Tag Archives: Roman Catholicism

Potpourri: Katrina’s fallout in a New Orleans parish, a post-Christian museum, Pentecostalism’s real birthplace, Corrie Ten Boom’s house, a Holy Land exhibit and three British kings

Posted on February 19, 2010 | 2 comments

After Hurricane Katrina, I was working on putting together Christian History & Biography’s front-of-issue “candy bowl” of church-history-in-the-news pieces, and I ran across the story of the Roman Catholic Church’s decision to close St. Augustine parish. The tale of that decision’s aftermath made it into our “Living History” for Issue 90: Adoniram & Ann Judson: American Mission Pioneers. Since the story didn’t end there, I’ve inserted after the original article, below, an update that appears in Wikipedia about the fate of that parish.

Living History
Compiled By Chris Armstrong

In New Orleans, the saints go marching on.

Since Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, a small but vibrant Roman Catholic parish has entered the public eye. As the city’s Catholic hierarchy struggled to deal with widespread damage to church property, the St. Augustine parish was slated to close in March and merge with the much larger St. Peter Claver parish several blocks east. But parishioners and supporters protested. “There are people who have roots in this church who are all over the country,” New Orleans resident Joan Rhodes told The Louisiana Weekly. “You shut that down and you really are putting a knife in the heart of the culture.”

St. Augustine was founded in 1841 by slaves and free blacks and through the years has also welcomed Creole, Haitian, French, and Spanish worshippers. Today, one result of this unique cultural ministry has been a Sunday morning service belying “America’s most segregated hour,” as people of many backgrounds, races, and ages gather amidst the stained-glass saints and oil paintings of Christ to sway and clap under the leadership of one of the city’s best-known clergymen, 76-year-old Fr. Jerome LeDoux. In his 15 years at St. Augustine, Fr. LeDoux has established the parish as a focal point for New Orleans culture, integrating jazz music and African drumming and dancing into the worship, blessing local jazz groups, and holding festivals and special services to commemorate musicians such as Louis Armstrong. Continue reading →

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Not a mercy but a sin: Christian tradition vs. euthanasia

Posted on January 15, 2010 | 2 comments

Though the following e-newsletter from my days at Christianity Today International opens with an out-of-date reference to the late Terry Schiavo, the topic is as pressing as ever. What should we as Christians think about euthanasia, or “mercy killing”?

Some time after this piece was posted on CTI’s website, it was reprinted as the lead essay in Euthanasia: Opposing Viewpoints, ed. Carrie L. Snyder (Thomson Gale/Greenhaven Press, 2006). The piece was retitled “Christianity Condemns Voluntary Euthanasia,” and it was followed by an essay from the opposite viewpoint: “Christianity Should Condone Voluntary Euthanasia.” The author? Liberal Episcopalian John Shelby Spong.

(Some links in the following are likely out-of-date.)

Not a Mercy but a Sin
The modern push for euthanasia is a push against a two-millenniums-old Christian tradition.
Chris Armstrong

The case of Terri Schiavo, a severely brain-damaged Florida woman who has been on life support for over a decade, has reopened debate by secular and church authorities alike on questions surrounding euthanasia or “mercy killing.”

The matter is admittedly not simple. But the Christian church has, at least until recent decades, spoken on it with a fairly unified voice.

Continue reading →

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More charismatic phenomena in non-charismatic church movements–“the early years”

Posted on December 27, 2009 | Leave a comment

Here is a continuation of my previous post on charismatic phenomena in “non-charismatic” church traditions. This time we head back farther in time and cross confessional lines. As with many of these posts, this was previously posted a few years back at http://www.christianhistory.net. For a related article on this blog, see here:

Christian History Corner: Timeline of the Spirit-gifted
Before Moody, Finney, Edwards, and Mather came a long line of Catholic and Orthodox believers reputed to enjoy the promise of the Father.
Chris Armstrong

Several readers wrote in after last week’s newsletter, “Do non-charismatics ‘Do’ Holy Spirit Baptism?” to chide me for omitting the Eastern Orthodox and Roman Catholic Christians who have sought and taught the Spirit’s empowering work in the Christian’s life.

As I thought about filling that gap in this week’s newsletter, it occurred to me: Why should I try to say again what has already been well said, and exceptionally well researched, by a scholar who has made the history of Holy Spirit baptism his life’s work?

