To: Dept. Editors
From: Executive Editor
Re: Editorial Board
Fellow team-members,
I confess that I’m envious of the faux-official titles which the bloggers over at Called to Communion have awarded themselves.
Cross and Judisch have conferred on themselves the hifalutin’ title of “Academic Editor(s),” while Troutman is “Editor in Chief,” and so on.
Why, it’s just about the most impressive thing I’ve seen since comrade Fidel used to pin those shiny medals on his chest. If you didn’t know better, you’d almost forget that CTC is just a do-it-yourself blog.
Anyway, we’re falling behind the competition. If team members of CTC can make up fancy faux-official titles for themselves, why can’t we? So here’s a draft proposal:
Hays: Executive Editor
Chan: Managing Editor
Engwer: Editorial Page Editor
Pike: Science Editor
Manata: Editor-at-Large
Bridges: Senior Editor
May: Deputy Editor
Thanks for all the hyperlinking. We appreciate the extra traffic.
ReplyDeleteWe're always happy to accommodate our "separated brethren" across the Tiber. And there's an open invitation for you guys to return to Mother Kirk.
ReplyDeleteHere are some traffic stats for you:
ReplyDelete* There is a great flux away from the Roman catholic church to Protestantism in the United states. 30 million people now in the US define themselves as ex roman catholics. Half are unafililiated with no church and half are now Protestants.
* Catholicism has suffered the greatest net loss in the process of religious change. Many people who leave the Catholic Church do so for religious reasons; two-thirds of former Catholics who have become unaffiliated say they left the Catholic faith because they stopped believing in its teachings, as do half of former Catholics who are now Protestant.
* Most former Catholics who are now evangelical Protestants say they left Catholicism in part because they stopped believing in Catholic teachings (62%) and specifically because they were unhappy with Catholic teachings about the Bible (55%).
* Only 3% of Proteststants have converted to Catholicism.
Source: Pew Forum on Religion in The United States.
LOL - Editor at large. Is there a reward for his capture?
ReplyDelete"There is a great flux away from the Roman catholic church to Protestantism in the United states. 30 million people now in the US define themselves as ex roman catholics."
ReplyDeleteIt just proves that Protestantism has no substantive life of its own. Without the Catholic Church (for its theology and church membership), Protestantism withers. It is incapable of attracting non Christian converts and it hardly ventures into territories that have not already been Christianized. One may recall that after the fall of Iraq in 2003 business minded evangelicals poured in with bible in one hand and TV infomercials in another, pretending they were bringing a purer form of Christianity. However, when heads started rolling off shoulders they all ran away. The Catholic remained and thus proving that it is an enduring and authentic religion.
Yes, I bet they were mighty impressed with the Roman Catholic Church during the Crusades (now that you mention heads flying off shoulders).
ReplyDeleteDear Brethren,
ReplyDeleteThank you for all your hard work. It's BeggarsAll, TurretinFan and Triablogue that are the top three blogs in my bookmarks bar. I hit them every day, 1-2-3.
I regret I don't have much to offer in the combox, but I thank you for the mental stretching that reading your work and the combox exchanges afford me.
Best in Christ for the New Year!
In Christ,
Pilgrimsarbour
You know, someone of you may be able to help me?
ReplyDeleteI have always wondered about being an editor at "large".
Does being a large editor mean you have had to have read like ten books or something?
Dozie said:
ReplyDelete"There is a great flux away from the Roman catholic church to Protestantism in the United states. 30 million people now in the US define themselves as ex roman catholics."
It just proves that Protestantism has no substantive life of its own.
It proves no such thing. In the US, this is largely demographically driven. That is, most people are either born into Catholic or Protestant homes. And they are moving definitively in one direction.
It proves that 30 million people found Roman Catholicism to be a bankrupt system. They wanted to leave it.
"To whom shall we go? You [Protestantism] have the words of eternal life." Protestantism has the Gospel. The words of eternal life.
True, there are bankrupt forms of Protestantism. There are the TV-preacher types. But even while these will be judged, they are less bankrupt than the papal system, which, in Calvin's words, has "polluted everything that God had appointed for our salvation." (Institutes 4.1.1.)
Do you understand what Calvin is saying? There once was a "church" at Rome that had "everything that God had appointed for our salvation."
It has the form of something Godly, but the true power of God, the true Gospel, is denied. Everything in it is polluted.
Bugay is quite right in pointing out that contrary to common perception, many more Romanists are becoming Protestants than vice versa.
ReplyDeleteIt's only that Protestants who become RCs are perceived as "important people", and are thus in elitistic spirit feted and made media noise about, producing the optical illusion of Prods leaving en masse for Rome, whereas the truth is rather the other way round.
In any case, most of those 3 % of Protestants who are now RCs actually converted in pragmatic spirit after marrying a Romanist - not out of real conviction. How many RCs have become Protestant just for for the sake of their spouse?
"Without the Catholic Church (for its theology and church membership), Protestantism withers. It is incapable of attracting non Christian converts and it hardly ventures into territories that have not already been Christianized."
ReplyDeleteA demonstrably false statement - this is yet another of those slanderous anti-Protestant urban legends that Rome feeds its followers.
Protestants are making lots and lots of converts among pagan Africans, Orientals like the Chinese and Koreans, and even among Muslims.
Today Protestants represent Christianity in countries like North Korea, where believers face fierce persecution.
"However, when heads started rolling off shoulders they all ran away. The Catholic remained and thus proving that it is an enduring and authentic religion."
ReplyDeleteEven if we accept this simplistic story for the sake of argument, the American Evangelicals obviously left because they were not native Iraqis. Catholics stayed because Iraq was their home.
But those native Christian Iraqis were originally NESTORIANS until Roman missionaries started doing just the same sort of "convert poaching" you here condemn in the 16th century, luring Assyrian Nestorians (and also some local Monophysites) into a Chaldean Uniate church.
The origins of the Chaldean Catholic church were sordidly politicking. Western Roman missionaries often lured impoverished and persecuted Nestorians into union with blatantly material goodies - Rome divided and conquered, favoring competing claimants like this:
"Dissent over the hereditary succession grew until in 1552, when a group of bishops, from the Northern regions of Amid and Salmas, elected Mar Yohannan Sulaqa as a rival Patriarch. To look for a bishop of metropolitan rank to consecrate him patriarch, Sulaqa traveled to the pope in Rome, entered into communion with the Catholic Church and in 1553 he was consecrated bishop and elevated to the rank of patriarch taking the name of Mar Shimun VIII."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaldean_Catholic_Church
Everyone knows you can't walk five feet in Iraq without tripping over a rosary or hearing Ave Maria over the airwaves.
ReplyDeleteViisaus -- you make an excellent point about "Nestorians" in Iraq.
ReplyDeleteThis is yet another instance in which Rome has reversed itself 180 degrees, and another blatant example of how wrong it is to say that "Rome has never erred."