Two recent news stories impressed upon me the fact that I will always be some kind of Catholic. Even if it’s ex-Catholic. My first step in rejecting religion was exploring my own. This started as what I later knew to be feminist critique of Catholicism. The more I learned, the more it seemed clear to [...]

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I was recently doing a survey recommended to me by BoingBoing. One of the questions involved a poor person giving money to a charity vs. a rich person giving the same amount of money to a charity. It reminded me of the parable of the widow’s mite. Now, I have often been told, as a [...]

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Over at Screaming into the Void.

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Kevin asked that John review the Rat’s most recent encyclical (open letter to The Faithful), Spe Salvi. I had previously thought that I’d like to do a bit of a review of Deus Caritas Est, the prior encyclical but am having difficulty slogging through it. I still hope to get to it. An encyclical is [...]

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I’d like to see a similar compilation of the Koran, but in the meantime, I shall leave you with this thought: instead of prayers in schools, we should have bears in schools. And let you find out for yourselves exactly which verse that describes. hattip

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I went with friends to see Elaine Pagels speak on the Gospel of Judas yesterday. The people at Chapman University introduced her by pointing out that her book, The Gnostic Gospels, is one of The Modern Library’s one hundred most influential non-fiction books of the 20th Century. Whatever credence you may give such lists, there’s [...]

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This is an abbreviated and imperfect introduction to a problem that sends learned Biblical scholars into heated exchanges. Consider this a place to begin, but not to finish, the study of the synoptic problem. From the earliest times, Christian scholars realized that the Gospels attributed to Matthew, Mark and Luke had a lot in common [...]

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The three major monotheistic religions all have holy books that date to a minimum of 1400 years ago. This makes the relevance of these supposed Divine rules somewhat suspect. A Jewish cartoon that I enjoy reading has an interesting take on Jewish bioethics, including links under the cartoon to discussions of same. Among some of [...]

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Who wrote the four canonical Gospels?¬† Easy peasy, you say! (or not)¬† Flip open the table of contents, and the first four books are listed directly under “The New Testament”:¬† Matthew, Mark, Luke and John.¬† End of discussion.¬† Short post. According to tradition, the Apostle Matthew (the former tax collector) wrote the first Gospel; Mark [...]

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This is the first Mind on Fire Bible Study post. I’m still working on an overall structure, but I’m going to start with what I know best: the New Testament in general and the Gospels in particular. I want to be clear about my approach and purpose: my goal is to acquaint you all with [...]

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