abrenuntio

Disobedience to the Law and defiance of the Lord, in contrast to God's own faithfulness, are not just features of the 21st century, but of human history in its entirety. It is the theme of the Bible, right from the first pages.

It ranges from simple stupidity and willfulness, "knuckleheaded" attempts to bring about God's promises on our own schedule using our own worldly means; to full-blown apostasy, idol worship and open rebellion; to the particularly sinister theme of a "counterfeit religion". All of it leads to bad outcomes, sometimes determining the rest of history, and none of it ever derails God's good promises coming to full fruition in their own time.

To answer your question: in my understanding, Scripture sees a good-natured, obedient kind of zealotry in a positive light. But this zealotry rarely makes the headlines.

We possess hand-copied manuscripts originating from a wide range of ages, cultures, languages and personal tastes. They are far from word-by-word accurate literal copies, yet all these copies are fundamentally sound to the ears of modern day devout Jews and Christians.

My claim is that, by grace, both cults have successfully, over the course of many millennia, sniffed out loose but sound translations (even if they don't like the style or certain choices) from deliberately deviant translations.

I would say LXX and Hebrew versions share a common theological vision. None of the examples mentioned in this article convince me otherwise.

Example: bringing the Law to the nations and bringing fear of the Lord to the nations refers to the exact same future, because fearing the Lord is a positive thing in Scripture. Israel itself was to be a spiritual sign of mankind fearing the Lord. And that future came to pass. God is bringing fear to the nations. Not the trembling fear for a dangerous oppressive army, but wholehearted conversion. By the time Messiah arrived, Jerusalem was already visited by eager "phoboumenoi": pagan "God-fearers" who had understood that the creator God of Israel was not like any of the pagan "gods".

An example of a translation truly deviating is for instance that made by Jehovah's Witnesses. An example: they translate ruach as "active force", not as a one-off choice because some human translator on some particular day in his own cultural context thought it just sounded better, but because JWs reject trinitarianism. You will not find a single actual Christian (or Jew!) accepting this as a (systematic) translation choice.

In fact, it's a testament to the divine inspiration of Scripture that Christians and Jews have never relied on an absolutely letter-for-letter standardized text to know the voice of their Shepherd.

Belt and suspenders protection it is.

Call it Houdini already.

For a good Catholic (Dominican) summary of the encyclical:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cpptgvohfZc

From the Wikipedia page on the Catholic Church: "By means of Catholic charities and beyond, the Catholic Church is the largest non-government provider of education and health care in the world."

Just yesterday I went to see a presentation of a priest appointed to a massive parish in the rural area of South Sudan, setting up schools and bringing in aid.

Because of Krazam it took me a minute or two to accept that this now exists for real

I'm personally rather fond of Java, but even this (or the shorter `Predicate`) still can't compete with the straightforward simplicity of a type along the lines of `string -> bool`.

No. The Bible says nothing about a European secular nationalist movement called Zionism. Certainly nothing positive.

Some Orthodox Jews are very active against it, on very sound religious grounds.

Not sure whether an index is still pragmatic.

But I hope the Catholic Church of the future will take the defense of its flock more serious again. Many books (and movies and TV series...) out there contain downright evil ideas, sometimes presented in dishonest ways. Perhaps some organized, ecclesiastically sanctioned system of reviews to guide readers would be feasible?

No opinions on the ship itself, but the social proposals are very interesting :-)

Earth biomes will be kept intact with respect to their natural evolution. But human society will be treated as an amoral engineering problem seeking to optimize a few measurable parameters chosen up front. There is little sense in this proposal that human beings will bring along with them original sin or whatever you want to call it. But what allows human beings to flourish and keeps societies together, especially in conditions of scarcity (very much unlike the conditions of say the past half century), may not be obvious to the project planners.

In fact, much of what has been handed down to us in the legal and opaque cultural and religious traditions that have successfully survived such stresses in the past, is gleefully discarded.

The social engineering proposed is of the most dystopian and heavy-handed variety: it involves taking a group of volunteers to Antarctica to format them to a supposed sociocultural blank slate, followed by "characteristics monitoring". Despite the apparent care for superficial day-to-day happiness, human beings are to be indoctrinated to see themselves as discardable resources. They are not just governed with "mere" discipline, but with a program of violent population control (e.g. "maximum 2 childrens", "not necessarily with the same partner", "euthanasia", "not owned by the individual", ...).

