What are you currently reading?

Started by Francisco Suárez, December 26, 2012, 09:48:56 PM

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Michael Wilson

I just finished reading "The Protestant's Dilemma" By Devin Rose;
If you like apologetical works, this one is well done, with short easy to read chapters that are not too technical and the average Catholic can grasp the arguments without any problems. Here is the Amazon description:
QuoteWhat if Protestantism were true? What if the Reformers really were heroes, the Bible the sole rule of faith, and Christ's Church just an invisible collection of loosely united believers?

As an Evangelical, Devin Rose used to believe all of it. Then one day the nagging questions began. He noticed things about Protestant belief and practice that didn't add up. He began following the logic of Protestant claims to places he never expected it to go -leading to conclusions no Christians would ever admit to holding.

In The Protestant's Dilemma, Rose examines over thirty of those conclusions, showing with solid evidence, compelling reason, and gentle humor how the major tenets of Protestantism - if honestly pursued to their furthest extent - wind up in dead ends. The only escape? Catholic truth. Rose patiently unpacks each instance, and shows how Catholicism solves the Protestant's dilemma through the witness of Scripture, Christian history, and the authority with which Christ himself undeniably vested his Church.
And here is one of the reviews of the book by a Protestant:
Quote of 5 starsFlaws Within Protestantism Point to the Rightness of Catholicism
September 25, 2014
Format: Kindle EditionVerified Purchase
If you are a Protestant willing to have your faith challenged, then read "The Protestant's Dilemma" by Devin Rose. This should be a book that every Protestant read. At the very least, it helps explain to us Protestants why Catholics believe in certain doctrines the way they do even if they seem a bit strange to us. At best, it helps a Protestant better understand why he/she may be drawing closer to the ancient beliefs and traditions of the Catholic faith such as myself.

In my early years of the Christian faith I was a right-wing fundamentalist Evangelical Christian that was taught that Catholics and their Church are apostates and heretics. I read a lot of anti-Catholic propaganda that led me to believe that the Popes are corrupt and Catholicism is really just a powerful and wealthy cult.

As I have grown in my faith and come to know Jesus more, not only have I left fundamentalism, but I have actually begun to understand and in some ways embrace many of the doctrines, traditions, and teachings of the Catholic faith. While this book helped clear up many misunderstandings and misgivings I had with the Catholic faith (i.e. the apocrypha/deuterocanonical books, purgatory, praying for and seeking prayer from the saints, and apostolic authority), I still have issue with a couple of key Catholic doctrines, such as: transubstantiation of the Eucharist and Marian theology. Aside from these two issues, I come just short of fully identifying with the Catholic faith.

Very well written and laid out, humbly explained, and uncritical to those of other faith traditions, I highly recommend this book to those Protestants who have enough balls to have their faith challenged and for those who desire to seek and understand more about our Catholic brothers and sisters in Christ and their rich history.
"The World Must Conform to Our Lord and not He to it." Rev. Dennis Fahey CSSP

"My brothers, all of you, if you are condemned to see the triumph of evil, never applaud it. Never say to evil: you are good; to decadence: you are progess; to death: you are life. Sanctify yourselves in the times wherein God has placed you; bewail the evils and the disorders which God tolerates; oppose them with the energy of your works and your efforts, your life uncontaminated by error, free from being led astray, in such a way that having lived here below, united with the Spirit of the Lord, you will be admitted to be made but one with Him forever and ever: But he who is joined to the Lord is one in spirit." Cardinal Pie of Potiers

Bernadette

Just finished the Tom Playfair series, by Fr. Finn. It was excellent. Now I'm in the middle of Claude Lightfoot.
My Lord and my God.

