Ash Wednesday is the first day of Lent, a 40 day (46 minus the Sundays) period of reflection and self-denial that precedes Easter Sunday. Should a real Christian participate in such a celebration? It’s a bit of an odd thing that Ash Wednesday is usually thought of as a Catholic…
Well, this is a busy weekend in some respects. Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Years are on the same day, and then Monday is Presidents Day. So, which of these would God approve of? Let’s see… Valentine’s Day is supposedly named after Saint Valentine. In reality, the name probably is…
Well, it looks like the Easter season will be upon us sooner than I was looking for it. I stumbled across Church To Reclaim The Spiritual Roots Of Mardi Gras on the njtoday.net site. Well, can you really reclaim something you’ve never had? Where is "Mardi Gras" in the Bible…
Christmas was not among the earliest festivals of the Church. Irenaeus and Tertullian omit it from their lists of feasts; Origen, glancing perhaps at the discreditable imperial Natalitia, asserts (in Lev. Hom. viii in Migne, P.G., XII, 495) that in the Scriptures sinners alone, not saints, celebrate their birthday; Arnobius…
Or, perhaps the title should be “The Hypocrisy of the Catholic Church”. According to the Telegraph, the “Vatican condemns Hallowe’en as anti-Christian”. The irony drips off of several sentences in the piece, but perhaps none more than the statement: The Bishop of Siguenza-Guadalajara, Jose Sanchez, said there was a risk…
I appreciate the prayers and emails. I’m feeling better. It wasn’t serious, but it did develop into bronchitis. It’s just sort of odd that I don’t even get back into the routine of everything after the Feast, and then I get thrown off course again. Like I said, nothing serious,…
OK, this is more of a personal lesson from the Feast, as I was talking to someone who was very nice but announced suddenly, “I am a calendar.” OK, given his accent, I thought maybe I misunderstood him, so I asked him about it. “Oh? You haven’t heard that some…
There are some very specific items I could take from the Feast, but I recently noticed that there are also some general items that all can learn from, no matter what Feast site they were with this year. There is a long dry spell between the Last Great Day and…
I am actually writing this ahead of time, but I want this to be a pointer back to the Feast of Tabernacles 2009 to help me to remember various aspects of it. I hope that this will jog my memory from time to time as I try to answer these…
“Shemini Atzeret” literally means “the 8th day of Assembly”. Sometimes it is called the 8th day of the Feast or the 8th day of Sukkot (Succoth), but it is actually a separate festival, as the Feast of Tabernacles is only 7 days (Lev 23:34). We saw before that 7 plays…