I am a 1st Degree Knight at Holy Family’s Knights of Columbus Council. Soon I will have my membership transferred to the Sacred Heart Council. I am excited to be getting more involved with my church down here in Wichita Falls. The Knights in Lawton really do a lot of good work for the Church and its Parishioners. I hope the Sacred Heart Council is as active as Holy Family’s. I am looking forward to getting my 2nd and 3rd Degrees soon!
I’ve decided to switch from Ubuntu to Debian Unstable. A couple of years back I used to use Debian exclusively, but I got a little bored with it because it always worked! Well, I’m kind of tired of Ubuntu’s graphical issues and the strange decisions Canonical makes (though I do kind of like Unity). I’ve made the switch to Debian and have both Gnome Shell and KDE installed. I tend to use Gnome Shell more, and am actually starting to like it. There are no graphical problems like Unity had (Compiz always gave me problems, even before Unity). I think I’m pretty happy with the switch!
On Sunday we went up to the local Catholic school’s Open House to see about enrolling Preston in Pre-K. I really hope that he is accepted and that we can get some kind of financial assistance to help with the tuition. I would really like it if we can get him (and Russell when he’s old enough) involved in the Catholic school. I want him to get a great education and be exposed to the Catholic faith at school as well as church and home.
I filled out our diocesan financial aid application… Wow, what a form! I even had to attach copies of my tax return and W-2s! At the school we were told that the diocese provides assistance, and then our church provides assistance, and after that, the school itself can offer a discount. Hopefully we can get the tuition down to something we can afford!
There has not been a whole lot of news in our family since we’ve moved, and that’s a good thing. “No news is good news,” as it were. We have been busy getting involved with church. I am now in the choir, and Donna has been going to the Mom’s group. The kids are attending “school” at church two days a week. It is kind of a Pre-Pre-K for Preston I guess, and just a chance for them to socialize and for Donna to have a few hours off. We’re going to look into getting Preston enrolled in Pre-K at the Catholic School that our church supports, though I kind of doubt we will be able to afford it… I accidentally started going to a Dad’s Parenting class. I thought it was a church class, kind of a Raise Your Children Catholic type of thing, but it ended up being a state-sponsored parenting class. Woops! But I’m going to keep attending for now. I like to learn!
I ran across this article on the Catholic News Service website. I think it is a wonderful idea for Christians to begin to defend their faith. In order to defend their faith, Christians must know and understand their faith, and that is sadly lacking in American Christianity today…
Making the old new: Vatican encourages a recovery of ‘apologetics’
 The dome of St. Peter’s Basilica at the Vatican. (CNS/Paul Haring) |
By Cindy Wooden
Catholic News Service
VATICAN CITY (CNS) — In the Catholic Church, it’s true that everything old can be new again, and the Vatican wants one of those things to be the art of “apologetics” — dusted off and updated to respond to new challenges, including those posed by militant atheists.
The term “apologetics” literally means “to answer, account for or defend,” and through the 1950s even Catholic high school students were given specific training in responding to questions about Catholicism and challenges to church teaching.
At least in Northern Europe and North America, the effort mainly was a response to Protestantism. Today, while sects and fundamentalist groups challenge Catholics in many parts of the world, almost all Catholics face objections to the idea of belief in general, said Legionary of Christ Father Thomas D. Williams, a professor at Rome’s Pontifical Regina Apostolorum University.
Father Williams is author of “Greater Than You Think: A Theologian Answers the Atheists About God,” written in response to the late Christopher Hitchens’ book, “God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything,” and similar works.
Over the past 50 years, apologetics lost its general appeal because “it was considered proselytism,” an aggressive attempt to win converts that was replaced by ecumenical dialogue, he said. It didn’t help that many Catholics started seeing all religions as equally valid paths to salvation, so they thought it was best to encourage people to live their own faith as best they could without trying to encourage them to consider Christianity.
Among the Regina Apostolorum students, he said, there is a renewed interest in apologetics — usually covered today under the heading of fundamental theology. “You can change the name, make it gentler and nicer, but you always have to give reasons for your hope and belief,” he said.
While there have been scattered attempts to train Catholics to explain their faith to others since Vatican II, the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith has asked for a more widespread effort to get apologetic material into the hands of Catholics.
In early January, the congregation issued a note on preparing for the Year of Faith, which will begin in October. Addressing national bishops’ conferences, the congregation said, “It would be useful to arrange for the preparation of pamphlets and leaflets of an apologetic nature” so that every Catholic could “respond better to the questions which arise in difficult contexts” from sects to moral relativism and from secularism to science and technology.
