Archive for August 2012

Archbishop Minnerath on Rome, the Papacy, and the East

Aug 21st, 2012 | By | Category: Blog Posts

How was the Papacy understood in the ancient Christian East? This is the topic of an essay by Archbishop Roland Minnerath entitled “The Petrine Ministry in the Early Patristic Tradition.” [1] I address Archbishop Minnerath’s essay because I do not want it to become an occassion for misunderstanding. In this ecumenical essay, the Archbishop acknowledges, “The East never […]



Relics, Saints, and the Assumption of Mary

Aug 15th, 2012 | By | Category: Blog Posts

My conversion to the Catholic faith was a slow process, and contained many surprises along the way. One of the biggest surprises was the change in my thinking about relics, saints,  and the Virgin Mary. As a good Presbyterian, I had naturally grown up with a revulsion to such things.  The derision of Calvin’s Treatist […]



PBS: Episcopal-to-Catholic Converts

Aug 9th, 2012 | By | Category: Unity in the News

Watch Episcopal-to-Catholic Converts on PBS.



Imputation and Paradigms: A Reply to Nicholas Batzig

Aug 3rd, 2012 | By | Category: Blog Posts

Nicholas Batzig is a graduate of Greenville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, and pastor of New Covenant Presbyterian Church (PCA) in Richmond Hill, Georgia. Nicholas and Anna Batzig Recently he wrote an article titled “The Justification of Imputation,” in which he provides an exegetical argument for the Protestant conception of justification by way of extra nos imputation. […]



Papacy Roundup

Aug 2nd, 2012 | By | Category: Blog Posts

There has been a great deal of discussion at CTC about the rational superiority of the Catholic interpretive paradigm  over the Protestant interpretive paradigm. As Michael Liccione, and others, have pointed out, Protestantism has no principled way to differentiate dogma from theological opinion – no coherent way even to identify the contours of Christian doctrine […]



Is Certainty a Bad Thing? Certainty, Infallibility, and the Reformed Tradition

Aug 1st, 2012 | By | Category: Blog Posts

Is it wrong to desire certainty in our act of faith?  If you peruse the Reformed blogoshpere these days, you might come to that conclusion. As more and more Reformed Christians join the Catholic Church in search of doctrinal certainty, an all-too common response from the Reformed world has been to impugn this desire for certainty as […]