I am reading Life of Christ by the Venerable Abp. Fulton Sheen. Although at first his language struck me as dated, but after a little reading it was clear that his content is timeless, and maybe even more applicable today than in his day because the trends that concerned him in the 1970s have now come into their fullness. The book goes through the life of Jesus Christ chronologically, drawing material from all four Gospels.

I went to confession last Friday, and for a penance, the priest told me to pray through Psalm 4. It turned out to be very appropriate for my struggles about the corruption that is being revealed in the Catholic Church. I thought I would go through the psalm and talk about what it means to me. The psalm starts with: Answer me when I call, O God of my right!

This morning I saw a post by a Fr. David Abernathy about a blog post that writes about one of the many great passages in The Brothers Karamazov. In this passage, a woman confesses to a monk, Fr. Zosima, about how she finds it difficult to actively love others in the way that Christ teaches us to do. Fr. Zosima replies: “I heard exactly the same thing, a long time ago to be sure, from a doctor,” the elder remarked.

These two quotes from Peter Kreeft’s book Heaven, the Heart’s Deepest Longing came in my email from Daily Catholic Wisdom. I think they are important for thinking about how we live our lives. Are we only looking for things that will gratify us in this life, or are we seeking something that gives our lives ultimate meaning? Jesus said, “For what shall it profit a man, if he shall gain the whole world, and lose his own soul?

As I was beginning my journey to the historic church, which resulted in me entering into the Catholic Church, I encountered a Latin expression, “Lex orandi, lex credendi,” which means “the rule of prayer is the rule of faith”. People in the Orthodox Church used this expression to say that the best way to learn about what Orthodox Christians believe is to look at how they pray, which means to look at their liturgy.

Lately, I’ve been exploring the liturgy that was used in the Catholic Church in the early 60s, before the changes that came in the wake of Vatican II. I was struck by the antiphons for the psalms and canticles of Lauds today (from Divinum Officium), which is the 4th Sunday of Advent. They stirred up my spirit as I anticipated the celebration of Christmas. Blow ye the trumpet * in Zion, for the day of the Lord is nigh at hand: behold, He cometh to save us!

I found some notes I took from a talk I heard where Peter Kreeft lists his favorite books. Here is what I have written. Enjoy! Top books Autobiography The Confessions, St. Augustine A Severe Mercy Novels The Brothers Karamozof, Dostoevsky Till We Have Faces, C. S. Lewis Plays A Man for All Seasons, Bolt Our Town, Thorton Wilder Epics The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien The Chronicles of Narnia, Lewis Supernatural Fantasy The Great Divorce, Lewis The Screwtape Letters, Lewis Science Fiction A Canticle for Leibowitz Brave New World Spirituality The Practice of the Presence of God The Story of a Soul, St.

I discovered blogging in 2001 with Dave Winer’s Radio Userland software. I played around with a few blog ideas using Radio and then tried other blogging software before finally settling down on Blogger, where my old Scriptorium blog still resides. If you look at it, you will see that although it goes back to 2003, not much has been done there lately. For some time I’ve been wanting to move off of Blogger to a static website system using Markdown, but now I decided to bite the bullet, make a decision, and setup this site using Hugo hosted on Netlify.