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