Jacob

"Arguing with anonymous strangers on the Internet is a sucker's game because they almost always turn out to be—or to be indistinguishable from—self-righteous sixteen-year-olds possessing infinite amounts of free time."
--Neal Stephenson

Bernadette

The Complete Short Stories of Hercule Poirot. Pretty good so far.
My Lord and my God.

martin88nyc

Quote from: Bernadette on February 27, 2019, 08:08:50 AM
The Complete Short Stories of Hercule Poirot. Pretty good so far.
I love the TV series
"These things I have spoken to you, that in me you may have peace. In the world you shall have distress: but have confidence, I have overcome the world." John 16:33

red solo cup

The Voice of the Dawn: An Autohistory of the Abenaki Nation by Frederick Wiseman
non impediti ratione cogitationis

rosenley

"Creation Rediscovered: Evolution and the Importance of the Origins Debate" By Gerard J. Keane
"And I live, now not I; but Christ liveth in me. And that I live now in the flesh: I live in the faith of the Son of God, who loved me, and delivered himself for me." (Galatians 2:20)

"Give them according to their works, and according to the wickedness of their inventions. According to the works of their hands give thou to them: render to them their reward." (Psalm 27:4)

"A man has free choice to the extent that he is rational."
"It is proper for man to be inclined to act according to reason."
"Human salvation demands the divine disclosure of truths surpassing reason."
"To one who has faith, no explanation is necessary. To one without faith, no explanation is possible." - St. Thomas Aquinas

MilesChristi

I'm reading kind of a weird duet:

La Parabola de Pablo

And

Louis IX: Most Christian King of France
The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
    It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
    It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
    And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
    And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
    There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
    Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
    World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

red solo cup

The Pursuit of the Millennium: Revolutionary Millenarians and Mystical Anarchists of the Middle Ages by Norman Cohn
non impediti ratione cogitationis

Bernadette

How Green Was My Valley, by Richard Llewellyn.
My Lord and my God.

Gardener

This morning saw my finishing of the Psalms. I had been doing about 2 chapters a day. Some days more for the really short ones.
"If anyone does not wish to have Mary Immaculate for his Mother, he will not have Christ for his Brother." - St. Maximilian Kolbe

Prayerful

Für Volk and Führer: The Memoir of a Veteran of the 1st SS Panzer Division Leibstandarte SS Adolf Hitler, Erwin Hartmann, which unlike Fernand Kaisergruber's biography of war in Russia and near twenty years of prison, does depict the author was evincing elements of doubt with the cause (the Walloonian says little enough on political except to state he saw his fight as that of a Europe of its nations against Communism), or least not an overt hostility to Jews and others, and Four Days in September: The Battle of Teutoburg, Jason B. Ardale.
Padre Pio: Pray, hope, and don't worry. Worry is useless. God is merciful and will hear your prayer.

Gardener

Forgot to mention I recently read Pius XI's encyclical on Motion Pictures. Refreshing in its pithiness, unlike modern "encyclicals". Quick read. Easily understandable.
"If anyone does not wish to have Mary Immaculate for his Mother, he will not have Christ for his Brother." - St. Maximilian Kolbe

Heinrich

Quote from: Gardener on March 31, 2019, 11:22:00 AM
This morning saw my finishing of the Psalms. I had been doing about 2 chapters a day. Some days more for the really short ones.

Get Bellarmine's commentaries.
Schaff Recht mir Gott und führe meine Sache gegen ein unheiliges Volk . . .   .                          
Lex Orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi.
"Die Welt sucht nach Ehre, Ansehen, Reichtum, Vergnügen; die Heiligen aber suchen Demütigung, Verachtung, Armut, Abtötung und Buße." --Ausschnitt von der Geschichte des Lebens St. Bennos.

Gardener

Quote from: Heinrich on March 31, 2019, 09:23:58 PM
Quote from: Gardener on March 31, 2019, 11:22:00 AM
This morning saw my finishing of the Psalms. I had been doing about 2 chapters a day. Some days more for the really short ones.

Get Bellarmine's commentaries.

Got that for my mother-in-law for Christmas. I really should buy my own copy.
"If anyone does not wish to have Mary Immaculate for his Mother, he will not have Christ for his Brother." - St. Maximilian Kolbe