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Starting today August 7th, 2024, in order to post in the Married Couples, Courting Couples, or Singles forums, you will not be allowed to post if you have your Marital status designated as private. Announcements will be made in the respective forums as well but please note that if yours is currently listed as Private, you will need to submit a ticket in the Support Area to have yours changed.
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CF has always been a site that welcomes people from different backgrounds and beliefs to participate in discussion and even debate. That is the nature of its ministry. In view of recent events emotions are running very high. We need to remind people of some basic principles in debating on this site. We need to be civil when we express differences in opinion. No personal attacks. Avoid you, your statements. Don't characterize an entire political party with comparisons to Fascism or Communism or other extreme movements that committed atrocities. CF is not the place for broad brush or blanket statements about groups and political parties. Put the broad brushes and blankets away when you come to CF, better yet, put them in the incinerator. Debate had no place for them. We need to remember that people that commit acts of violence represent themselves or a small extreme faction.
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How wide and long and HIGH and DEEP is the love of Christ
- By tonychanyt
- Bibliology & Hermeneutics
- 0 Replies
God's love is exalted. Psalm 103:
Height and depth emphasized on the vertical dimension of love. Romans 8:
Ephesians 3:
Mathematically, breadth and length run along two independent axes.
Height and depth run along the same axis of dimension. Height went up from the plane generated by breadth and length. Depth went down. The love of Christ dwells deeply in our hearts (v 17); also, his love is exalted high above the earth.
The breadth, length, height, and depth is a poetic way of describing the all-encompassing nature of Christ's love. It reaches every possible dimension of human existence and beyond, emphasizing its limitless and transformative power in the lives of believers.
Height and depth emphasized on the vertical dimension of love. Romans 8:
Jesus' love reaches the lowest depth to raise us high, e.g., from depression to joy.
Well, that settles it. I’m a heretic and anathema.
- By Aldebaran
- Denomination Specific Theology
- 300 Replies
PERMANENTLY
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Jesus died once for all
- By tonychanyt
- Bibliology & Hermeneutics
- 9 Replies
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The Pope and Other Religions...
- By Michie
- One Bread, One Body - Catholic
- 0 Replies
by Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap
Pope Francis has the habit, by now well established, of saying things that leave listeners confused and hoping he meant something other than what he actually said.
At the end of his recent trip to Singapore, the pope left his prepared remarks for an interreligious group of young people and offered some general reflections about religion. Since his comments were extemporaneous, they naturally lacked the precision that a prepared text would normally possess, and so hopefully what he said is not quite what he meant.
According to news reports, Pope Francis suggested that, “[Religions] are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God.” He went on to say, “If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].” The Holy Father’s positive intent here was obvious.
Francis then added a call to enter into interreligious dialogue. He spoke about dialogue as if it were an end in itself. “Interreligious dialogue,” he said, “is something that creates a path.” The question then is: a path to where?
That all religions have equal weight is an extraordinarily flawed idea for the Successor of Peter to appear to support. It is true that all of the great religions express a human yearning—often with beauty and wisdom—for something more than this life. Humans have a need to worship. That desire seems to be hardwired into our DNA. But not all religions are equal in their content or consequences. Substantial differences exist among the religions the pope named. They have very different notions of who God is and what that implies for the nature of the human person and society. As St. Paul preached two thousand years ago, the search for God can take many imperfect forms, but they are each an imperfect search for the one, true, triune God of Sacred Scripture. Paul condemns false religions and preaches Jesus Christ as the reality and fulfillment of the unknown God whom the Greeks worship (Acts 17:22–31).
Simply put: Not all religions seek the same God, and some religions are both wrong and potentially dangerous, materially and spiritually.
Continued below.
www.firstthings.com
Pope Francis has the habit, by now well established, of saying things that leave listeners confused and hoping he meant something other than what he actually said.
At the end of his recent trip to Singapore, the pope left his prepared remarks for an interreligious group of young people and offered some general reflections about religion. Since his comments were extemporaneous, they naturally lacked the precision that a prepared text would normally possess, and so hopefully what he said is not quite what he meant.
According to news reports, Pope Francis suggested that, “[Religions] are like different languages in order to arrive at God, but God is God for all. Since God is God for all, then we are all children of God.” He went on to say, “If you start to fight, ‘my religion is more important than yours, mine is true and yours isn’t,’ where will that lead us? There’s only one God, and each of us has a language to arrive at God. Some are Sikh, Muslim, Hindu, Christian, and they are different paths [to God].” The Holy Father’s positive intent here was obvious.
Francis then added a call to enter into interreligious dialogue. He spoke about dialogue as if it were an end in itself. “Interreligious dialogue,” he said, “is something that creates a path.” The question then is: a path to where?
