Year: 2011

Events like last week’s tsunami often spur on premillenial believers who think that things have never been this bad before and that the end is in sight. This is not new. James Moorhead mentions an encounter that Robert Willett had back in World War I: he encountered an energetic man who explained that Kaiser Wilhelm…

This is me thinking out loud. The prominence of Peter in the New Testament is striking, but it does not mean what the modern RCC says it means. So what does it mean? I’m not sure. The famous passage from Matthew 16 says: And Jesus answered him, “Blessed are you, Simon Bar-Jonah! For flesh and…

I just finished reading The New Charismatics by Richard Quebedeaux. The book is a history of the charismatic movement up until about 1973. I learned a lot from the book and it’s a subject I wanted to know more about, since it involves my Mom and the trajectory she took quite a bit. Some random…

Last week I read something Jesus said that puzzled me, it is in Matthew 13.51-52 where he finishes a string of parables and told the disciples: Therefore every scribe who has been trained for the kingdom of heaven is like a master of a house, who brings out of his treasure what is new and…

I was struck this morning while reading the Sermon on the Mount, how Jesus’ first teaching as recorded by St. Matthew is an ethics-laden sermon. Jesus called Israel to repent, and then went up on the mountain and issued all kinds of teaching on care for the poor, sexual ethics, the way marriage should work,…