Pope Gregory VII
In the early church the two biggest players were the Greek Church and the Latin Church. The Greek Church was larger but the Latin Church was clearly second. I’m aware that there were other churches such as Syriac, Coptic, Ethiopic, Armenian and others. However, these churches were quite small and by the end of the sixth century, most of them had fallen into Monophysitism.
Joshua Harris
In the 1990’s Evangelical pastor Joshua Harris wrote a book called I Kissed Dating Goodbye. It’s a book that was really popular among Evangelicals and even Catholics. Last year he repudiated the book in the same way that Thomas Merton repudiated The Seven Storey Mountain. He recently announced that he and his wife were getting a divorce. He more recently announced that he no longer identifies as a Christian. By the way, yesterday I was on the phone with a friend talking about this and he said that Harris’ book was awful.
I’ve always wondered what book I would give to a liberal heretic if I ever met them. Obviously Fr. James Martin is the most famous one in the English speaking world so he occupies the heretic slot in the question. What book would I give to Fr. Martin? Of course, Fr. Martin could be replaced with Ted McCarrick, Cardinal Wuerl, or any of the pseudo-theologians who composed the Instrumemtum Laboris for the upcoming Amazon Synod.
Queen Isabella and King Fernando of Spain
The Protestant Reformation revolved along theological issues. However, church corruption was the spark that set off the theological powder keg. Keep in mind the doctrines that the reformers protested against were nothing new at the time of the 16th century.
In my apologetics on this blog, the main thing that I deal with is Islam. I deal with a few other topics as well such as cultural issues, abortion, church politics, etc. I’ve tended to stay away from Creation vs. Evolution debate because that’s not a main focus of mine. This doesn’t mean that I’m unfamiliar with the debate. A lot of people I know who do apologetics specialize in this area so its a debate that I’m around, even if I’m not directly involved. I’m actually quite well read on this topic and have studied it for quite a while. In fact I’ve probably read more of Charles Darwin than 99.9% of atheists, including biology majors.
I saw about two dozen of these
Great Falls Montana is only a short drive from my city in Canada. I can be there in a few hours. I drove down there the morning of the fourth and happened to see more fireworks than I have in my life a hundred times over. I was thoroughly impressed. American patriotism is something that I’ve never seen rivaled.
After Mecca had fallen to the Muslims, Allah “revealed” Surah 9:29 to Muhammad. What does Muhammad do at this point? He rallies 30,000 men and marches them north of Medina to Tabuk in an attempt to engage the Romans. The Romans didn’t send an army to engage Muhammad. According to Ibn Kathir, they stayed there 20 days then went back to Medina. Ibn Kathir actually has a good summary of his events in his section on Surah 9:29.
From about 2008 to 2014 I was the ultimate Dennis Prager fan. I had read his first five books and listened to all three hours of his radio show every day for years. A while ago I posted a video by Theodore Shoebat where he compiles a bunch of pro-homosexuality statements by Prager while he was being interviewed by homosexual Dave Rubin.
The vast majority of Jews today support the state of Israel. However, the reasons differ quite a bit. The movement that made the modern state of Israel was 19th century secular nationalism. To this day, Jews that are secular support it as a safe place for Jews to live. There are some ultra-Orthodox Jews who oppose the state of Israel since they claim that a Jewish state can only be established as a Torah based theocracy. There are some religious Jews who support the state of Israel but think its not part of the Messianic puzzle. That’s the view of Rabbi Asher Meza.
This weekend I was doing a lot of reading and I realized something discouraging. It’s not enough to make me give up, if anything I’m going to try that much harder. Any Christian apologist who deals with Islam knows that Islamic apologetics is essentially using double standards which include quoting liberals ad nauseam. The Gospel of John becomes either super useful or super corrupted depending on what topic you’re trying to argue.