So humans on Chrysalis will decide over every single aspect of life and death, not for themselves but for each other. But this time, unlike all earlier times, it will work because they're going to keep "governance architecture liquid, horizontal and inclusive" and "open source communities" and "not ethically compulsory" and based on "deep scenario exploration".

Would a true divine miracle be a suspension of order or a manifestation of it?

Will it ever be possible to prove that some future human theory of reality is complete?

It might be added that Dominicans had the explicit calling to crown their preaching by leading virtuous lives marked by poverty. As an example of this, especially in the early days, Dominicans traveled a lot by foot as a form of austerity. This could certainly work with having a bit of a girth, but the full experience of 13th century Dominican life is hard to square with "morbid obesity" or being "physically grotesque". We also know that Aquinas was humble, spiritual and deeply motivated to join this new mendicant order specifically. He resisted all attempts of his noble family to steer him in other directions that would have been more prestigious in the eyes of the world. I also remember reading that Aquinas ate only once a day to devote himself more fully to his work (not sure where though).

Yes. You are right. "My sacrifice, O God, is a broken spirit; a broken and contrite heart you, God, will not despise." It would not be good to create religious beauty to "impress" God in a boastful way. All that is good in creation exists in God in supereminent fashion.

But we don't do things to impress God in that sense. By supernatural grace our broken spirit begins to heal and we become like God, from the inside out, in a way appropriate to our finite created nature. From grace comes our (sometimes clumsy...) imitation of Jesus and, why not, a taste for sacred art and beauty. By grace all of creation will be transformed.

Since you ask: what is elevated on the Catholic (and Orthodox) altars is the Son, the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It does not come from us, we did nothing to deserve it, and yet it was given to us so we can offer it to God. As the Lamb is elevated and we look up to it, we desire to add what little is in us. One expression of this desire is to have everything involved, from the building to the sacred vessels, express the sanctity of what is taking place. It may be clumsy, it may be mixed up with impure motives and false piety. Who knows, it may really have been a bit much at times. But in itself, it is good and appropriate. It does not exclude other expressions of grace. In fact, to suppress it completely strikes me as joyless, misanthropic, deeply unbiblical and likewise potentially mixed up with impure motives and false piety.

What I think is wrong in your reply, is that you seem to confuse the art and golden vessels found in churches (which is a growing heritage serving public and religious purposes) with privately owned wealth and a life dedicated to self-indulgence (like the rich man from Lazarus).

Finally, as a father I am always happy with the drawings of my kids, especially if I know that they really put effort in it. It is amazing to see that these little human beings I helped to come into existence have such creativity in and of themselves. Would this same joy not exist in our Heavenly Father in a supereminent way?

"He who testifies to these things says, ``Yes, I am coming soon.'' Amen. Come, Lord Jesus."

Correct, he lived in Turkey around the late third-early fourth century.

Read it here:

https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/0714.htm

(E.g. when discussing the Eucharist.)

It's a catastrophe, not just esthetically but spiritually as well. It has nothing to do with austerity or wealth. Some of the churches no longer seek to express holiness ("having been set aside for God") and support the numinous and eternal nature of the divine liturgy that takes place in them.

One of the most breathtaking pictures I've ever seen in this regard is of Mass in a German church completely destroyed during WW2.

https://www.churchpop.com/content/images/size/w1200/wordpres...

"Stat crux dum volvitur orbis"...

"This perfume was worth an entire year's wages. Why wasn't it sold and the money given to the poor?"

Sacred art exists to honor the Lord. We ourselves may remain poor and humble in the middle of all this beauty :-)

Don’t confuse culture and gradual inculturation with purity of religion and validity of liturgy.

In the age of the Messiah the faithful are truly drawn “from every nation, from all tribes and peoples and languages”. If your wife would go to any (decent) Catholic or Orthodox church, and learns to "read" the building and the liturgy of Holy Mass, maybe she could recognize the contours of the “pure” or “more Jewish" religion she is yearning for. She could go to modern or more traditional Latin/Greek/Ukrainian/Syriac/Ethiopian/... rites and in the plurality of all those different cultures and temperaments recognize over and over again the exact same elements and basic plan, organically evolved yet meticulously preserved in a chain of unbroken sacramental obedience.

