animation of a grid representing a giant rogue wave In November of 2020, a freak wave came out of the blue, lifting a lonesome buoy off the coast of British Columbia 17.6 meters high (58 feet). The four-story wall of water was finally confirmed in February 2022 as the most extreme rogue wave ever recorded at the time. Such an exceptional event is thought to occur only once every 1,300 years. And unless the buoy had been taken for a ride, we might never have known it even happened. For centuries, rogue waves were considered nothing but nautical folklore. It wasn’t until 1995 that myth became fact. On the first day of the new year, a nearly 26-meter-high wave (85 feet) suddenly struck an oil-drilling platform roughly 160 kilometers (100 miles) off the coast of Norway. At the time, the ...

Despite the multitude of Christian denominations that have sprung up over the last 500 years, there seem to have been few, if any, important divisions among Christians about the authenticity of the canon of the New Testament since the Catholic Church promulgated it at the Council of Rome more than 1,600 years ago. I. The Genesis of this Topic St. John Henry Newman, the great 19th century English churchman, scholar and convert to Catholicism, famously once said, “To be deep in history is to cease to be Protestant.”[1] That seems like a fitting way to begin because the genesis of this essay was my hearing a Catholic convert quote the New Testament passages he references when explaining to his Protestant family and friends why he became Catholic.[2] I noticed that in the dialogue he described...

25th Sunday in Ordinary TimeBy Fr Victor Feltes What is the act of eating for? It is good for eating and drinking to be enjoyable, but they are intended for supporting life. What if people tasted but refused to consume? What if it became common and culturally accepted for people to eat and expel their meals without digestion? A normalization of bulimia would obviously be very unhealthy. It would be psychologically unhealthy — warping attitudes about food and our bodies — and also physically unhealthy, leading to malnourishment and the death of many. However, new technologies, products, and politics would rise to promote this way of life despite its harms. The divine purpose for eating and drinking is our nourishment. It is not merely for our delight but for the good of supporting life. As ...

Skip to content It would seem that we are not free in heaven. If there is not even a possibility of falling from heaven, then can we say that we are there freely or are we there against our will? To navigate this paradox, we can look to Dante Alighieri’s masterpiece, The Divine Comedy. In the poem, Dante’s guide, Virgil, bids farewell after leading him through hell and purgatory. His parting advice to Dante is enigmatic at best and scandalous at worst: From now on, let your pleasure be your guide;…your will is free, erect, and whole—to actagainst that will would be to err: thereforeI crown and miter you over yourself.”(Purgatorio XXVII, 131, 140-142, trans. A. Mandelbaum) To understand Virgil’s advice, we must re-examine human nature. We freely make choices; some are good for us,...

[embedded content] I want to talk about something fundamental. We’re going to discuss what God really wants—the most important thing to God. So here are 9 mysteries concerning this subject What God Really Wants The thing that God really wants from us is love, and there are several ways we know this. One of the ways is that Scripture flat-out tells us that God himself is love. In 1 John 4, we read: God is love, and whoever abides in love abides in God, and God abides in him (1 John 4:16). Love is a major theme in the Gospels. In one of the most famous verses—John 3:16—we read: For God so loved the world, that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life (John 3:16). That’s one of the key ways God manifests his love for us: he sent his Son to sav...

In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the Founders and Framers would never have imagined to be “rights.” “Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy – “I did it my way” – over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul. The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Professor Glendon predicted. Nowhe...

The Vatican has issued a cautious ruling allowing the faithful to benefit from the spiritual phenomena reported at Medjugorje, Bosnia and Herzegovina.  Cardinal Víctor Fernández, prefect of the Dicastery for the Doctrine of the Faith (DDF), announced the finding at a press conference accompanying the release of a document titled “‘The Queen of Peace’: Note About the Spiritual Experience Connected with Medjugorje.”  This document authorized the granting of a nihil obstat (Latin, “nothing obstructs”) for the phenomena, provided certain clarifications are understood.   The nihil obstat is one of the new categories introduced in May 2024, when the DDF issued its new “Norms for Proceeding in the Discernment of Alleged Supernatural Phenomena.” It does not imply the origin of an ev...

By Clement Harrold September 20, 2024 The Babylonian exile is one of the most important events in salvation history. In fact, there are large portions of the Scriptures—the majority of the prophets, for instance—which don’t really make sense until we first learn to appreciate what the exile was and why it matters. So what is it exactly? Also known as the Bablyonian captivity, the Babylonian exile refers to the deportation of the Jewish people away from their homeland of Judah and into Babylon, the capital city of the Neo-Babylonian Empire (also known as the Chaldean Empire). Though no longer extant, Babylon was then located on the Euphrates river in southern Mesopotamia, in modern-day Iraq. This was not the first exile to afflict God’s people. Back in B.C. 722, the mighty Assyrian Empire h...