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Posted by Anthony on March 17, 2010
My ministry will be hosting an online apologetics conference this May with the theme of ‘literary apologetics.’ The general idea is to impact the culture in intentional ways to pave the way for better reception of the Gospel of Christ. So culture is on my mind.
Something I’ve been pondering for awhile is this: Is the culture war over? And did we lose it?
I part company with those who seek to Christianize the culture as though this in itself is a noble goal. It seems to me that this would in effect merely make our culture a ‘white washed tomb.’ More important than the culture are the people within it and their state of mind and eternal fates. Nonetheless, people are strongly influenced by the culture at large whether they know it or not or admit it or not. An unfriendly culture will make it harder for people to receive the Gospel.
I believe that. To an extent. I note, however, that the Christian Church itself exploded into existence within a culture that was not yet, by virtue of the fact that there wasn’t a pervasive Christianity to Christianize, Christian. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on March 10, 2010
I’ve been thinking about the culture wars lately. I have a real problem with Christians who seem to be driving for a change in the culture just for the sake of having a ‘holy’ culture. I think we’d have to call that a legalistic culture. I believe that the Christian church should be about something more than creating white-washed tombs.
On the other hand, the nature of ‘culture’ is that it perpetuates itself, feeds itself, fuels itself. The culture is the air we breathe and the water in which we swim. It has the ability to mold us into its image, and once so molded, we mold others in that same image. Resistance isn’t exactly futile, but it is difficult. Conformity to the culture is the path of least resistance. It would behoove us, therefore, to ensure that the culture is not toxic. If the culture is healthy, the path of least resistance will more likely result in healthy beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors. Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on November 7, 2008
A Christian Review of Anne Rice’s Called out of Darkness
Read my reviews of Anne’s other books, Out of Egypt and Road to Cana.
PURCHASE CALLED OUT OF DARKNESS
I was pleased to have Anne Rice’s latest release sent to me for review. Her spiritual auto-biography,
Called Out of Darkness: a spiritual confession, is available for purchase
through Amazon.
Welcome Catholic News readers! Feel free to drop a comment. You may be interested in my own book series,
Birth Pangs. Take a look after you finish the review!
Anne Rice begins her book by laying out in careful detail what her early life was like. It was a life that was thoroughly drenched in the Roman Catholic Church and culture as it was practiced in New Orleans. She attended Catholic schools and had Catholic friends. At one point, she wanted to be a nun. She delighted in the architecture of New Orleans and her Catholic surroundings.
However, she fell away from all this after high school. Though the seeds had been planted earlier on, in college she came into contact with people who loved learning, were smart, and cared about doing the right thing- all without religion, Christianity, or Catholicism. Anne reports that the controversies and strict moral teachings of the Catholic church weren’t primarily what drove her away from the faith. It was instead a disconnect between her and God, an inability to separate her relationship with the church with her relationship with Jesus Christ.
In a section on page 124 she says,
The church had become for me anti-art and anti-mind. No longer was there a blending of the aesthetic and the religious as there had been throughout my childhood.
Desperately I sought to escape the sense of sin that seemed to dominate every choice facing me. I lost faith in Hellfire. Or to put it differently, faith in Hellfire simply did not hold me firmly, as faith in God had once done. I left the church.
I stopped going. I stopped being a Catholic…. I quit for thirty-eight years.
…
I could not separate my personal relationship with God, and with Jesus Christ, from my relationship with the church. As I mentioned, I’d stopped really talking to God a long time ago. I hadn’t felt entitled to talk to Him in a long while. I’d felt far too demoralized to talk to Him. I just wasn’t the Catholic girl who had a right to talk to Him. I harbored too many profane ambitions.
I really enjoyed these frank and honest thoughts. I spend a lot of time talking to atheists and nonChristians and a lot of them were Christians at one time. They too could not separate their personal relationship with God and Jesus Christ from the relationship with the church. Incidentally, there are an awful lot of Christians who have this struggle, too. If you read my blog regularly, you will see that I speak to this fairly often.
Anne’s journey back to the faith was embodied in the novels that she wrote. If you don’t know, Anne is the author of the series of vampire books, beginning with Interview with a Vampire. Since I haven’t read these books, I merely report what Anne says about them in her spiritual auto-biography. After a long discussion about the appeal of her books and what drove her to write them, she says:
Read the rest of the entry… »
Posted by Anthony on June 2, 2008
A long time ago I had some conversations with Don Veinot at Midwest Christian Outreach. We touched base about once a year, I think. Then I moved to a new city. Still, I received their journals and newsletters, and so remained familiar with their ministry.
Recently, we renewed contact after he saw my recent article on WorldNetDaily.com on my argument that apologetics can be useful in addressing the ‘culture wars.’ It was then that I realized that I had never put a link to their webpage on my page, which is unfortunate. They are a great resource and they’ve been ‘at it’ for much longer than I have. Their material on the Jehovah Witnesses, in particular, has been informative for me.
So, the link has been added at last! It is in the right menu but if your eyes are too lazy to scan over there you can check it out here: http://www.midwestoutreach.org/
I saw that Don wrote a blog entry discussing the themes of my WND article, too. It was interesting, as were the comments. Check it out here: If Johnny Jumped over a Cliff. Gosh, that title sounds like some of the hate mail I get! It’s a different Johnny, I swear!
Posted by Anthony on April 28, 2008
Note: this post was originally intended for a small, almost exclusively Christian readership that consisted largely of folks who shared my perspective. I have opened the post up to the World Wide Web but please read it in light of its original context.
In private correspondence this week I’ve talked with a couple of people who are pursuing their Masters in Apologetics. In case the reader doesn’t know, I am doing the same. I don’t get emails like that very often, but if the programs that Christian colleges are offering is any indication, there is a demand- at least from the perspective of students- for apologetics degrees.
I wonder if any one has checked the ‘want ads’ for apologetics openings. I have. There aren’t any. There aren’t any because there aren’t apologetics positions. So the scoop is that there are many determined men and women willing to commit to the time of study required to handle the deepest objections to the Christian faith but there isn’t any place for them in the Church. Not if they want to support their families of course, or make use of the Scriptural principle “The worker is worth his wages” or “Don’t muzzle the ox…”
If a person wants to support themselves in apologetics, the options are limited. 1. Become a professor. 2. Get lucky. 3. Self-Support, like a missionary. I fear for the people entering apologetics. I certainly think the education establishment could use a fair number of informed and godly men and women, don’t get me wrong, but those positions are few and far between and let’s face it, they aren’t specifically apologetics. Even CS Lewis was a professor of literature with his apologetics on the side. Read the rest of the entry… »
