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Spiritual or Religious?  Challenge: I consider myself spiritual rather than religious. Why isn’t that enough?  Defense: Because God loves you and wants even better things for you.  When people say they are spiritual rather than religious, they frequently mean that, although they don’t practice a specific religion, they recognize there is more to the world than matter, that it has a spiritual dimension. This is good! But it doesn’t go very far. Wouldn’t it …

St. Paul was martyred in the mid-A.D. 60s, and he wrote his letters in the 50s and 60s, making them very early sources about Jesus—much earlier, Mythicists say, than the Gospels.   Mythicists frequently state that if Jesus were a real, historical figure, St. Paul would tell us about his life; but he only speaks about Jesus as a heavenly individual. He doesn’t tell us stories about his life, give sayings of Jesus, or relate biogra …

We should first briefly consider some objections to the concept of miracles. Today, in the secular Western world, many are skeptical of the very possibility that miracles can occur.   This is an assumption of secular Westerners, but it is not shared by other peoples. And there is actually a great deal of evidence that miracles do occur, including in today’s world. The Catholic Church has rigorously evaluated many reported miracle …

There aren’t too many passages where Paul speaks about baptism. However, in the passages where he does mention it, his theology is profound and worth unpacking. The two passages that we will look at, respectively, are 1 Corinthians 12:13 and Romans 6:3-4, 7, 17-18, the passage from Romans 6 being the clearest and strongest text. 1 Corinthians 12:13 Let’s start with 1 Corinthians 12:13, where Paul writes, “For by one Spirit we were all baptized into one body.” The “ …

Examining End Times Beliefs: A Scriptural Perspective If the news we watch every day, and the social media we follow is true, the end times must be just around the corner, right? What does Scripture say?Faced with such a dire time of tribulation, some Christians have wondered whether they will have to live through it. The historic answer, for both Catholics and Protestants, is that we will. Jesus warned us we would have to face persecution (John 15:20). However, in the nineteenth century,d …