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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Happy Jack and Friends - Update

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  Pull up a chair and say hello  Happy Jack has discovered how to allow anonymous comments! This is available to those without Google accounts. Just click on the 'Comment' button and select 'Anonymous'. You can give yourself a name too by clicking the 'Name/URL button.  There is now a 'Contact' button - on the right of the page - for anyone with any ideas or suggestions about this blog. However, Jack believes one has to have a Google account to use this. If someone has an article they'd like published do send Jack your email address and he'll contact you and let you know his. You'll see from the 'Visits' counter that we've had 2000+ views since week this blog has been running. So please make a comment and keep things going - or not!  
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Non Serviam: The Mystery of the First Refusal

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  "Better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heav'n"   (Satan, Milton's Paradise Lost) Introduction Before the serpent, before any human being drew breath, or any garden was planted, something turned. That's the question this essay sits with. Not why evil exists in some abstract philosophical sense, but how the very first act of rebellion was even possible. Lucifer, the tradition tells us, had no excuses. No tempter whispering in his ear, no passion clouding his judgment, no ignorance to hide behind. Pure spirit and intellect; created good and held in grace, and yet, at some point in what we can only call the morning of creation: non serviam . I will not serve. The human fall has contextual factors. There's a serpent, there's embodiment, there's the particular vulnerability of creatures who learn gradually and can be deceived. When Adam and Eve make a wrong choice, we can see contributing conditions. But Lucifer strips the problem to its bones. His ...
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Did Christ Have to Suffer?

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As a child, HJ asked himself why Jesus died such a terrible death to put right Adam and Eve eating an apple? An apple! Was there no other way? What did it say about God? These are question any thinking Christian will have contemplated - or should have. And, if we are to bring others to Christ, we need to be clear in our answers. Warning. It's a lengthy read - as it ought to be! This article , by Paul Thigpen, Catholic Answers, covers the many questions raised by the Passion of Our Lord. As Good Friday approaches it seems fitting to contemplate the issues raised. Sixteen centuries ago, when Augustine addressed the matter, he noted that he was not the first person even back then to discuss it. “There are those,” the bishop wrote, “who say, ‘What? Did God have no other way to free men from the misery of this mortality? No other way than to will that the only-begotten Son . . . should become man by putting on a human soul and flesh, becoming mortal so he could endure death?’” If Go...
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