Putting “Lent” and “Ash Wednesday” into perspective

I wrote about Lent several years ago. It’s worth bringing this up every year, I think: For all you Catholics out there, [yesterday was] “Ash Wednesday”. It’s the beginning of the Lent season – the 40 days prior to Easter, a very old tradition of the early church. For all you Protestants, you should know …

On mining for support for doctrines “after the fact”, and finding “100% certainty” “under certain conditions”. Or: “Dogma-appreciation 101”.

This is something that Nathan Rinne picked up on a couple of weeks ago: Earlier in the thread [the “Visible Church” thread], in post # 221, John Thayer Jensen wrote: “… people often seem to me to make the mistake of deciding, first, what things are true – which implies some external canon – and …

The Catholic Historical Method

It’s important to understand, when Catholics and Protestants approach a given topic, they approach things in different ways. In comments to a recent posting on the question of the origin of the Bible, one Catholic writer prefaced his statement this way: “Both sides, yours and mine both can be accused of question begging.” The dishonesty …

A Positive View of Christian Foundations

Jesus said, “Everyone then who hears these words of mine and does them will be like a wise man who built his house on the rock. And the rain fell, and the floods came, and the winds blew and beat on that house, but it did not fall, because it had been founded on the …

Ash Wednesday and the practice of Lent

For all you Catholics out there, today is “Ash Wednesday,” (sorry I’m posting this in the evening). It’s the beginning of the Lent season – the 40 days prior to Easter, a very old tradition of the early church. For all you Protestants, you should know that there’s a difference between “tradition” and “Tradition” in …