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One evening I had the sad duty of attending my neighbor’s funeral. The assistant pastor from the church stood up and after a few remarks about the deceased began to give a sermon. The first ten minutes was dedicated to how he knew that my neighbor believed in Jesus and was in heaven, so there was no need to pray for her or offer Masses or anything like that. The next thirty minutes or so (it’s difficult to tell since it seemed like eternity) was dedicated to explaining why it doesn’t matter whic …

Many non-Catholics struggle with the concept of praying to saints because they think prayer and worship are the same thing. Since the Bible says we should only worship God, then shouldn’t we only pray to God? But the word “worship” refers to giving someone “worth-ship,” or the honor that person is due. We call judges “your honor,” for example, as a way of paying them respect, but we don’t treat them like gods. “Prayer” comes from the Latin word precarius and refers to making a request for someth …

Despite the ruins of the Sexual Revolution being all around us, many Protestants are doubling down—not only continuing to support contraception, but starting to embrace other related practices that have historically been considered grave sins. And as usual, theirsola scripturaapproach is allowing them to re-interpret Scripture to find justification. For example, the debate over homosexuality and same-sex “marriage” in Protestantism is taking an almost identical trajectory to the debate over cont …

There can be no doubt that the apostles’ great work of evangelization took them to the ends of the earth. Of the eventual ends of the Twelve themselves, by which they glorified the God they served, there are many pious legends, several ancient histories that may include creditable material, and a few solid facts. The first to be lost was James, the elder brother of John—who never made it out of the home base of Jerusalem. James had once asked the Lord for a place at his right hand in the kingdom …

Can God change the past?No . . . and this question is a real doozy! (But a doozy that brings with it important clarifications of the nature of God’s power.)If you enjoy science fiction, you’ve undoubtedly encountered stories of time travel, like H.G. Wells’s The Time Machine. One common theme in these stories is to travel back in time to prevent some horrible event (like Hitler’s rise to power). To make up a quick example, perhaps a time traveler eats a rabbit, unwittingly depriving a starving w …