What You Really Get Excited About

"I know that some of you are not the least interested in these [religious] things. You have no emotional resonance with what I am saying at all. What you really get excited about is a new CD. Or a new outfit. Or losing five pounds. Or watching a ballgame. Or adding a room to your house. Or getting a new car or computer. To you – children, teenagers, adults – I plead, along with the apostle Paul, 'Wake up, O sleeper, and arise from the dead, and Christ shall give you light' (Ephesians 5:14). Don't be like the person who goes to the Grand Canyon with a little garden shovel in his hand, and on the precipice of that majesty turns his back to the Canyon, kneels down, and digs a little trough with his shovel and shouts, 'Hey, look at this! Look at my trough!'" (John Piper)

How common was opposition to the perpetual virginity of Mary in the late patristic and early medieval eras?

I've said a lot over the years about early evidence against the perpetual virginity of Mary, in the New Testament and in early extrabiblical sources. See my recent post on Irenaeus, for example. What I want to do in this post is say more about the later sources. Helvidius will often be mentioned without much or any discussion of others, but he was far from an isolated individual on the subject in his day or in the centuries that followed.