Entering the church building she’d gradually walk from the holy water near the entrance, through the “outer courtyard” for the lay people, to the sanctuary with the sacrificial altar, golden vessels and incense, elevated and separated by altar rail or curtain. Behind is the tabernacle, the Holy of Holies containing the Real Presence, indicated by a lit candle. And if she was to e.g. carefully analyse the words of the Eucharistic prayers in all these different rites and languages, she would find over and over again the same underlying structure, complete with the Haggadah.

But language and cultural differences aside, there must be fundamental differences as well. It is Christ Himself who took the prescribed liturgy of the ancient Passover meal and gave it its full and final meaning by substituting Himself, in the presence of the apostles, for the merely symbolic lamb. It is through Christ that the Trinity is fully revealed.

How then could e.g. the exact same holidays have been retained? For instance, why would you celebrate Shavuot, if with Pentecost the Holy Spirit directly descended on the Church? Another example: the Lord's Day is not "Sabbath on the wrong day". Sabbath laws do not apply to those under the New Covenant. Beyond the most excellent idea of dedicating an entire day to the Lord with plenty of obligatory prayer, rest, food and family/community time, the Christian Sunday is simply not the Sabbath. On Sunday we celebrate the Resurrection, which occurred on the first day of a new week (the supernatural "eighth day", beyond the natural fullness of the old week).

The priest in this age is also no longer a Levite. To properly offer this sacrifice, he is now sacramentally ordained by proper religious authorities “in the Order of Melchizedek”, reminiscent of the royal priesthood of David and the priesthood of Adam and the firstborns. And where the old liturgy was a sign of divine grace, the liturgy of our age is an effective cause of divine grace. If the priest obeys the liturgy that has been prescribed for his own rite and his own day, no amount of personal corruption can take away the sanctity of his work. This also means that there is no fundamental need for wars in the Holy Land or for "conquering" the Temple Mount by force. The Temple is already being built. Every time the faithful, after having been sacramentally cleansed of mortal sin through baptism or confession, participate in the Lord’s sacrifice by eating the body and drinking the blood of the Lamb, they themselves will inevitably become more and more the dwelling place of the Lord within the material creation.

Napoleon: "don't you know that I can destroy the Church?"

Bishop: "my colleagues have been trying for 1800 years and haven't succeeded."

When a woman honored the Lord with expensive perfume, it was Judas who complained about this. "Why wasn't this money given to the poor?"

Many flawed people belong to the Church. But the art of the Church does not belong to any individual. It exists to honor and glorify the Triune God from within material creation.

Indeed: some scholars date the synoptic gospels after 70AD because of their metaphysical assumption that predicting the future is impossible.

But late dating creates a host of disparate problems that must be explained. One problem coming to mind: Acts of the Apostles clearly ends with Paul still being alive.

If you simply don't share the assumption that prophecy is fundamentally impossible, then early dating for Mt, Mc and Lc becomes easy to accept on the basis of evidence.

The Q hypothesis has issues. For such an important document or source, nothing is known about it. Its existence is not mentioned or hinted at in external sources. No trace of it has been found.

In addition, the synoptic puzzle can be laid in a self-consistent and "path-of-least-resistance way" by looking at e.g. author motives: Matthew writing for the Jewish community in Jerusalem; Mark describing Peter's preaching in Rome; Luke writing as a Greek doctor for a gentile audience (and John writing much later, clarifying and responding to the first heresies that had popped up).

So the Q hypothesis, aside from being a theoretical construction based on internal evidence, is not necessary either.

See e.g. "Case Against Q: Studies in Markan Priority and the Synoptic Problem" by Goodacre.

Absolutely this.

I had the exact same reaction: "mind" as in "mind-body" for me refers to things such as reasoning, qualia, intentionality, the fact that neural patterns somehow receive "real meaning".

The mind may or may not be immaterial. This age-old question has not been resolved in any way, not even close.

I'm looking forward to going through this... thank you so much!

Definitely not ordinary places. Perhaps Stella Maris, the end point, is the most fascinating of all because of its association with the prophet Elijah.

Check it :-) Other popular saints and devotions are "Mary", "Joseph", "Paul", "Sacred Heart", ... can you easily get seven sufficiently special ones on a line for those?