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- Written by: John Rae
- Category: Blog
In Matthew 7:24 Jesus admonishes us to: “be like the wise man who built his house upon the rock.” How do we determine when we have reached the prime reality or the bedrock of existence upon which we can start to build our lives? In the current marketplace of ideas there are a few takes on what constitutes the prime reality of existence. For some the base reality is the face of the angry or indifferent God. Some 20th century philosophers tried selling us on the idea that absurdity or meaninglessness fits the bill and for others reality is just ongoing suffering. The latest version of the suffering sales pitch is that we are all perpetual participants in the victim Olympics. It’s a pretty depressing set of alternatives.
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- Written by: Mark Pilon
- Category: Blog
Recently the feast of Our Lady of Guadalupe was celebrated. The image of Our Lady of Guadalupe is "a venerated image on a cloak enshrined within the Basilica of Our Lady of Guadalupe in Mexico City".1 The image is on a Tilma, which a is hand woven cloth made from the coarse fibres of the Maguey cactus and is close to 500 years old.2 On it is the picture of the Virgin Mary with child (signified by the dark waist tassel seen below her clasped hands) and she is wearing a blue mantle with stars on it. There are many claims about it such as the stars on Mary's mantle are in the same configuration as the stars in the sky on the morning of Dec. 12 1531 when the image was miraculously created.3 I recall also reading a claim that the temperature of parts of the icon are always the same - around the temperature of the human body.4 However, I want to focus on the results of the scientific study that Philip Serna Callahan carried out using Infrared (IR) photography.
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- Written by: John Rae
- Category: Blog
The other day, I was following an online chat about the rising tide of ‘cancel culture’. One participant quipped, “You know, trying to live your life under a rock somewhere is not as safe as it used to be!”. In the same vein, back in 1969, the rock and roll poet, Mick Jagger wrote:
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- Written by: John Rae
- Category: Blog
One of the images of God in Scripture is that He is a loving, wooing, bridegroom and we are His bride. He pursues us as the bridegroom who is totally smitten by His bride, but He does not overwhelm us, He woos us. “He (God) is wooing you from the jaws of distress to a spacious place free from restriction…” Job 36:16. In the same vein, Jesus says, “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draws them”, John 6:44.
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- Written by: John Rae
- Category: Blog
In 1931, the Austrian logician Kurt Gödel published his “incompleteness theorem” which states that any logical system must ultimately be reliant on something outside of that closed system. Internally the system can show that the relationship between a set of statements is logically flawless, but the real-world truth of that logical conclusion is outside the realm of just demonstrating internal consistency. In other words, formal systems cannot “think outside of the box”.