Stanley M. Burgess is a professor of religious studies at Southwest Missouri State University and editor of The New International Dictionary of Pentecostal and Charismatic Movements (Zondervan, 2002). That indispensable tome displays prominently on its cover an abbreviated timeline of Pentecostal prehistory. Continue reading →

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Mary: Exploring the church’s thought on the mother of Jesus

Posted on December 13, 2009 | 2 comments

As Christian History & Biography was preparing to put out issue #83 on “Mary in the Imagination of the Church,” I spent some quality time poring over sources on the mother of our Lord. As usual, a few of those were culled out for the issue’s “Recommended Resources” section. Here they are:

[On why evangelical Protestants should even care about Mary in the first place, see here.]

Mary: Recommended Resources
A few good places for Protestants to explore the church’s thought on the mother of our Lord.
Steven Gertz and Chris Armstrong

Those looking for a starting place for a thoughtful modern Protestant reclamation of Mary may wish to browse Blessed One: Protestant Perspectives on Mary, a compact set of scholarly essays on the subject edited by Beverley Roberts Gaventa & Cynthia L. Rigby, eds. (Westminster John Knox, 2002). For those wishing to cut straight to the most highly contested points of Marian doctrine, a stimulating read is Mary: A Catholic-Evangelical Debate (Brazos Press, 2003), by an articulate and sometimes passionately opposed pair, Dwight Longenecker & David Gustafson. Continue reading →

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Malcolm Muggeridge & Augustine of Hippo: one “wrestling prophet” appreciates another

Posted on December 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

That wonderful 20th-century curmudgeon-convert, the British journalist Malcolm Muggeridge, first came to faith after meeting the larger-than-life Mother Teresa. It didn’t take long before Mugg began writing about many other saints, past and present. In this e-newsletter written while I was at  Christianity Today, I excavate some of his observations on that towering figure of Western theology, Augustine of Hippo (I’ll also post on Mugg on Kierkegaard, in a moment). Don’t bother clicking the links, though. They’re almost all out of date:

“St. Mugg” and the Wrestling Prophets
A modern British journalist gives us timely words from yesterday’s sinner-saints.
Chris Armstrong

Lurking in the shadows of the headlines we examine in our “Behind the News” newsletter is a common and spiritually deadly virus—something we might call “photonegative syndrome.” It is best described in the words of author and professor David Wells:

“Worldliness is what any particular culture does to make sin look normal and righteousness look strange.” Continue reading →

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J. R. R. Tolkien: the faith behind his writings

Posted on December 5, 2009 | 1 comment

One of the first challenges I encountered in putting together an issue of Christian History & Biography on J R R Tolkien was justifying the topic. Tolkien? Wasn’t he a writer of secular fantasy stories? What did he have to do with Christian history? At the time the issue was being crafted, I reflected on this question in an online article:

Saint J. R. R. the Evangelist
Tolkien wanted his Lord of the Rings to echo the “Lord of Lords”—but do we have ears to hear?
Chris Armstrong

His family and friends called him by his second given name, Ronald, but his first name was John, in honor of his patron saint, John the Evangelist. And when J. R. R. Tolkien wrote The Books that have now spawned The Movies, his work was deeply colored by the convictions of his Roman Catholic faith. Continue reading →

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Should evangelicals pay attention to the Virgin Mary?

Posted on November 17, 2009 | Leave a comment

Soon it will be Christmas–the one time in the year that most evangelicals think about the Virgin Mary. When the staff at Christian History & Biography decided a few years back to do an issue on the Virgin Mary (issue #83), there was some skepticism in the office. My art director, the late Rai Whitlock, was worried we would get hate mail from some of our loyal evangelical Protestant readers.

In the end, the hate mail didn’t materialize. What we got instead was the Evangelical Press Association award for best thematic magazine issue (sorry, indulging a little paternal pride). I guess evangelicals, too, are interested in Mary! At the front of the issue, in my Editor’s Note, I reflected on my own ambivalence going into the issue. Why should evangelicals join in the long tradition of what we called, in that issue’s title, “Mary in the Imagination of the Church”?

[For some choice further reading on this topic, see here.]