That all religions have equal weight is an extraordinarily flawed idea for the Successor of Peter to appear to support. It is true that all of the great religions express a human yearning—often with beauty and wisdom—for something more than this life. Humans have a need to worship. That desire seems to be hardwired into our DNA. But not all religions are equal in their content or consequences. Substantial differences exist among the religions the pope named. They have very different notions of who God is and what that implies for the nature of the human person and society. As St. Paul preached two thousand years ago, the search for God can take many imperfect forms, but they are each an imperfect search for the one, true, triune God of Sacred Scripture. Paul condemns false religions and preaches Jesus Christ as the reality and fulfillment of the unknown God whom the Greeks worship (Acts 17:22–31).
Simply put: Not all religions seek the same God, and some religions are both wrong and potentially dangerous, materially and spiritually.
Continued below.
The Pope and Other Religions | Charles J. Chaput, O.F.M. Cap.
Too often, confusion infects and undermines the good will of this pontificate.
www.firstthings.com
Choking on Rights Talk
- By Michie
- One Bread, One Body - Catholic
- 0 Replies
COMMENTARY: How do we rebuild a public space where truth-telling prevails over euphemism?
In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the Founders and Framers would never have imagined to be “rights.”
“Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy – “I did it myway” – over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.
The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Glendon predicted.
Nowhere has this descent into verbal incontinence created as malodorous a public stench as in the profligate use of the self-contradictory phrase “reproductive rights.” What can that term possibly mean if we’re not in Alice’s Wonderland? “Reproductive rights” is a euphemism for abortion. Elective abortion is the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of his or her development. How can the destruction of that human being — whose biological humanity is affirmed in high school textbooks – be a matter of exercising a reproductive right when the process in question is intended to end reproduction by expulsion from the womb or fetal dismemberment?
Continued below.
www.ncregister.com
In her prescient book, Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse, Mary Ann Glendon of the Harvard Law School warned her fellow Americans in 1993 that our public life was being degraded by the promiscuous use of the language of “rights” as a rhetorical intensifier in campaigns to promote this, that, or the other thing: things that the Founders and Framers would never have imagined to be “rights.”
“Rights talk,” Professor Glendon cautioned, sets the individual against the community, as it privileges personal autonomy – “I did it myway” – over the common good. And that, she concluded, was going to be very bad for the American experiment in ordered liberty over the long haul.
The long haul has now arrived. And the results are every bit as bad as Glendon predicted.
Nowhere has this descent into verbal incontinence created as malodorous a public stench as in the profligate use of the self-contradictory phrase “reproductive rights.” What can that term possibly mean if we’re not in Alice’s Wonderland? “Reproductive rights” is a euphemism for abortion. Elective abortion is the willful destruction of a human being at an early stage of his or her development. How can the destruction of that human being — whose biological humanity is affirmed in high school textbooks – be a matter of exercising a reproductive right when the process in question is intended to end reproduction by expulsion from the womb or fetal dismemberment?
Continued below.
Choking on Rights Talk
COMMENTARY: How do we rebuild a public space where truth-telling prevails over euphemism?
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Catholic Evangelization
- One Bread, One Body - Catholic
- 8 Replies
"52. This first proclamation is addressed especially to those who have never heard the Good News of Jesus, or to children. But, as a result of the frequent situations of dechristianization in our day, it also proves equally necessary for innumerable people who have been baptized but who live quite outside Christian life, for simple people who have a certain faith but an imperfect knowledge of the foundations of that faith, for intellectuals who feel the need to know Jesus Christ in a light different from the instruction they received as children, and for many others."
www.vatican.va
I think there are many fully initiated Catholics who have not grown in their faith since childhood or young adulthood. So at this point they may have lost even the fundamentals. And perhaps even hunger for a more mature expression of the faith than they learned as children. There really is no limit to the depth one can go. We must be open to hearing their questions and be as best equipped as we can to provide either some answers or directions to answers.
Evangelii Nuntiandi (December 8, 1975)
I think there are many fully initiated Catholics who have not grown in their faith since childhood or young adulthood. So at this point they may have lost even the fundamentals. And perhaps even hunger for a more mature expression of the faith than they learned as children. There really is no limit to the depth one can go. We must be open to hearing their questions and be as best equipped as we can to provide either some answers or directions to answers.
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Public Speech, Threats by NutBars, and Moral Responsibility
- By Stephen3141
Ryan Routh: In Ukraine, Trump plot suspect remembered as 'delusional'
Ryan Routh had an "unhealthy" fixation on the war, despite being rejected by Ukraine’s International Legion.
www.bbc.com
Note that many consider the guy who supposedly was trying to kill
Trump, a NutBar.
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