Prayer Request

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Please join with me in praying for a dear friend who is undergoing treatment for cancer.   

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Memorandum from Below - Toward a Successful Apostolate

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History Is Not a Moral Scoreboard - We are Not God’s Referees

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  Introduction There is a very human instinct, when something bad happens to someone, to wonder what they did to deserve it. And there is an equally human instinct, when we read the harsher parts of the Old Testament, the sudden deaths, the divine punishments, the apparent scorekeeping, to feel that we understand what is going on: God is rewarding the good and punishing the bad, and we are meant to learn from that. Both instincts feel reasonable; they can even feel religious. But when we take the Gospels seriously, when we let Jesus Christ be the lens through which we read everything else, something unexpected happens. It puts real pressure on them both. Again and again, in His words and in His parables, Jesus dispels the idea that we can read God's verdicts off the surface of events, or that we are qualified to do that kind of reading. This is not comfortable, but it’s deeply reassuring. It means that no suffering person need wonder whether God is punishing them. And it mean...
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The Existence of Hell and the Question of Eternity

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"For the Son of Man came to seek out and to save the lost"  (Luke 19:10) Introduction There are objections to hell that come from anger. Some objections come from wounded experience. And then some objections come from love, from a refusal to believe that the God revealed in Christ could eternally abandon His creatures. It is the last of these that deserves the most careful listening. Understanding the suffering of hell as a freely chosen separation from God, rather than a divinely imposed torture, has made the doctrine morally intelligible for many Christians. It aligns with the Father who runs to meet the prodigal, who entreats the elder brother, who desires not the death of the sinner but that he turn and live. Yet the difficulty remains. Why must such separation be eternal? Why would freedom be "locked in" at death? Why would the Father ever cease to entreat? What the Church Teaches The Catholic Church teaches that hell is real, that it is eternal, and ...
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