Free Republic

One of the disappointments of the post-Vatican II period has been the glacial pace of the growth in Catholic biblical literacy the Council hoped to inspire. Why the slow-down? Several reasons suggest themselves.The hegemony of the historical-critical method of biblical study has taught two generations of Catholics that the Bible is too complicated for ordinary people to understand: so why read what only savants can grasp? Inept preaching, dissecting the biblical text with historical-critical scalpels or reducing Scripture to a psychology manual, has also been a turn-off to Bible-study. Then there is the clunkiness of the New American Bible,...

A Cancer at the Heart of the Church How and why does this sort of thing happen? It causes me a piercing sorrow because it is emblematic of the widespread loss of faith in the adorable mystery of the Most Holy Eucharist that is a cancer at the heart of the Church. The Erosion of Faith Several years ago, in the context of a course I was teaching, I suggested that the erosion of faith in the Most Holy Eucharist was, in fact, fostered by a number of liturgical and disciplinary changes: – Minimalistic approach to the fast before Holy...

So Protestants and Catholics may not agree on which books should be in the Bible. And we don’t agree on which translations are best. But at least we can always agree on the Ten Commandments, right?  Well, not exactly. We agree on the scripture passages that the ten commandments come from (Deut 5 and Exodus 20). But scripture doesn’t enumerate them for us and break them into 10 nice, neat “commandments.” Because of this, there have been a number of different variations of the ten commandments as we know them today. The Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant versions are very...

O Philipp Melanchthon! . . . I appeal to you who live in the presence of God with Christ, and wait for us there until we are united with you in the blessed rest . . . I have wished a thousand times that it had been our lot together! (from online paper, "John Calvin -- True Presbyterian," by Francis Nigel Lee [pdf / html]; his own sources provided: J. Calvin: Clear Explanation of the Holy Supper, in Reid’s Theological Treatises of John Calvin, S.C.M., London, p. 258; see an alternate 1978 printing listed on amazon and this exact...

Findings from a nationwide study reveal that clergy sexual misconduct is more prevalent than many people believe.According to research by Baylor University, 3.1 percent of adult women who attend religious services at least once a month have been victims of clergy sexual misconduct since turning 18. In other words, seven women in every congregation of 400 adults have been victimized.Ninety-two percent of the sexual advances were made in secret and 67 percent of the offenders were married to someone else at the time of the advance."Because many people are familiar with some of the high-profile cases of sexual misconduct, most...

End-times mania and wild-eyed apocalyptic predictions have long been a staple in certain sectors of the Protestant world. In addition to the more mainstream Protestant prognosticators who have made a very comfortable living off their end-times related books and broadcasts (e.g., Hal Lindsey, Jack Van Impe, and Tim LaHaye, to name but three of the more prominent ones), groups which derive from Protestantism, such as Seventh-day Adventists and Jehovah's Witnesses, also spend an inordinate amount of time and energy trying to map out the contours of the rise of the Man of Sin and the dire happenings described in...

A Phoenix-area pastor has started to draw protesters to his congregation after he delivered a sermon titled, "Why I Hate Barack Obama," and told his parishioners that he prays for President Obama's death. Pastor Steven Anderson stood by his sermon in an interview with MyFOXPhoenix, which reports that the pastor continues to encourage his parishioners to join him in praying for the president's death. "I hope that God strikes Barack Obama with brain cancer so he can die like Ted Kennedy and I hope it happens today," he told MyFOXPhoenix on Sunday. He called his message "spiritual warfare" and said...

Updated August 18, 2008 (first published June 4, 2008) (David Cloud, Fundamental Baptist Information Service, P.O. Box 610368, Port Huron, MI 48061, 866-295-4143, fbns@wayoflife.org; for instructions about subscribing and unsubscribing or changing addresses, see the information paragraph at the end of the article) - Many people have walked into the Roman Catholic Church through the broad door of the “church fathers,” and this is a loud warning today when there is a widespread attraction to the “church fathers” within evangelicalism. The Catholic apologetic ministries use the “church fathers” to prove that Rome’s doctrines go back to the earliest centuries. In...