Since becoming Catholic, I have sometimes been accused of holding Catholic assumptions, which necessarily lead to Catholic conclusions. Ironically, this accusation is sometimes made by various protestant friends who know I was raised and lived as a devout protestant for the vast majority of my life, and indeed shared many
This is the second in a “mini-series” within my Becoming Catholic series about the numerous examples from the Church Fathers that show how they described heresy—and how their descriptions matched what I took for granted as a protestant to be the means by which one arrives at the “true Faith.”
One of the key moments in my conversion was reading An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine, by the famous Anglican convert John Henry Cardinal Newman. Published in 1845, most of it was written and conceived before Newman had even been received into the Catholic Church. Newman was a
One of the most striking discoveries I made in the writings of the Church Fathers is that every time they spoke about heresy and heretics, they were describing me and my protestantism. I don’t mean they described the specific details of protestant beliefs. Rather, they explained how heresies and heretics
St. Justin Martyr was one of the Church’s first great apologists, utilizing the power of philosophy and Scripture to argue in favor of Christianity. He was martyred during the reign of Emperor Marcus Aurelius, sometime in the 160’s, and beheaded for not offering sacrifice to the Roman gods.1 In the
There are few parts of the Bible that played a bigger role in bringing me to the Catholic Church than Acts 15—the account of the “Council of Jerusalem.” There is a reason this blog is my longest so far in the “Becoming Catholic” series—it takes a good deal of unpacking.
I am set to be received into the Catholic Church in July 2019. I made the decision to convert in February 2018. I only considered the Catholic Church as a possibility (one I hated, despised, and feared) in July 2017. To become Catholic is, quite simply, the most unexpected turn
This blog post is the fifth, and final part of Church Authority, and Saint Ignatius the Red Pill. The individual parts are linked above. Part 1 covered Ignatius’ idea of Church authority in his epistles to the Philadelphians and the Smyrnaeans. Part 2 covered his epistle to the Ephesians. Part
As I have outlined, the key catalytic moment when, for the first time, I had to seriously consider the proposition that the Catholic Church is the true Church founded by Jesus Christ, was when I read the Church Fathers. Some of the earliest ones, men discipled by the Apostles themselves,
