The J-Files

Let’s continue the cross-linking of my apologetics work from the Catholic Answers web site.

As most of y’all know, we publish a magazine called This Rock.

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We also post it online, but delayed by several months so you still have to

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The most recent two issues we have online are the July/August 2004 and the September 2004 issue. We publish monthly except for May/June and July/August, so you get ten issues a year when you

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Okay, enough of that gag.

Here’s the deal: Each month I publish a column in This Rock, and my column is called "Brass Tacks" (which is Cockney rhyming-slang for "facts" or, in some sources, "hard facts"–which is what I try to deliver in the column). I also sometimes write feature stories.

In the two most recent issues that are online, my columns form a pair.

In the first issue I talk about WHY CATHOLIC APOLOGISTS NEED TO LEARN MORE LANGUAGES, PARTICULARLY THE BIBLICAL ONES (AND HOW IT’S EASIER THAN YOU THINK).

In the second issue I follow up by MAKING RECOMMENDATIONS FOR LANGUAGE-LEARNING RESOURCES AND REFERENCE WORKS–a subject I am often asked about here on the blog.

In fact, you may notice a suspicious similarity between the second article and certain previous things I’ve written on the blog. Yes, it’s true. Sometimes I get behind the eight ball on a deadline and will cannibalizeadapt things I’ve written elsewhere . . . all in a quest to deliver timely and quality material, of course! In this case the second article was a logical and much-needed follow-on to the first.

I normally don’t have a feature story in This Rock, but it so happens that in the July/August issue, I do.

It’s called THE LOSS OF MASCULINE SPIRITUALITY.

This article deals not only with gender relations and how they are rooted in human nature but also the impact of gender on spirituality and the negative consequences that can ensue when a church places an over-emphasis on either "masculine" or "feminine" spirituality. God made the masculine and the feminine mutually interdependent in humans biologically, and they are both equally necessary in us spiritually, as well.

Unfortunately, I diagnose the present situation of the Catholic Church as involving an under-emphasis on "masculine" spirituality, which results in some of the problems we have in the Church today. I call for a renewal of this mode of spirituality to compliment the "feminine" spirituality that we presently have (and will always need) in abundance.

For what it’s worth, when this article came out many people locked on to it as an article of particular significance, and I got requests for electronic copies of it as well as requests for notification of when it was online.

Now I’m fulfilling the latter.

I am very particular about fulfilling my commitments. 🙂

Have fun reading . . .

THE J-FILES.

Author: Jimmy Akin

Jimmy was born in Texas, grew up nominally Protestant, but at age 20 experienced a profound conversion to Christ. Planning on becoming a Protestant seminary professor, he started an intensive study of the Bible. But the more he immersed himself in Scripture the more he found to support the Catholic faith, and in 1992 he entered the Catholic Church. His conversion story, "A Triumph and a Tragedy," is published in Surprised by Truth. Besides being an author, Jimmy is the Senior Apologist at Catholic Answers, a contributing editor to Catholic Answers Magazine, and a weekly guest on "Catholic Answers Live."

13 thoughts on “The J-Files”

  1. Very fine article on Masculine spirituality. Particularly trenchant was this:
    At the end of this chain of events, we are left with a Church that spends much of its energy on international peace and diplomacy (beyond the realm of its mandate by Christ), has largely run out of people who are easy to evangelize (much of the rest of the world being either indifferent to the Christian message or committed to other thus far resilient belief systems), and has placed an emphasis on trying to reunite Christians through the diplomacy of ecumenism.
    I’ve often wondered why the Vatican seems to put much more emphasis on addressing worldly issues than in evangelization – I even get the impression that ‘evangelization’ is something of a dirty word in the Vatican. Much Vatican energy seems to be directed toward perfecting this world rather than focusing people on the primacy of the next, a phenomenon that can be seen in the Vatican’s curious embrace of that godless abomination, the United Nations.
    I’m generalizing, of course . . .

  2. Jimmy, you write that one only needs to learn to read a Biblical language.
    I’m inclined to differ, I would have learned Greek far better, had I learned to -speak- it, likewise with Hebrew, save that far less of it stuck. Most of my classmates had been engineers, and the learning was directed toward purely left-brained, list-learning thinkers.
    But that isn’t how humans learn and use language. I tend to suspect – strongly? that we’d understand the Bible better if we could actually speak it, read it aloud and understand it, and thereby better catch nuances and emphases that grammatical commentaries – such as the blue one from the Vatican, as helpful as they can be – can enable us to do.
    Treating the text as computer code may, I am inclined to think, cause us to misinterpret from time to time. Think of Shakespeare, or Donne.
    What think you?

  3. Could I be really nit-picky and point out that you meant to use complement, but used compliment instead? “I call for a renewal of this mode of spirituality to compliment the ‘feminine’ spirituality that we presently have (and will always need) in abundance”, instead of the correct “I call for a renewal of this mode of spirituality to complement the ‘feminine’ spirituality that we presently have (and will always need) in abundance.”

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