Soundings

Children violence. Stop now are write on extended girl’s hands and help me on her taped mouth. Like so many around the world, I too was hoodwinked into believing Somaly Mam’s story. The world-renowned crusader against sex trafficking and slavery almost achieved iconic status with the story of her own sexual abuse when she was […]

Collage – sunset in alien planet While searching for planets in the constellation Draco, researchers at the Harvard-Smithsonian Centre for Astrophysics found a giant Earth-like planet with a diameter of nearly 28,900 km – more than twice the size of planet Earth. Using NASA’s Kepler spacecraft, these scientists spotted this “Godzilla of Earths” – which […]

Nanotechnology and energy computer generated abstract background ** Note: Shallow depth of field At Johns Hopkins University, neurosurgeons and biomedical engineers collaborated to create tiny, biodegradable “nanoparticles” that can transport DNA to brain cancer cells in mice. These scientists hope that one day, they will be able to load these particles with “death genes” and […]

St. Patrick’s Cathedral a Neo-Gothic-style Roman Catholic cathedral is the seat of the archbishop of the archdiocese of New York Ceiling perspective detail Manhattan NYC Almost sixty years ago, the Romanian philosopher Mircea Elaide perceptively noted that certain physical spaces in many traditional religions are regarded as sacred. However, modernity with its corrosive secularism has […]

In his insightful book entitled Contending for the Faith, Ralph Wood, Professor of Theology and Literature at Baylor University, describes a sweatshirt on sale at an annual Christian Book Fair designed by a Christian T-Shirt company called Living Epistle. Labelled “The Lord’s Gym”, it depicts Jesus Christ as a muscle-bound body-builder. He presses himself on […]

Apart from the doctrine of the Trinity, the tenet of the faith that has also attracted much controversy and debate is Christology (the doctrine or study of Christ). In this series, we have briefly examined Ebionitism (p13 MM May 2013) and Arianism (p11 MM Dec 2013), two Christological heresies that in their own ways registered […]

… Pelagianism was a heresy in the “classical” sense because it was a curious and ultimately harmful amalgam of truth and error. In A.D. 400, Pelagius, a native of Ireland, arrived in Rome and began to promote his philosophy of self-determination that gave rise to one of the most enduring controversies in the history of […]

…“None of the great ‘heretics’ of the history of dogma have borne this name so unjustly as Nestorius.” Nestorius, the Bishop of Constantinople, is arguably one of the most controversial figures in the history of Christian theology. A student of the revered Antiochene theologian Theodore of Mopsuestia, Nestorius strongly affirmed the deity of the Son […]

Among the many heresies related to the person of Christ, arguably the most threatening was Arianism, named after its founder Arius (d. 336), a dynamic and popular presbyter in the Church of Alexandria. Adhering to a strict monotheism, Arius and his followers felt compelled to reject the orthodox doctrine of the Trinity because they were […]

…while orthodoxy teaches that the Father, Son and Holy Spirit are three persons in the one God, the modalists maintain that these are merely tags attached to the successive and varied manifestations of the one God. While the influence of dynamic monarchianism (p13 MM Oct 2013) was somewhat limited and short-lived, that of modalistic monarchianism was […]

One of the most important tenets of the Christian faith (perhaps the most important) is the Trinity. Since its inception, the Church has taught that there is only one God. Like Judaism, Christianity is a monotheistic religion. But Christians have a very unique understanding of the oneness of God. For although Christians maintain that there is […]

Manichaeism grouped its followers into two distinct categories: the Elect were those who have attained knowledge by renouncing all sexual and physical pleasures, while the Hearers were second-class devotees who were not required to refrain from sexual activities as long as they did not regard them in a positive light. One of the most troubling […]