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A “Sermon by a Boy” for the meeting of the brothers of the Little Oratory

My dear brothers; this afternoon it seemed appropriate to speak on a topic I have been looking into during this liturgical period where we meditate upon the four last things. In recent reading, I was introduced to a position I was previously unfamiliar with on the topic of the fires of damnation and purgatory. A position which attempts to understand these fires as the divine love. The initial thought many of you may have is the same as the first thought that I myself had. How could the tormenting fire of hell and the purifying fire of purgatory be divine love? For is it not divine love which the saints enjoy in the beatific vision? How could this same love be that which torments the damned and which purifies the not yet beatified? An old maxim of the Theologians appears to be relevant here. “ That which is received is received according to the mode of the receiver”. The damned receive this perfect and infinite love as torment because they reject it. The souls undergoing their puri...
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On the Charge of Ontotheology

Much time has been spent attacking the critiques of Natural Theology and the chief arguments for the existence of God from contemporary analytical philosophy. So this post will not be spent with those critiques. There is a charge made within continental philosophy which is not often responded to nor addressed within contemporary Anglophone philosophy. The charge of “ ontotheology” . This has its roots within the critiques of philosophy by Luther, in the Critique of Pure Reason by Kant, and most recently in the work of Martin Heidegger. The principle work in English responding to this charge in contemporary is Thomas Joseph White’s “Wisdom in the Face of Modernity”. This post will proceed in three stages. The first will be laying out what exactly is the charge of ontotheology and why it is a problem for philosophical theism. The second will be in explaining some forms of philosophical theism that this charge does hit its mark against and how devastating the blow is. The thi...
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Why I became and remain Catholic.

Easter 2010 was a particularly momentous occasion in my life, I was formally received into the Catholic Church; receiving the Grace of Love, that is the Holy Spirit, through my first Sacramental Reconciliation; was sealed by the infusion of grace through Confirmation; and finally made communion with the Universal Church in my first reception of Our Lord in the Most Holy Sacrament of the Altar. I have noticed a growing trend on Catholic Social Media and Blogosphere in response to the purported loss of Catholics to the ‘unaffiliated’—I shall endeavour to say more about this notion of an unaffiliated religious belief in another post—group in the USA in which practicing Catholics give reasons for why they are Catholic.                 Firstly, a little about myself. I am a 22 year old practicing Catholic, who has recently graduated University with a BA (Hons) Philosophy and Theology with the ultimate aim of bei...
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Sola Scriptura, Solo Scriptura, & Ecclesial Anarchy; Against the Doctrine of Sola Scriptura. Author; Clay Whittleberry.

So, the following post will be a repeat of much of what I’ve already said in the past about Sola Scriptura. I would like to revisit the argument claiming that Sola Scriptura is Solo Scriptura, and then look at some of the implications that has. So, as I have referred to before, Keith Mathison wrote a book entitled The Shape of Sola Scriptura. Within that book he argued that Protestants were giving up the classical Reformation doctrine Sola Scriptura for the novelty Solo Scriptura. Sola Scriptura states that Scripture is our sole infallible authority on matters of faith and practice. Solo Scriptura states that Scripture is our sole authority on matters of faith and practice. The former allows for secondary fallible authorities. The latter does not. Bryan Cross and Neal Judisch argued that there is no principled difference between the two in a blog post they co-wrote at Called to Communion in 2009. I’ll summarize the argument here. Sola Scriptura sets Scripture up as our sole in...
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On the relation of Faith and Reason in the Doctrine of Creation; a preliminary analysis.

  " If anyone says that human reason is so independent that faith cannot be enjoined upon it by God, let him be anathema ... If anyone says that divine revelation cannot be made credible by outward signs and that, therefore, men ought to be moved to faith solely by each one's inner experience or by personal inspiration, let him be anathema." The First Ecumenical Council at the Vatican.   A post authored by a friend of mine recently turned up on my news feed on a subject that I have discussed much about privately. This issue is not so hotly discussed and debated in the United Kingdom as it is in the United States, but some clarity would of course be helpful. If it was not clear from the title of this post; the topic is that of Creationism vs. Intelligent Design vs. Evolution, where do we stand as the Faithful of the Holy Mother Church? Explicit in the dogmatic canons there is no specific position taken, implicitly though there do appear to be some problems that need to be...
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