Blog - Page 12 of 318 - John H Armstrong

Truth & Love Will Have the Final Word: A Commitment to Writing for 2016

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:13:16-05:00December 31st, 2015|Categories: Uncategorized|

The late Christian civil rights leader, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., once said: “I believe the unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word.” As we come to the end of 2015 I have reflected upon this a great deal and applied it to my own life and work. We are about to enter what appears to be a year that will be filled with war, tumult and continued suffering. There will be a lot more bad news. And we are entering an election year in the U.S., a time when minds and hearts are taken away into profound partisanship.

I look ahead to 2016 praying to God that I will be armed with both “truth” and “unconditional love.” I do believe it is not “pie-in-the-sky” to adopt this stance toward all things. Let me elaborate.

Those who love me, and follow me via the social media, know that over the last six months of 2015 I wrote very few blogs. There were several reasons for this:

I was working on a new book and this […]

The Francis Effect

By John Armstrong|2015-12-24T11:32:32-06:00December 5th, 2015|Categories: Pope Francis, Roman Catholicism|

Dr. Jeffrey Mirus holds a Ph.D. in intellectual history from Princeton University. A co-founder of Christendom College, he also pioneered Catholic Internet services. He is the founder of Trinity Communications and CatholicCulture.org. In a recent article in First Things David Bentley Hart, who is Orthodox, says he finds the response of many Catholics to this pope “inexplicable.” Dr. Mirus explains why hypersensitivity and hysteria have no place in a truly Catholic response to the pope. He writes:

At the same time, there is a right way and a wrong way for a Catholic to respond to his fears. Any type of hypercriticism, hysteria or panic—especially when accompanied by accusations which go beyond a strict and necessary construction of the evidence—is, as I have already noted, not of God. This sort of anxiety, and the quick (and even petty) trigger finger that goes with it, always comes from the Devil. What comes from the Holy Spirit is interior peace, joy, generosity, and trust in God.

Mirus sees legitimate and illegitimate reasons for a sensitive or suspicious response to Pope Francis but provides some helpful […]

Pope Francis, the Mercy of God, and the Danger of Fundamentalism

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:13:16-05:00December 4th, 2015|Categories: American Evangelicalism, God's Character, Mercy, Missional-Ecumenism, Roman Catholicism, The Church, The Future, The Persecuted Church, Unity of the Church|

Pope Francis just returned from his first trip to Africa a few days ago. Those of us who watch and pray for him were amazed once again at his courage, faithfulness and continued displays of pastoral mercy. Surely “mercy” does sum up what Francis says and does as pope. Thus it is not surprising really since he has declared the coming year to be a “Year of Mercy.” He recently said that he will make twelve big (“significant”) gestures, one each month.Each is mean to demonstrate God’s mercy. This is what the Catholic Church calls a Jubilee Year. This year was pre-launched last Sunday when Pope Francis opened the Holy Door of the cathedral in Bangui, Central African Republic. One of the admirable features of Catholic Church life is the way this biblical concept of jubilee can be used to capture the minds and hearts of the whole church over a span of time.

In a brief interview in Credere, the official jubilee weekly magazine in Italian, Francis said: “There will be many gestures, but on one Friday each […]

The Passing of My Friend Joseph F. Girzone

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:13:16-05:00December 1st, 2015|Categories: ACT 3, Biblical Theology, Christ/Christology, Death, Discipleship, Faith, Jesus, Love, Personal|

Several years ago I shared the story of how I met Fr. Joseph F. Girzone (1930-2015). I had read Joe’s wonderful book, Jesus: A New Understanding of God’s Son (New York: Doubleday, 2009). I simply loved it. Frankly, it changed my life in many profound ways. I wrote my first ever review on Amazon and as a result someone showed it to Joe who then reached out to get to know me. Since this is the kind of thing I would do, and it is rarely done to me, I had an immediate desire to know this lovely man. Well, we began to chat on the phone and by email. The man who wrote the huge best-selling novel, Joshua (1983), was a friend. What a pleasant and divinely-orchestrated surprise. When I first encountered Joshua in the days of its immense popularity in the early 1980s I was so profoundly influenced by Puritanism that I considered a novel about Jesus a virtual sacrilege. (So much for a mind that was open!) So getting to know this unusual priest became an […]

George Koch – A Word for Unity from the Chair of the ACT3 Board

By John Armstrong|2015-11-21T14:26:22-06:00November 25th, 2015|Categories: ACT 3, Missional-Ecumenism, My Christian Unity Story, The Church, Unity of the Church|

Rev. George Koch is the chairman of the ACT3 Network board and pastor of the Jerusalem House of Prayer, a messianic Anglican parish, located in West Chicago, Illinois. George is a great advocate for unity and has a magnificent influence in my life. His video for today is both solid and helpful.

A Common Struggle – An Uncommonly Fine Book

By John Armstrong|2021-07-02T06:13:16-05:00November 24th, 2015|Categories: Books, Current Affairs, Personal, Psychology, Spirituality|

Patrick J. Kennedy, the former congressman and youngest child of Senator Ted Kennedy, recently appeared in an interview on the award-winning news broadcast, “CBS 60 Minutes.” The interview that Kennedy gave so intrigued me that I decided to read his new best-selling book, A Common Struggle: A Personal Journey Through the Past and Future of Illness and Addiction (New York: Blue Rider Press: Penguin, 423 pages).

A Common Struggle, co-authored with Stephen Fried, details Kennedy’s personal and political battle with mental illness and addiction, exploring mental health history in the U.S. alongside his own private struggle. Kennedy, a former Rhode Island congressman, publicly disclosed his addiction to prescription painkillers in 2006 after he crashed his car into a Capitol barrier in the middle of the night. The true extent of his struggle with bipolar disorder was not known at the time thus his plan to openly seek help caught many off-guard. Given the way public life works in Washington this could have been the end of Kennedy’s public career but instead of the end it proved to be […]

René Girard: The Passing of an Amazing and Iconic Thinker

By John Armstrong|2015-11-11T19:25:57-06:00November 11th, 2015|Categories: Biblical Theology, Culture, Hermeneutics, Philosophy, Religion, Roman Catholicism|

I think it is quite unlikely that many readers of this post know the life and thought of René Girard. I discovered him late in life, only about fifteen years ago. I found his work on human desire both insightful and brilliant. Agree or disagree with Girard’s thought he helped us rethink human desire, anthropology and sin. If you reject the idea of evolution please do not let that issue keep you from learning from this great Christian thinker. This presentation by Fr. James Alison is a great, short summary.

You may need to see this several times to actually process Girard’s central thought but this is as good as any short presentation of the man and his thinking I’ve seen.