Book Recommendations

Howdy y'all. We just got Internet up and running in our new house here in Steubenville, and the new semester is going well. I'm taking 6 hours of graduate school and working part time as an assistant to Dr. Scott Hahn at the St. Paul Center For Biblical Theology ( http://www.SalvationHistory.com ), and my roommate is its director. He's also mentioned on p. 87 of Stephen Ray's Crossing the Tiber as Robert Corzine because he came into the Church with the Ray family Easter of 1994. In addition to this, I am serving on the Rite of Christian Initiation of A d u l t s team at the university, and we have some very interesting team members.. including quite a few converts from Protestant backgrounds - even including one former Messianic Jew who studied the Bible for 5 years in Israel. My other roommate just transferred up here from Bob Jones University (yes, "the" Bob Jones Univ.), and he is attending RCIA with his Catholic friend this semester, and we have been having some great conversations. He's been eating up our tapes and books (Rob has 60 shelves.. I have about eight), and it's exciting to witness his journey.

Apart from all of that, I just finished three books, all of which are great. The first is Mystagogy by Enrico Mazza, which studies the use of typology in teaching the saraments to catechumens by St. Ambrose, St. Cyril of Jerusalem, Theodore of Mopsuestia, and St. John Chrysostom. The second is The Meaning of Grace by Cardinal Journet, which is a wonderful text that explores this awesome gift of God. The third is The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism by Louis Bouyer. This final book is out of this world. Bouyer was once a Protestant theologian who converted to Catholicism, and in this text, he shows that the positive principles of the Reformation are both orthodox and Catholic (e.g. the sovereignty of God, the supreme authority of Scripture, justification by faith, and the primacy of grace), and that they can only be brought out fully in Catholicism. In other words, the Reformation was right! He shows how Protestantism adopted an un-Christian medieval philosophical system in the nominalism of William Ockham, and how this generated into the negative principles of the Reformers, which are not bound up in the positive principles and actually destroy those very principles in the end.. ironically!

For a summary of The Spirit and Forms of Protestantism, I suggest reading this article:

http://www.catholiceducation.org/links/jump.cgi?ID=3267

[ September 30, 2003, 07:33 PM: Message edited by: Carson Weber ]

 

Thanks Bill.

John, thanks for reading the article. The book is even better.