In my home it is no secret that I am no fan of secular Christmas. I was raised outside the Church. When I was a kid, I loved Christmas. The music. The beautiful colors. Nostalgia for a “better time.” The idea of joy, family, and peace. And, naturally, presents.
But, then, I answered the call of Jesus. Christmas, I came to understand, was not just a remembrance of a nice man that gave out pretty sayings and showed an examplary way of life. Christmas was a Christian feast of the Incarnation. God became human. God came to us! The world and the universe were bigger than I had ever imagined. God was real. God knew me and — even when he really and truly knew me — he loved me unconstrained and unconditionally. The nativity is the moment where everything changed. It is the momement were the Word of God took on flesh. My flesh. Your flesh. Our flesh. “Cur Deus homo?”/“Why did God become Human?” asked St. Anselm. One begins to find the answer to that question with Christmas.
Read more...For the last several years, I’ve been trying to find a short and simple Advent liturgy to do each night around the advent-wreath. The family form of Evening Prayer from the 2019 Prayer Book is good, but it is still a little long for my very young children and still requires me to find short readings for each night. I wanted a resource that was short and simple for my young family, but still retained the character of the daily offices. This Advent I have finally found the perfect resource, The Season of Light by Jay Cormier.
Read more...I am called to preach the Gospel and faithfully administer the sacraments under the apostolic authority of a bishop of Christ’s Holy Church because God saved a Mormon boy from the pits of despair and freed him from the chains of the law. This God, in securely calling me his own, redirected my heart to serve his one, holy, Catholic Church and to share the truly Good News of unmerited free grace to others lost in darkness. God calls me especially to minister to and establish the Church among those often overlooked and forgotten; the poor, the imprisoned, the foreigner, and the oppressed.
Read more...The last two weeks of divinity school turned out much differently than I expected. For my last semester I was required to take a course to fulfill a credit in the topic of gender and sexuality. There was only one course that fulfilled that requirement that would fit into my schedule with another required course, ethics. I spent my last semester as one of two men in a course exploring the intersections of theology and psychology for women. Out of character for VDS, the classroom was chaotic and stifled any opinion outside of the professor’s own progressive feminism. The course was a struggle for me to attend each week as the Church, great women of faith, and traditional Christian anthropology was drug through the mud. And yet, I persevered and dutifully attended each week and participated in discussions as I was able.
Read more...So, I happened to be looking back through some old files and I found an early programming assignment from my first computer science course back in college. In the middle of the code I found this wonderful line:
]
]
]
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]while (cownt<years) {
cout<<cownt+1; //"cownt" = "count", but when I entered it spelt correctly it gave me errors.//
As it turns out early on in the code I declared int cownt=0;. I either couldn’t find this typo in debugging my mere 61 lines of code or — what I think was actually going on — I thought count was a reserved magical variable that made loops work — not something I had to declare. Sometimes it’s nice to look back and see how far you’ve come.