The congregation included a reference to the biblical admonition from the First Letter of Peter: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.”
The passage continues by saying responses should be given “with gentleness and reverence,” which Jesuit Father Felix Korner said means taking the attitude that “the person talking to me has a real question; through the question I discover the deeper grounds of my hope and joy; I try to respond by making myself and our faith understood.”
The Jesuit, a theology professor at Rome’s Pontifical Gregorian University and expert in Christian-Muslim relations, said, “Apologetics in the restricted, poor, primitive sense later became: ‘I learn some answers, and I respond to any question as if it were an attack by refuting the other.'”
To make apologetics part of a true Christian witness, he said, involves “being interested in the newness of the question” posed and “challenged by its rationality, daring to explore deeper my own tradition and hope.”
Pope Benedict XVI and the Pontifical Council for Culture have chosen the path of dialogue to explore the issues and objections to faith raised by some secular humanists, atheists and agnostics. The pope invited nonbelievers to his day of dialogue for peace in Assisi last October and the pontifical council has launched a dialogue project called “the Courtyard of the Gentiles” to explore issues raised by experts in the fields of politics, economics, law, literature and the arts.
An effort to combine dialogue and apologetics is found in Catholic Voices, an organization in the United Kingdom that compiles detailed responses to current questions and trains Catholics to present official church teaching civilly and clearly in the media when questions are raised on controversial topics.
The need for articulate Catholics who could remain calm under fire became evident after a 2009 formal debate in England in which Hitchens and the actor Stephen Fry faced off against Nigerian Archbishop John Onaiyekan of Abuja and Ann Widdecombe, a Catholic member of Parliament. The crowd clearly was on the side of Hitchens and Fry, who argued against the motion that “the Catholic Church is a force for good.”
Jack Valero, coordinator of Catholic Voices and U.K. press spokesman for Opus Dei, said the group began by trying to respond to objections raised by groups protesting Pope Benedict’s 2010 visit to Scotland and England. The issues included homosexuality, contraception, assisted suicide, clerical sexual abuse, abortion, AIDS, same-sex marriage and women in the church.
“Once we had identified the issues, we studied how best to answer them and developed our apologetics materials,” Valero said.
But having written responses isn’t enough. “If somebody communicates aggressively, which is not a very Christian way to behave, then the message does not come across,” he said.
We’ve been living in Wichita Falls now for a full week (and a couple of days). I really like the new house we’re renting. It’s an older home, built in the 1920s, but it’s pretty comfortable. It’s smaller than our previous place, but I think we’re actually going to like it more. While I still haven’t gotten our electricity bill, the house seems more energy-efficient than the house in Lawton. It stays at a comfortable temperature, while the living room in the house in Lawton was often cold in the winter. Of course, I have no idea what this house is going to be like in the summer!
We’re almost done unpacking, so the piles of boxes have been shrinking. I had to make another run to the dumpster to get rid of a car load of broken-down boxes last night, and that helped clear out the walkways in the house a lot! Now we just have to start getting used to daily life in the new house. I don’t think we’ve been doing a very good job of keeping up with laundry, but it should get better. One of the problems with the laundry is that the dryer is outside in the storage shed; that makes it just that more inconvenient, and we’ve never been great at keeping up with laundry!
Lots of changes have taken place in my family’s lives over the last couple of months. It is all the more interesting because I did not see any of it coming! God really does look out for us, even when we think he isn’t! I’m excited about life in Texas. As I get more familiar with my job, I really think I’m going to like it, but that will have to wait for another post…
Today was the first day on my new job. It was a little overwhelming. Hopefully I’ll pick up on it pretty quickly. I think that once I understand what it is I’m doing, I’ll enjoy it.
I’m very excited, because we are finally moved in at Wichita Falls! Adios Lawton… Can’t say I’ll miss you all that much…
I have only one more day of work left before I’m no longer employed by the City of Lawton. I’m pretty excited, though I guess I’m a little scared too… Big changes are always a little nerve wracking, I guess.
I’ve been using Ubuntu 11.10 for a while now. So far it seems okay. It has a lot of improvements over 11.04. The main problem that I have is that sometimes, especially when switching users, the system fails to switch to the GUI properly. It normally isn’t a problem for me, as I know most of the shortcuts like Ctrl-Alt-F8 and stuff, but it isn’t good for my wife. I hope that problem gets taken care of in 12.04.