The Christian Vanguard

I am not a danger to myself, or to anyone else. Murder and suicide are gravely evil for the same reason: it is the unjust taking of a life. Suicide just happens to be your own life that you are taking. I think murder happens mostly for malicious or passionate reasons. Someone has wronged you, and you want to revenge, and so, you kill them. Unless you're just a serial killer or a terrorist, I take this to be fairly common. I have not looked at the stats, but this is just my intuition.  Suicide, though it is essentially the same crime, happens for almost never those reasons. We may imagine a man strangling his wife with his face red in rage, or a woman beating her cheating husbands skull in with a hammer because of her humiliation. But I can't imagine suicide being carried out in the same manner. I find it difficult to imagine someone beating themselves to death. No one gets mad at themselves and thinks, 'Dammit, I'll shoot myself if I cut someone else off again!...

The word "up" generally means to increase in some manner. To "ante up" means to pay ones share and thus increase. To "up the ante" means to raise the stakes. To "look up the word in the dictionary" means that your search for knowledge now expands to a dictionary. To "speak up" means to increase your volume and to "shut up" means that there needs to be more shutting of the mouth. To say your friend had a "come up" means he was profitable in some way. Even Disney Pixars movie "UP" is about fulfillment of ones loving promise despite and highlighted by great loss.  What does this mean in terms of a "break up"? What is there to be increased? Brokenness. There is a brokenness in our relationship such that a complete annihilation of the relationship is thought to be the last measure or antidote. Sometimes this is necessary. In medical contexts, sometimes we have to break a bone to have it heal corre...

It is a common anti Catholic argument to point out that Pope St. Gregory (540-604 AD) denied the title of "Universal Bishop." If the Pope himself denied the title, then how can the Pope claim to have universal jurisdiction over the entire church? This argument has been around since at least the reformation, as we see it in John Calvin's Institutes , and it still made today by people like James White, Geisler and MacKenzie. So what exactly did Pope St. Gregory say? In a few different places, he says things like,  None of my predecessors has consented to bear this profane title, for when a Patriarch adopts for himself the title of 'universal' the title of Patriarch suffers discredit. No Christian, then, has the desire to adopt a title that would cause discredit to his brethren. And  Was it not the case, as your Fraternity knows, that the prelates of this Apostolic See, which by the providence of God I serve, had the honour offered them of being called Univers...

In my previous post , I discussed Canon 28 of the Council of Chalcedon (you'll find the full text of the canon there). But I should have put an asterisk on the conversation because Canon 28 isn't properly part of the council. You'll remember from an earlier post , that what makes a council ecumenical is ratification from the Roman Pontiff. Canons are part of councils. And naturally, canons also have to be ratified. However, Canon 28 was not ratified by Pope Leo (Roman Pontiff at the time). So Canon 28 isn't part of the council and thus isn't binding.  If you are Orthodox, this may sound too convenient. I've already suggested why Roman Ratification is the correct theory in the previous link. However, I want to add two things. First, even Saints in the East agree with the Roman position, and second, a case can be made for Canon 28 not being problematic for Catholicism.  First, there are the sayings of Pope St. Gelasius (about 490 AD), and Pope St. Gelasius is...

The other day, I shared a quotation from a saint recognized in the East, St. Maximos the Confessor (about 649 AD). It read,  For the extremities of the earth and all in every part of it who purely and rightly confess the Lord, look directly towards the most holy Roman Church and its confession and faith, as it were to a sun of unfailing light, awaiting from it the bright radiance of the sacred dogmas of our fathers, according to what the six inspired and holy councils have purely and piously decreed, declaring most expressly the symbol of faith. For from the coming down of the incarnate Word among us, all the Churches in every part of the world have possessed that greatest Church along as their base and foundation, seeing that, according to the promise of Christ our Savior, the gates of hell do never prevail against it , that it possesses the keys of a right confession and faith in Him, that it opens the true and only religion to such as approach with piety, and shuts up and ...

Some time ago, I wrote on this blog about a dream I had of a lost friend, and how I woke up crying because I hadn't seen her in so long, and my dream was a fresh reminder of her face. Last night, the same thing happened, but for an ex love of mine. In my dream, I was walking towards class, and I happened to bump into her. I didn't recognize her at first, but details started forming as I continued to talk with her. I told her how happy I was to see her, after not seeing her for too long, even though we had a painful conversation (why did you come here-because I still love you-don't tell me that, I can't bear it-marry me).  Dreams are shadows of reality. They can make the incoherent coherent. While in real life, I cannot force her to freely love me again (to force something freely is a contradiction), I can make it so in my dreams, and more easily in my imagination. But life too is a shadow of heaven. Contrary to the cynicists, in virtue of our participation in Being...

My philosophy of religion professor posed this challenge to me. Professor says the arguments for God's existence don't prove uniqueness (that is, these arguments do not prove one single God is responsible), including Aquinas. I said, appealing to Aquinas First Way, that there can't be more than one thing that is Pure Act because if there were, there would be some potential to distinguish between them. Professor replied that assumes the indiscernibility of identicals, which is by no means obvious. Consider a sphere with equidistant points on the surface. They have no distinguishing features to differentiate between one and the other, yet they are not all the same.  The tempting answer is to appeal to space and relation, but it seems every space point has the same relation. My friend Christopher shared with me his thoughts and I thought they were worth sharing here so that I can reference it in the future.  You don't have to argue from the identity of indiscernib...

A protestant friend of mine was expressing his worry of the term "heresy" being thrown around too loosely among his other protestant friends. This is a fair worry. Even within Catholicism, the word gets tossed around too easily among the laity, in my opinion. However, there is a difference between my friend and I: our criteria for what counts as heresy. My protestant friend said, "If I am not contradicting any of the ecumenical councils, I am not a heretic." I pointed out he denies the Council of Trent. His response was that Trent was not ecumenical. "Which Orthodox bishops ratified Trent?" he asked me, which of course isn't really a question, but an argument. He believes that enough Bishops have to be present in order for a council to be ecumenical, and since the Orthodox were obviously not present in Trent, Trent cannot be ecumenical. This makes some sense. The big 7 ecumenical councils that all Christians believe, even the Protestants, were ratifi...

I am in the process of moving. I've been getting rid of a lot of stuff to make the move easier. I will not have a garage in my new place, so I need to make more space. I have this box. I call it the memory box. It's basically mementos, but they're of all my past relationships. Tickets for a play, little trinkets my significant other gave to me, photos, etc. It's in my garage and decided to look through it as I was tossing stuff out.  In my box is a letter. It's probably the most important object in my memory box. My girlfriend at the time worked at a school where one of my favorite philosophers sends his daughter. Since my girlfriend worked at the front office, she would often see him. So in this letter, she writes, facetious and formally, that my favorite philosopher walked into her office and she noticed one of his hairs had fallen out, which she taped to the letter.  It's the greatest gift I have ever received from a significant other. Not because of...