Moses
Deuteronomy is the final book in the Torah. It is the last set of instructions given to the Israelites before their military conquest of the holy land. God commanded the Israelites to invade the land and displace the inhabitants and set it up as their home and to follow His customs and laws. This happens in the book of Joshua.
Eusebius of Caesarea
Over the Christmas break, I was up north in my hometown visiting family. I was talking with my mom about history and the important tools of historiography. We weren’t talking about Church history, but the history of WWII. The discussion focused around how bad history from WWII was. At this point my mom remembered an episode from a history class that she took in University. The professor had told her class the following: “Since the year 1800, there has been no history, only journalism.”
One of the new books added to the list
When I first started this website back in 2015, I wanted to make a Recommended Reading section. When I originally made it, I only put a few books on the list and they were very basic. I’ve learnt a lot more about apologetics dealing with the online community since then. I now have a better idea about what is important and where focus needs to be put. I hope that my readers find this helpful. Here are my recent additions to the list:
I hope that everyone is having a great 2018. Recently I’ve been reading many medieval Christian polemics against Islam. When reading medieval Christian literature, we can’t ignore what St. Thomas Aquinas says. Sadly, I must admit the Angelic Doctor dropped the ball on this one; at least according to what he wrote in the Summa Contra Gentiles. This won’t be popular amongst my Traditional Catholic friends but I believe that I have a good argument on this one.
Earlier this year, the Turkish Islamic scholar Mustafa Akyol came out with the book The Islamic Jesus: How the King of the Jews Became a Prophet of the Muslims. The book is interesting, I’ll say that much. I had meant to read it earlier but other things got in the way. I picked it up yesterday and finished it today and am now going to share some of my thoughts on the book.
St. John of Damascus
Church history is my speciality. I’ve been studying it in depth for eight years. One of the greatest rules of doing history is enemy attestation. We don’t have the surviving writings of many heretical groups but we have Catholic polemics against them and can therefore determine many of their beliefs.
Above is one of the most one sided debates that I’ve ever seen. It’s between Robert Spencer and Adnan Rashid about the existence of Muhammad. I’ve written about this topic before so I won’t elaborate on it here but I want to touch on the terrible tactic used by Rashid. Although I believe Muhammad existed and am not a fan of the Spencer brand of apologetics to Muslims, I think that Spencer easily won this debate.
Sultan Mehmed the Conqueror who lived during the days when Islam was very powerful
I have often criticized fellow Christians and conservatives in my country and other Western countries for blaming societal problems on Islam and Muslims. I have often expressed anger at this because it is in my opinion an abdication of responsibility. Muslims aren’t the reason that Western countries have homosexual “marriage”, sky high abortion rates, sky high divorce rates, euthanasia, feminism, or Darwinism taught in our schools.
Donald Trump has recently announced that America will now recognize Jerusalem as the Capital of Israel. Also, he has initiated a process where the embassy will be moved to Jerusalem. This obviously has huge ramifications for the Arab Israeli conflict. I won’t comment on that here, but I do want to talk about the history of Zionism.
The Sacred Scriptures
In recent decades, Muslims have begun using the Bible against Christians. In my view, this is an unwise move. It’ll only work providing the Christian does not know their own Bible, especially the NT. Christians and Muslims do share theology in common such as Jesus being the Messiah and born of a virgin. Muslims will see this in the Bible and take it as confirmation. However, on the points that we disagree, some Muslims will take quotes out of the context of the book they’re quoting from and try to prove Islam.