By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 14, 2021
Years ago I did a good deal of work in apologetics, or the rational defense of the Faith. I developed and taught a college level course in apologetics. I also edited and co-authored a basic book of apologetics which we published at Christendom College (at last check it can be purchased on Amazon for something like $985), an indication that it is no longer widely available. Happily, four of its chapters are in our library on CatholicCulture.org, and of course I’ve written quite a few commentaries here over the past twenty-five years which deal with apologetics. (At the end of this essay, I link to the ebooks which contain many of these writings, plus a few other things, which are all free.)
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 11, 2021
I found myself thinking today of the various saints throughout history who had discerned their future course by opening up a Bible at random and reading that page or perhaps opening the Bible, plunking their finger down on the page, and reading that verse. I’ve tried this myself from time to time, with no discernible result. Today when I tried it for inspiration, I got this:
For all his anger has not turned away, and his hand is stretched out still.
That’s from the Book of Isaiah, chapter 9, the second half of verse 12.
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 07, 2021
It is one of the most peculiar characteristics of post-modernity that the dominant culture has a love-hate relationship with the concept of “order”. On the one hand, the contemporary mindset seeks to justify every desire that was formerly considered “disordered” through the assumption that the universe is the product of chaos; on the other, this same contemporary mindset insists upon a socially uniform, consistent and
orderly stance against challenges to this assumption. In other words, we wish to orchestrate a unified and orderly exclusion of the theory that both the material and moral universes are deliberately and intrinsically ordered toward intelligible ends.
By Dr. Jeff Mirus ( bio - articles - email ) | May 04, 2021
I have previously called attention to Gerard Verschuuren’s latest book on the Shroud of Turin (see Out of the past, three surprise books, all occasions of grace). But having finished a careful reading of Verschuuren’s argument, I decided it would be useful to summarize the main points. The following is a summary of the conclusions of the noted geneticist, in accordance with the nine areas of study he undertook in the main chapters of his book:
Biblical analysis: We know that Jesus Christ was crucified, died and was buried after being wrapped in a burial cloth, such that if an image should have been miraculously imprinted on the cloth, its fundamental visual characteristics would have been something very like what is seen on the Shroud of Turin today.