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 When I originally made it, I only put a few books on the list and they were very basic.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.
For some reason I’ve had more than one discussion recently involving DNA sequencing and genealogy. You’re probably familiar with the whole thing where you spit in a capsule, send it to these companies and they tell you where your ancestors were from, supposedly. There are a lot of people on Youtube who make videos opening their results and they’re shocked because they didn’t know that they were Greek, Russian, Armenian, Jewish, etc.
What I found on my old bookshelf back home
I used to be a huge Dennis Prager fan. I subscribed to his podcast, owned his first five books and listened to any talk of his on YouTube that I could find. When I became a Traditional Catholic, I looked to only Scripture and Tradition for my guidance and my trust in Prager started to wane. However, I still regarded him as a “voice of reason” even though he wasn’t as influential toward my worldview as he once was.
My icon of St. Nicholas of Myra that I purchased in an Orthodox Monastery in Serbia
Has anyone asked the following question: why didn’t the so called Reformation happen in the East? Why didn’t it happen in Russia, Serbia, Romania, Greece, Armenia and other Eastern Countries that call themselves Christian. This is something that I’ve thought about for a long time and I believe that I’ve found the answer.
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.