Here and There . . .

• Jamie Blosser (Ad Limina Apostolorum) has a good post on Catholics and The Bible:
  the Catholic Church is not the evangelical church(es). If the holy Scriptures are 'front and center' in our Church, it is a position they must share with the holy Eucharist, the summit of our faith and worship. And the Scriptures in our Church serve not only as nourishment for the individual believer, but primarily for the common activities of "pastoral preaching, catechetics and all Christian instruction, in which the liturgical homily must hold the foremost place (Dei Verbum 24). In my view, the best way to nourish the Catholic reading of Scripture is to advance and reform these pastoral activities - i.e., preaching, catechetics, Christian instruction and liturgy. If these were carried out the way the Second Vatican Council intended them to be, Catholics would be getting fed with enough Scripture to put the most fervent evangelical to shame. But the last thing we need, to this end, is yet another pastoral statement; how about some implementation and enforcement of existing norms?

• "The Best-Selling Bigotry of Left-Behind. Carl Olson, author of Will Catholics be Left Behind?, revisits the topic in an article for The Catholic League. Did you know he corresponded by email with Dr. Tim LaHaye, who attempted to persuade him to forsake the "Babylonish paganism" of the Church?

• What About Charles Williams? - Thomas Howard on the oft-overlooked Inkling in Touchstone.

• Good exchange between Jamie Blosser and James Akin on the recent publication of the Compendium of the Social Doctrine of the Church.

• Pontifications on mortal and venial sin:
  . . . The Reformation didn’t solve the problem of assurance. It accentuated it. The Reformation only succeeded in turning the sinner’s gaze around into the black abyss of the human heart. The anguished conscience remains. It’s a minority problem, of course. Most Christians have not struggled with it and do not struggle with it. Most Christians live lives of humble faith, doing good works, saying their prayers, and trusting and fearing the final judgment of the gracious and holy God, hoping but not knowing what that final judgment will be. As one of my good friends who was struggling with serious sin in her life once told me, “I cannot presently repent, but I accept whatever God’s judgment upon my life might be. Who better to judge my life than the Father of Jesus?” As for the rest of us, perhaps Prozac has solved the problem. But the problem of the anguished conscience is ecumenical. It doesn’t matter if one is Reformed, Lutheran, Anglican, Catholic, or Orthodox.