As promised, I thought that this would be a good discussion starter here in the community - this is from a conversation I had with my producer at Catholic Culture, around the podcast episodes on St. Gregory of Narek. If you've listened to the first episode on St. Gregory, you know that he is the first and only Doctor of the Church who was not Catholic! What are we to make of this? How do we explain it? Well, it was within the context of me trying to explain it that two really fundamental questions came up, and had to be hashed out between me and my producer. The first question - and this was surprising, given that we had a whole series on The Heresies - the first question is: What is a heresy? And how you answer that has serious implications for the second question, which is: What is the Universal Church? And that has serious implications for ecumenical dialogue, not to mention how we think about our fellow Christians who are not Catholic. So let's take the first question first (and here's where you get to chime in with your thoughts).
What IS heresy, really? Does it always necessarily mean apostasy from the Christian faith? Or are there degrees of heresy?
What do you think? And I want to hear from the non-Catholic members of the community, too, because that point of view is going to factor into the next set of questions.
Incidentally, this is a private conversation within this community, not to be shared outside of it. Let's keep this behind the scenes stuff behind the scenes - being a member of this community is your back stage pass!
Jim
I'm back, up and running, and ready to go - I should have a new JOURNEY episode within the next week or so - and because you are my loyal peeps, here is an exclusive, just-for-you, behind the scenes SNEAK PEEK into my new office:
This was for March 24th, recorded for the Ascension App
Thanks for your patience - here is our next installment of The Journey - it's session # 96, but I'm also calling it PART 1 of a "miniseries" on John chapter 6.
Whoever watches it first, please let me know if it looks good or if there are any problems with it - I get through the first two sections of the text on the feeding of the 5,000.
Enjoy!
I mentioned in The Journey that I wrote a song based on Isaiah 2, which is one of my favorite OT passages:
In days to come, the mountain of the Lord’s house
shall be established as the highest mountain, and raised above the hills.
All nations shall stream toward it. Many peoples shall come and say:
“Come, let us go up to the Lord’s mountain, to the house of the God of Jacob, That he may instruct us in his ways, and we may walk in his paths.” For from Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem.
He shall judge between the nations, and set terms for many peoples.
They shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; One nation shall not raise the sword against another, nor shall they train for war again. House of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the Lord!
I hope you like the song!
So begins a song I wrote back in the day, to commemorate the martyrs of Rome - which was the point of the name of the band I had for about 20 years - the band was called Remember Rome. The song was called Midnight Light. At about midnight on the night between July 18th and 19th, in the year 64 AD, the emperor Nero's men started the great fire in Rome, which would be blamed on the Christians, starting the long trajectory of Roman persecution of the Church. Here's a video of Remember Rome playing the song - do I look younger? This was recorded right around the turn of Y2K, about 25 years ago.
I highly recommend this podcast in general, but this concept of "Transhumanism" is really important to understand, and in my opinion is not unrelated with the whole AI thing - check this out:
