bites. Btw, same thing goes for presidential sound-bites from Air Force One. With the Pope, I pay attention to encyclicals and apostolic exhortations, which are highly edited and intentionally nuanced documents that must be digested slowly and in context. It’s a different way of getting information, completely alien to the way people process the disposable “content” from YouTube and social media and talk radio and “The View”.
Here’s some techno-babble: I’ve used Linux for a couple of decades now. I love Linux. I used to run Arch Linux, but when the AUR got hacked recently I decided to migrate back to MX Linux (the lazy man’s Debian). I recently tried Nixos, but I couldn’t get it to do all the things I wanted, and I just didn’t have the patience to figure it all out. Maybe some day. I still use X11, but I’m keeping an eye on Wayland development. So for now, it’s MX Linux (the tried and true) with sysvinit.
Am I a Linux expert? Naw. I know just enough to use the terminal and write bash scripts that do all sorts of useful things. I actually prefer a highly customized Fluxbox WM (no, really) to all the eye-candy DEs and WMs (minimalism, baby). And I do everything with custom keybindings (including tiling and workspace switching). So I’m not really a nerd yet. I’m still just a nerd wannabe. Even so, I love Linux. It’s all about choice and control. I mean, it is MY beloved obsolete, low-spec laptop, after all. Yes, I bought a super-cheap HP laptop at Walmart fifteen years ago, and I’m still using that laptop today.