In his classic Orthodoxy, G.K. Chesterton gives us some wonderful advice on how to foster a healthy mind. This is my most heart-felt wish for all in 2011. And so here is my grain of salt to help us all do so… In a chapter entitled The Maniac, Chesterton tells us that it is not … Read more
Merry Christmas from Loving The Church. Here are two gems from St. Irenaeus on the Word-become-flesh for you and your family to contemplate and relish over the Christmas season. May we grow closer to Him this Christmas and come to love others with the same love that He has shown to us! As regards His … Read more
Today the Church celebrates the Feast of St. Ambrose, Bishop & Doctor of the Church, who was ordained a priest on Dec 7, 374, and became bishop of Milan. He was an effective pastor and teacher of the faithful. He boldly defended Church teaching against the Arians, a formidable heresy of the time. He died … Read more
On our November 16 post we looked at an ugly sect of the first & second centuries that wounded the Church to the core… Gnosticism… We saw what Hans Urs von Balthasar wrote: ‘So-called gnosis’ was all enormous temptation in the early Christian Church,” and that even the bloodiest persecution “posed far less of a … Read more
Have you ever wondered if the false ideas in our world today are ones that have been repeated again and again throughout the centuries? If that were true couldn’t we learn from the past? Couldn’t we gain wisdom from the men and women of the Church who found the solutions to these errors? The answer … Read more
Have you ever been embarrassed at a Cocktail party because you were not in the know about the latest Postsynodal Apostolic Exhortation from Rome? Then read on… Pope Benedict XVI just published a new one: Verbum Domini as it is called in Latin (that name will go over very well with a Brandy Sour in … Read more
Women Saints In his Wednesday General Audiences this year Pope Benedict XVI has been nourishing our souls & instructing us about the great men and women of our Christian heritage. This past Wed, 3 Nov 2010, he spoke about Marguertie d’Oingt, a thirteenth-century Carthusian prioress and mystic. Among other things he said this: Marguerite’s writings… … Read more
In Parts I – III, we saw that Loving the Church with von Balthasar proposes to comment on issues of the world, culture, religion, etc., in the spirit of von Balthasar, including the habit of consulting the best and brightest Christian minds from across the centuries. Here is the final installment of this introduction to … Read more
In Part I & II, we saw that Loving the Church with von Balthasar intends to comment on contemporary issues of our world, culture, religion, etc., in the spirit of von Balthasar, with our mind & heart open to the great luminaries of western Christian heritage. Here are more reasons that von Balthasar makes a … Read more
Tradition is the living river that links us to the origins, the living river in which the origins are ever present, the great river that leads us to the gates of eternity… – Pope Benedict XVI In Part I we saw that Loving the Church with von Balthasar proposes to comment on contemporary issues, culture, … Read more