From the Editor
Mary and the Flabbergasting Fact
Chris Armstrong

It’s a sleepy Wednesday night and I’m the only one left in the office, on the top floor of CTI’s modest Carol Stream, Illinois facilities, across from the Aldi’s grocery store and the MacDonalds restaurant. I’ve been looking through the images on the layouts for this issue—picture after picture of scenes starring Mary, the mother of Jesus—until they have all begun to blur together in one big scene; kind of like Memling’s “Seven Joys of Mary” on our opening pages.

And I’m wondering: Do I know the mother of Jesus—the theotokos, or in Jaroslav Pelikan’s phrase, “the one who gave birth to the one who is God”—any better now than when we started this issue?

I’m just not sure. Part of me still feels like a kid in a museum: The Renaissance masterpieces, the Byzantine icons, the 15th-century German wood carvings … these are all too lofty and alien—something from a different age and a different religious sensibility. Can all of this really mean anything to me: a college-educated twenty-first century suburbanite, an “evangelical,” used to thinking of Mary for only a few days around Christmas? Continue reading →

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How evangelicals have rediscovered the treasures of early Christianity, and what to do next

Posted on November 6, 2009 | Leave a comment

Further to my previous post on the new center for early church studies at Wheaton: In Spring, 2007, Wheaton College hosted a conference on how evangelicals are re-engaging with the wisdom of the early church. I attended the conference and wrote a feature article on it, published in Christianity Today in February 2008. The trends I describe here are certainly continuing, and the wise encouragements and warnings of the scholars who presented at that conference still apply. Let us rejoice in “treasures old” as well as new, and let us also display and use these treasures with discernment:

The Future Lies in the Past
Why evangelicals are connecting with the early church as they move into the 21st century.
Chris Armstrong

Last spring, something was stirring under the white steeple of the Billy Graham Center at Wheaton College.

A motley group of young and clean-cut, goateed and pierced, white-haired and bespectacled filled the center’s Barrows Auditorium. They joined their voices to sing of “the saints who nobly fought of old” and “mystic communion with those whose rest is won.” A speaker walked an attentive crowd through prayers from the 5th-century Gelasian Sacramentary, recommending its forms as templates for worship in today’s Protestant churches. Another speaker highlighted the pastoral strengths of the medieval fourfold hermeneutic. Yet another gleefully passed on the news that Liberty University had observed the liturgical season of Lent. The t-word—that old Protestant nemesis, tradition—echoed through the halls.

Just what was going on in this veritable shrine to pragmatic evangelistic methods and no-nonsense, back-to-the-Bible Protestant conservatism? Had Catholics taken over? Continue reading →

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Re-Monking the Church: new monasticism

Posted on October 28, 2009 | 9 comments

In a 2007 issue of Christian History & Biography dedicated to Benedict and Western monasticism, I contributed the following piece:

Christians struggling for sanctity in a too-comfortable world should pay attention to this observation by Mark Noll: “For over a millennium, in the centuries between the reign of Constantine and the Protestant Reformation, almost everything in the church that approached the highest, noblest, and truest ideals of the gospel was done either by those who had chosen the monastic way or by those who had been inspired in their Christian life by the monks.” Can Western monasticism’s “father,” Benedict, still give us an antidote to cultural compromise?

At first blush, this might seem unlikely, at least in the Western church. Between 1978 and 2004—nearly the entire span of John Paul II’s pontificate—the number of men in monastic and religious orders (not including priests) decreased by 46% in Europe and 30% in the Americas, while the number of women decreased by 39% and 27%, respectively. Compare this to the trend in the global South: During the same period, men in monastic and religious orders increased by 48% in Africa and 39% in Asia, with women increasing on those two continents by 62% and 64%.

A number of the Catholic writers in the 2006 volume A Monastic Vision for the 21st Century frankly wonder if “monasticism as we know it” is, in God’s providential plan, destined for obsolescence in the West. Yet most suggest that new and powerful forms of the monastic impulse may even now be arising.

This is certainly the impression given by the 21st annual Monastic Institute, held in July 2006 at St. John’s Seminary in Collegeville, Minnesota. There, Catholic Benedictines and members of established communities such as L’Arche and the Catholic Worker Movement joined with leaders of new Protestant communities with names like the Simple Way (Pennsylvania), Rutba House (North Carolina), and the Church of the Servant King (Oregon) to mine the riches of Benedict’s Rule. This strikingly diverse group—50% Catholic, 50% Protestant—discussed the topic of “new communities” with high hopes that, indeed, God is still in the monastic impulse. Continue reading →

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