Douglas Knight

In its catholicity, the Orthodox Church is truly and profoundly “ecumenical.” Nevertheless, this catholicity or ecumenicity is not “universal” – in the etymological sense of the word (from the Latin “tending toward oneness”), in the literal sense of drawing all things to unilateral homogeneity. This, as we underlined yesterday to our brother Bishops during the [...]

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Message of the Orthodox Primates
The Orthodox Church, having the understanding of the authentic interpretation of the teaching of the Apostle to the Nations, in both peaceful and difficult times of its two-thousand year historical course, can and must promote to the contemporary world the teaching not only regarding the restoration in Christ of the unity [...]

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To undo the Council of Trent would be no mean endeavour, although to anyone with a sense of the religious history of Europe during the last four hundred and fifty years it must seem a madly ambitious one. But what really ignited the Catholic culture wars was the way it was done: by an unprecedented [...]

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Know your saints. Today, June 22, is Saint Alban’s day. Saint Alban was the first British martyr. He is in good company and there is room for more.

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The Role of Parents in God’s Plan of Salvation
It is a fundamental principle of Catholic education that parents, as co-creators with God of the life of their child, are the primary educators of their children (CCC 2223). Parents have an ‘irreplaceable and inalienable’ role in education because of the uniqueness of the loving relationship between [...]

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Here then, beloved seminarians, is the world which you will be sent forth to serve. In the mind of secular man, there is no God, or even if He does exist, it does not matter. This is clearly the condition of a grave disease. WWhat is the medicinehat are the models of healthful words that [...]

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The priest was gradually changed in the popular imagination from the celebrant of the Sacred Mysteries of salvation into the coordinator of the liturgical ministries of others. And this false understanding of the ministerial priesthood produced the ever-expanding role of the “priest presider,” whose primary task was to make the congregation feel welcome and constantly [...]

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You were bought with a price. So glorify God in your body.
We stand at a threshold – either we can continue to allow this plague (pornography) to spread with fewer and fewer checks, or we can take concrete steps to uproot it in our lives, our families, our neighborhoods and our culture.
We [...]

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Now we include in the Honours List people who live a lifestyle that is totally at odds with the family and children. According to the law of the land, this is no longer the definition of a family. A family can be any kind of assortment of people, two men and a child or two [...]

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Andy,
You ask about the SST (the Society for the Study of Theology annual conference) last week.
The conference was good, the company was great, and I found a fellow Spaemann fan. My paper was feeble, but everyone was very polite. England’s greatest living theologian was just great – master of self-control and understatement. He [...]

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On 9 April the Church of England calendar of saints remembers Dietrich Bonhoeffer.
Archbishop Rowan Williams gave a sermon on Pastor Bonhoeffer at the Berliner Mattäuskirche in 2006
to become a human being and a Christian, to use Bonhoeffer’s words in the same letter, is not to separate ourselves and work to become holy [...]

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The subject is bishops as theologians and theologians as bishops. The Christian world is much indebted to N.T. (Tom) Wright, the Anglican bishop of Durham.
Most of (Bishop Tom’s) book (Surprised by Hope) is devoted to making the case for a greater accent in Christian piety and liturgy on the final resurrection of the dead and [...]

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Cardinal Paul Josef Cordes, president of the Pontifical Council “Cor Unum”, is to meet with bishops of England and Wales. At the invitation of the Episcopal Conference of England and Wales (CBEW), the cardinal will dialogue with the bishops in the light of the Holy Father’s first Encyclical “Deus caritas est” on
how to promote [...]

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The Church in this land is now in a totally new situation. After years of enjoying a comparatively privileged position, we are now clearly facing attack, ridicule and even persecution. We are in a counter-culture situation and our position is increasingly similar to the Early Church.
Viewed from the position of the world, the Church is [...]

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The Goal of a Catholic School is the Promotion of the Fully Human Person
I came that they may have life, and have it abundantly (John 10:10)
The Church’s recent teaching on the purpose of Catholic education states clearly that its goal is the promotion of the human person. What does thismean for the schools and colleges [...]

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Michael Spenser is concerned that the Chinese church is vulnerable to the ‘Prosperity Gospel’
The Prosperity Gospel….
A) is the presumption that God wants us to be rich.
B) is the assumption that the blessings of the Gospel are a guarantee of material and financial blessings now. (The mediation of Jesus makes all blessing possible, but it [...]

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Cardinal Walter Kasper has been talking about the October 2007 Joint International Commission for Theological Dialogue Between the Catholic Church and the Orthodox Church, held in Ravenna, and explaining what’s left in the process of achieving full unity.
The breakthrough, he said, was that “the Orthodox agreed to speak about the universal level – because before [...]

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The head of the Anglican church in Europe, Dr Geoffrey Rowell, was locked out of six churches in Turkey by their congregations after his controversial decision to ordain a local convert to the priesthood.
In an unprecedented step and amid fears that the ordination would endanger the lives of congregants in the mainly Muslim country, furious [...]

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Today is the feast of the Conversion of Saint Paul and also the feast of Saint Gregory Nazianzus
At his birth we duly kept Festival, both I, the leader of the Feast, and you, and all that is in the world and above the world. With the Star we ran, and with the Magi we worshipped, [...]

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This is the Week of Prayer for Christian Unity 2008
The Week of Prayer for Christian Unity is an expression of the ecumenical movement – a worldwide movement among Christians to heal the divisions within the Church; to promote dialogues among churches and Christian communities; and to encourage Christians everywhere to better understand and reflect the [...]

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