Dwight Longenecker's Blog, page 174

Read, Mark and Learn – Day 8

Welcome to the eighth day of our Lenten Blobble Study of Mark’s gospel. Don’t forget you can use the “Categories” tool in the right sidebar to see all the posts together. Just click on “Blobble Study.” I hope you are gaining much from the study. I’m enjoying reading the gospel through again and meeting Jesus [Read More...]

Read, Mark and Learn – 7

Welcome to Day Seven of the Lent Blobble Study. We begin chapter three today and the conflict with the scribes and Pharisees over Jesus breaking the Sabbath continues. A Man with a Withered Hand .1 Again he entered the synagogue. There was a man there who had a withered hand.2They watched him closely to see if [Read More...]

Dear Crabby…

Really, this is something you should read. The Crescat gets these “gimme advice” emails from single women and she gives them a good talking to. I get letters like this frequently. The circumstances may differ, details tweaked a bit, but essentially they are all the same. Why is it so hard to find the perfect [Read More...]

Gouge Out Your Eyes

Jesus makes a shocking statement when he says that if your eye offends you it would be better to gouge out your eye and enter the kingdom with one eye than to have both and go to hell. This statement is given a new and startling dimension in Bought With A Price Bishop Paul Loverde’s powerful [Read More...]

The Romance of the Gospel

One of the problems of being a Catholic is that we allow ourselves to get cluttered up with religion. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not an iconoclast. I don’t want to throw out all the religious traditions. I love them. I’m also not a primitivist. I don’t think we need to somehow get back to [Read More...]

The Pope of Surprises

Here is my latest article for Aleteia on the first anniversary of Pope Francis’ election. The week after Pope Benedict’s surprise resignation, I began writing “Papabile Profiles” for Aleteia. I did my research and learned everything I could about the world’s leading cardinals. What a stunning array of talent had risen to the top of the [Read More...]

What the Cardinals Think of Pope Francis

John Allen has a round up here of what some of the world’s cardinals think of Pope Francis on the first anniversary of his election. Symbolically, Francis, 77, has changed the narrative about Catholicism. Substantively, he has taken bold steps toward reform and reoriented the church toward the political and cultural center after years of [Read More...]

Read, Mark and Learn – 6

Welcome to Day Six of the Lenten Blobble Study of Mark’s Gospel. We conclude chapter two today. In chapter one we saw Jesus beginning his ministry with a clear assault on Satan’s kingdom with his baptism, temptation, teaching the truth and exorcisms. Yesterday we saw how this leads into the issue of forgiveness of sins. [Read More...]

On God Being a Child

It occurs to me in watching children play that they know something that we have forgotten. They know how to play for its own sake. We, on the other hand, will only play games if we can enter a competition, and we enter a competition to win. What do we want to win? We want [Read More...]

Gulag and Guillotine- Atheism’s Legacy

Joseph Pearce reminds us here of the genocidal legacy of atheism. The atheists like to suggest that these horrors were not brought about by atheism or atheists as such. Nonsense. We admit that not all atheists are genocidal maniacs, and that not all genocides are inspired by atheism. Nevertheless, it remains true that atheism was [Read More...]