Learning to be Quick to Listen

I wanted to share a viewpoint from a fellow blogger today. Tony Perkins writes, "Abortion may have taken 55 million lives since Roe v. Wade, but it's created at least 110 million victims. Every one of those children had a mother--and not one of them was ever the same again. Some doctors would like us to believe that taking the life of an unborn child is just a simple, outpatient procedure. But lost somewhere in the pro-choice picket lines and political debates are the deeply personal stories of women trying to cope. And what was the Left doing to celebrate 40 years of legalized abortions? Releasing sick ads like the one described below. It was the brainchild of the Center for Reproductive Rights, a group that based on the video, the word "radical" doesn't begin to describe. The commercial features True Blood actor Mehcad Brooks holding roses and drinks in front of a roaring fire. At the end of a two-minute come-on, Mehcad looks at the camera and says, "Happy...

The Catholic Church celebrates the liturgical memorial of Saints Timothy and Titus, close companions of the Apostle Paul and bishops of the Catholic Church in its earliest days on January 26. Both men received letters from St. Paul, which are included in the New Testament. Pope Benedict XVI discussed these early bishops during a general audience recently, noting “their readiness to take on various offices” in “far from easy” circumstances. Both saints, the Pope said, “teach us to serve the Gospel with generosity, realizing that this also entails a service to the Church herself.” The son of a Jewish mother and a non-Jewish father, Timothy came from Lystra in present-day Turkey. His mother, Eunice, and his grandmother, Lois, are known to have joined the Church, and Timothy himself is described as a student of Sacred Scripture from his youth. After St. Paul’s visit to Timothy’s home region of Lycaonia, around the year 51, the young man joined the apostle and accompanied him in his travels...

There was a recent question on the Catholic Answers radio show about the idea of God having a body. Here is the response. Certain groups, notably the Mormons, have committed the error of saying that God the Father has a body, and have thus become anthropomorphites, people who say that God has a human form. In recent years, this form of doctrinal decay has also set in among certain segments of American Evangelicalism, most notably in the Pentecostal Word Faith movement. Evangelicals such as Finnis Dake, Jimmy Swaggart, Kenneth Copeland, and Benny Hinn have all (temporarily or permanently) bought into the idea that the Father has a body. Anthropomorphites argue that man is made in the image of God (Gen. 1:26–27) and point to verses that refer to the strong right arm of God, the eyes of God, and so forth. In doing this, they profoundly misunderstand Scripture. First, the image of God we bear involves our rational soul that separates us from animals (the function that the image plays in Ge...

The birth of Jesus causes joy because it gives us the certainty that God “works wonders in weakness,” Pope Benedict XVI said recently. “The Nativity of the Lord once again illuminates the darkness that often surrounds our world and our hearts with his light, bringing hope and joy,” he said during his weekly general audience. The pontiff opened and closed his remarks with Pilate's question to Christ at his trial: “Where do you come from?” Pope Benedict answered that the Gospels show Christ's “true origin” is from God the Father, and that he “comes entirely from him.” That Christ “by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary,” is a mystery “central to our profession of faith,” he stated. “At this phrase we kneel because the veil which hid God is, so to speak, lifted and his unfathomable and inaccessible mystery touches us directly,” the Pope reflected. He said that sacred music composed by the “great masters … lingers especially on this phrase, as if to try to express in...