These articles give you some taste of what he was; but they can’t convey the faith impact he had on me and mine. By asking the musical question, “Why Should the Devil Have all the Good Music?” Norman gave teenagers something to listen to that would annoy our parents and yet support our faith.

And more than that, he gave us a more real and gritty, a more deeply layered, kind of Christian music. Songs like “So Long Ago the Garden” were not simply about how great it is to love Jesus. They were about the evils that we could see in the world around us, the hypocrisy and the emptiness of the prevailing culture that teenagers are so sensitive to in the adults areound them. But in spite of the darkness, he assured us of the victory of Christ, and in that sense, I find his music very Catholic.

Not actually doctrinally Catholic, however. Decades before the Left Behind books, “I Wish We’d All Been Ready” painted a bleak picture of the time after the Rapture. As an anxious and immature junior high kid, if I came home and my mother wasn’t home, yet the car was in the driveway, my first thought was not “Mom must be at the neighbors’” but, “Did the Rapture happen while I was on the school bus?”

I was touched to read in his obituaries that he lived with bipolar disorder, the effects of head injury, and heart disease. Life was often hard for him. He recently told his friends,

I feel like a prize in a box of cracker jacks with God’s hand reaching down to pick me up. I have been under medical care for months. My wounds are getting bigger. I have trouble breathing. I am ready to fly home.

My brother Charles is right, I won’t be here much longer. I can’t do anything about it. My heart is too weak. I want to say goodbye to everyone. In the past you have generously supported me with prayer and finance and we will probably still need financial help.

My plan is to be buried in a simple pine box with some flowers inside. But still it will be costly because of funeral arrangement, transportation to the gravesite, entombment, coordination, legal papers etc. However money is not really what I need, I want to say I love you.

I’d like to push back the darkness with my bravest effort. There will be a funeral posted here on the website, in case some of you want to attend. We are not sure of the date when I will die. Goodbye, farewell, we will meet again.

Goodbye, farewell, we’ll meet again
Somewhere beyond the sky.
I pray that you will stay with God
Goodbye, my friends, goodbye.

Larry

Larry, may God give you healing, blessings, rest, and reward. I don’t believe in a Rapture these days, though I do believe Jesus will return. Whether on his return, or at the end of our lives, we will all see him face to face. And for that, I believe you were indeed ready.

Not goodbye, Larry. Till we meet again, God willing.

So a special short-term BIble study, not an add-on, but as the main event, seems a little odd. But I’ve gotten used to it. Mostly.

Still, there are parts of the Bible that are harder to get through than others. Like many people whose hope springs up annually in spite of prior experience, I’ve embarked on reading the Bible through this year, using My daily Catholic Bible. I’ve only tried this particular enterprise a few times since becoming Catholic. I especially like the way this version rearranges the New Testamanet readings so that the Gospels are not read successively.

There’s one pitfall they didn’t av0id, though. And that’s the Leviticus hurdle. When the days are short, when your enthusiasm for new projects is starting to wane in the grey light of February, one runs smack into the tabernacle plans in Exodus, Leviticus and the opening chapters of Numbers.

It’s not my place to question the wisdom of God in ensuring these detailed “technical specs” in the Scriptures. But I do question reading plans that lead us right into the quagmire at the dark of the year.

McKnight says his book fills a missing place in Protestant theology: “… to my knowledge, no one has written a book about the life and character of Mary helping us develop a positive, Protestant view of Mary. Allow me to say this more forcibly: We are Protestants, we believe in the Bible; Mary is in the Bible; we need to believe what the Bible says about Mary. ” He argues that “the mother of Jesus ought to matter to each of us,” and “… Mary represents each of us — both you and me — in our call to follow Jesus.”

Now, it may or may not surprise McKnight to know that, as a Catholic, I am with him all the way so far. And it is perhaps unfair to criticize the book for being so very much what it says it is: a Protestant view of Mary. And so focused is he on presenting that, that he seems to be standing right at the threshold of accepting Catholic truth about Mary, gazing on her, and not seeing. Even worse, he doesn’t see what he doesn’t see: the weight and limitation of his own unexamined assumptions.

McKnight lucidly and respectfully presents many of the major Catholic teachings about Mary, even going so far as to admit that even the doctrines defined later in Church history are attested to in the Church fathers as early as the second century. And yet, so bound is he to the necessity of relating everything to an explicit scriptural statement, that he can’t see the implications of that.

Then there is the missing piece: In the two concluding chapters that describe Catholic Marian beliefs, he never mentions the Rosary. This is, I must say, like writing about pizza without mentioning pepperoni.

Dr. McKnight, I admire your determination to stick to Scripture. Did you not notice that the first part of the Hail Mary is nearly verbatim from the gospel of Luke? That 18 of the 20 mysteries on which we meditate are Scriptural events? (And the remaining two are attested to in Scripture, if one accepts OT/NT parallels?)

