Daily Archives: January 28, 2021
Statement from The Archbishop of Armagh following the publication of the Research Report on Mother and Baby Homes and Magdalene Laundries in Northern Ireland
(Deseret News) Boyd Matheson–America is a nation in need of grace
If America is to unify, we must make space for grace | By @BoydMathesonhttps://t.co/aQ4Tj1mvwi
— Deseret News (@DeseretNews) January 27, 2021
I liked this piece, but if you read it carefully, he never really got at the core of a biblical understanding of grace-undeserved favor from an unobligated giver. We need all of what he talked about, but this core idea most of all,+we have it not in our own strength to give it–KSH.
(Local Paper) 2 cases of South African strain of coronavirus in SC, 1st cases reported in US
Two South Carolina patients are the first in the United States to be diagnosed with a mutated strain of the coronavirus, raising concerns that this more transmissible variant could become dominant here and throughout the country.
There are now a few variants of COVID-19 spreading from different parts of the world. The S.C. Department of Health and Environmental Control announced Thursday that the two patients in South Carolina were diagnosed with the B.1.351 variant, a strain first identified in South Africa about six weeks ago.
President Joe Biden added the African country to a travel ban earlier this week in order to mitigate the spread of the virus, but the restrictions come weeks after the South Carolina patients tested positive in early January. It was only determined this week that they tested positive for this specific new variant.
One patient is from the Lowcountry and the other is from the Pee Dee, according to DHEC, and both are now ”doing well,” according to one health department official. The agency released few other personal details, citing patient privacy, but did say the two cases are not related and neither person had a known travel history.
At a briefing, @PressSec notes that people flying to the US from South Africa (as well as all other foreign nations) need to have negative tests at least 3 days before arrival.
First US cases of South African #COVID19 variant found in SC. https://t.co/xzI0NUi2ZH— Andy Shain (@AndyShain) January 28, 2021
(NYT) An Organ Recital, With a Coronavirus Shot
On a recent Saturday afternoon, Margaret Drabble, 83, sat beneath the soaring arches of Salisbury Cathedral, swinging her legs back and forth under her chair like a schoolgirl.
Minutes earlier, in a booth near the cathedral’s entrance, she had received her first shot of the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine against the coronavirus. But that wasn’t why she was looking so happy, she said. Instead, it was from the elaborate organ music gently reverberating in the cathedral’s interior.
“Oh, I just love the organ,” said Drabble, a former schoolteacher. “It’s so beautiful, it almost makes me cry every time I hear it.”
Salisbury Cathedral is joining Britain’s vaccination drive, and its organists are providing a musical accompaniment. They’re even taking requests. https://t.co/JjjfaBWyVC
— The New York Times (@nytimes) January 25, 2021
For Thomas Aquinas’ Feast Day– Archbishop Michael Miller Speaks on Aquinas and Universities
Authentic Christian faith does not fear reason “but seeks it out and has trust in it”. Faith presupposes reason and perfects it. Nor does human reason lose anything by opening itself to the content of faith. When reason is illumined by faith, it “is set free from the fragility and limitations deriving from the disobedience of sin and finds the strength required to rise to the knowledge of the Triune God”. The Holy Father observes that St Thomas thinks that human reason, as it were, “breathes” by moving within a vast horizon open to transcendence. If, instead, “a person reduces himself to thinking only of material objects or those that can be proven, he closes himself to the great questions about life, himself and God and is impoverished”. Such a person has far too summarily divorced reason from faith, rendering asunder the very dynamic of the intellect.
What does this mean for Catholic universities today? Pope Benedict answers in this way: “The Catholic university is [therefore] a vast laboratory where, in accordance with the different disciplines, ever new areas of research are developed in a stimulating confrontation between faith and reason that aims to recover the harmonious synthesis achieved by Thomas Aquinas and other great Christian thinkers”. When firmly grounded in St Thomas’ understanding of faith and reason, Catholic institutions of higher learning can confidently face every new challenge on the horizon, since the truths discovered by any genuine science can never contradict the one Truth, who is God himself.
Read it all from 2010.
“God alone satisfies.”
– St. Thomas Aquinas#StThomasAquinas #Aquinas pic.twitter.com/9sLYIl47Is
— Msgr Brian Bransfield (@BrianBransfield) January 28, 2021
A Prayer for the Feast Day of Saint Thomas Aquinas
Almighty God, who hast enriched thy Church with the singular learning and holiness of thy servant Thomas Aquinas: Enlighten us more and more, we pray thee, by the disciplined thinking and teaching of Christian scholars, and deepen our devotion by the example of saintly lives; through Jesus Christ our Lord, who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever.
January 28th is the feast of Saint Thomas Aquinas, the “Angelic Doctor”: Lombardo-Norman nobleman, Dominican friar, Catholic priest, scholastic philosopher, theologian, jurist, mystic, hymn-writer, hagiographer, wonderworker, and popular preacher—who died in 1274, aged about 49. pic.twitter.com/i9OVMG4QHT
— Tradical (@NoTrueScotist) January 28, 2021
A Prayer to Begin the Day from Frank Colquhoun
O Lord Jesus Christ, who in thine own appointed ordinance dost accept and seal thy disciples as members of thy mystical body: Grant, we pray thee, that all who by baptism have been admitted into thy holy Church may be faithful to their vows, and may live henceforth as those who, having died to sin, are partakers of thy risen power and glory; for the honour of thy holy name.
Sunrise in Nova Scotia today. pic.twitter.com/unweAak7Ss
— Brett Ruskin (@Brett_CBC) January 28, 2021
From the Morning Scripture Readings
A Psalm of Asaph. The Mighty One, God the LORD, speaks and summons the earth from the rising of the sun to its setting. Out of Zion, the perfection of beauty, God shines forth. Our God comes, he does not keep silence, before him is a devouring fire, round about him a mighty tempest.
–Psalm 50:1-3
Good Morning from the Golden Retriever Channel. Pupper is helping M clean up after breakfast. What a good boy!
Looks like a brighter day already(Mountaingoldens IG)#cutenessoverload pic.twitter.com/2iE4Mq7yV0
— Golden Retriever Channel (@GoldretrieverUS) January 28, 2021