I noticed Scott Hahn’s book, Hail, Holy Queen:the Mother of God in the Word of God in your bibliography. You refer to Dr. Hahn as “a Roman Catholic theologian,” and rightly so. Did you know that Dr. Hahn once guarded the supremacy of Scripture much as you do now?

Pray for me, Dr. McKnight, that I may never give Mary other than her proper place. And I will pray the same for you. And keep reading the works of Dr. Hahn.

If you don’t know Marlette’s strip Kudzu, please go see it now. I don’t always agree with Rev. Will B. Dunn, but he’s a closer exemplar of the Southern preachers I’ve known than the ones you see on TV.

God bless you, Mr. Marlette, and may He grant you rest.

Our homily this past weekend was fascinating, but uncomfortable. Father pointed out that heaven will be a kind of eternal liturgy.

“That’s going to be hard on those of you for whom an hour is now too long to pray,” he said. Ow! I was wondering whether my pastor might have been inspired by the late Christian rock singer Keith Green, who wrote the tract Will You Be Bored in Heaven? Or perhaps it’s just that the same Spirit encouraged them to write about this common human problem– a lack of appreciation for the Mass.

It must be, after all, the ultimate case of “familiarity breeds contempt,” if you give it a moment’s thought. The holy, almighty living God becomes truly present, Jesus is our food. And we skinny out before the closing hymn to snag a donut or catch the game.

WHAT ARE WE THINKING?? OR FAILING TO THINK??

It is rare that I leave before the end of the recessional hymn, but I have to admit that I like to go grab a pastry. And I do want to see my friends in the parish. So I don’t spend the time in prayer after the Mass that I would spend if I were a little less worldly.

One way in which I’m blessed is coming to the Catholic Church after belonging to groups that routinely had worship services longer than an hour. So I’m not burdened with the expectation some people seem to have that a Mass longer than an hour is actually sinful. I won’t tell you that I never get fidgety, but it never occurs to me to be offended when the Mass “runs over”.

I think we’re really cheating ourselves when we check our watches and decide that the best liturgy is a brief liturgy.  Please folks, let us practice for heaven by immersing ourselves in loving God.

He founded the Thomas Road Baptist Church, Liberty University, and the Moral Majority Coalition, and in so doing, changed the term “Fundamentalist” from a technical term for a school of Protestant thought to one of the most misused buzzwords of modern journalism.

God grant him rest, and the joy of His presence forever.

There is so much talk among US Catholics about Christian unity, and how the important thing is that we all worship the same Jesus. It may be shocking to such people to realize that some Protestant groups still deny the Christian nature of Catholicism, and the Christian faith of Catholics.

I used to be such a Protestant. It was jarring to me when my Jewish and Pagan friends calmly asserted, “Of course, Catholics were the original Christians…. everyone knows that.”

I was interested to read about Dr. Francis Beckwith, who was reared Catholic, became Protestant, and has now returned to his original home of faith. Here is his own account of that returning. The responses underneath may give the unruffled ecumenist some idea of what it can cost to embrace the fullness of the Church. They are by turns sobering, heartening, and oddly familiar.

This site uses only standard technologies. It needs no particular navigator, frames, script, or cookie.

You can navigate using only a keyboard. Special measures have also been taken to help people with out-of-date material, a low-speed connection, or visual or neuromotor limitations.

In principle, the pages of this site should function correctly and normally with any modern, graphic navigator.

The format used to record the audio files is not an open one, but it is used widely enough to allow you to hear the languages on any good sound-band interpreter.

And that is also worth celebrating. Link via SQPN’s SaintCast

Hart was a “born-again Christian,” who sometimes upset people by inserting Christian and Biblical themes into his strips. I didn’t always like the way he viewed relations between the sexes, but I always knew his strips would be funny, clean, and frequently thought-provoking.

May God give you peace, Mr. Hart, and may you rejoice with Easter joy in the presence of our Lord.

Q: What do you get when you sober up a horse thief?

A: A sober horse thief!

A Catholic precept that puts a different slant on that is that “grace follows nature.” God takes us as we are, and our lives as a new creation, even when they are a profound transformation, follow from our true core.

Saul, the zealous Jewish intellectual, became Paul, the zealous Christian evangelist.

And Charlene Cothran, who made a splash in the Black and lesbian community as a publicist, activist, and speaker, still wants to lead “her people” to happiness, self-respect, and freedom. She just has a different idea now of what that means. Because she has fallen for Jesus, and he has changed her. And she’s telling her world about it.

Pray for her. She’s going to be under a lot of attack from people who feel betrayed. And when her first enthusiasm is tried, she will need many graces to hang on.

(Thanks to Kathy Shaidle for the link!)