Prophets Schedule

Click the tab above for the Prophets Study schedule. We're combining sessions 4 and 5 as well as 7 and 8 in order to finish in eight meetings instead of ten.

Several have told us they can't come to some of the meetings and would like to borrow the CDs. We would rather not do that and will work with you to provide make-up opportunities. Since the sessions are short, we can either come in early at 6:15 (if Mark's work permits) or stay late and show the missed segment after the regularly scheduled one.

We hope this won't be necessary too often. It's a short study as it is and we're making it even shorter.

The Prophets: Messengers of God's Mercy

We have confirmed with EWTN that we will be able to offer The Prophets: Messengers of God's Mercy at Guadalupe Hall starting Monday, September 14 and running at the latest to November 16. Since the DVD sessions are 30-40 minutes long, we may double up a few and end earlier. Our start time will be 6:45pm.

A study guide is available from Ascension Press here, but we won't require it.

Our first meeting on September 14 will be a 30-minute introduction, so no preparation is required.

Update: Link to view content till 9/11/15

Theresa got us a link to review the Epic content until September 11, 2015. Click the link below to access. Thanks, Theresa!

Epic online content

Those of you who haven't been keeping up with the study from home will only have until Sept. 11 to get all your viewing done. If someone else offers the study, you might be able to register with them and then view online. Not exactly sure how that would work.

Reminder: we start at 6:30 tonight and will only watch the last session of Epic. We're done with Great Moments in Church History.

Last Epic class tonight! ...What's next?

Tonight is our last session of the Epic Study! Those of you who have been studying at home may want to come tonight: faithful attendees Dan and Elsie Troceen, unable to come to the last 2 sessions, discovered they couldn't view the video online. We tried ourselves and found we couldn't either. Theresa Brown has placed a call with Ascension Press to try to resolve this. She says we were supposed to be able to view the online content up to 2 weeks after the end of the class.

Some of you have been asking what we're going to do next. After a long study like this, all we think of is taking a break. And then we wait for inspiration. Yesterday we finally got inspired to offer The Prophets: Messengers of God's Mercy by Ascension Press. We will order it and take a look at the DVDs and study guide and then decide whether to offer it as a 10-week or 5-week course. The videos are only 30 minutes long, so we may do as we did with the Exodus study and double up the sessions and only have a brief discussion period for each.

We will NOT bother with online viewing since AP only offers that through a parish (as we had Theresa register our Epic study as taking place at St. Theresa's in Leeds).

It looks like we'll have to stick with Monday nights since Guadalupe Hall is unavailable other nights. If we do a 10-week course, we'll probably start Sept. 14; if a 5-week course, probably some time in October.

For those who don't have the study guide

Epic Study, Session 14

CHRONOLOGY OF MAJOR PROTESTANT GROUPS

Group	Date Founded	Founder(s)
Lutheran	1517	Martin Luther
Anabaptists	1521	Nicholas Storch, Thomas Münzer, John Denk, Baithasar Hubmaier, Felix Manz, Conrad .Grebel
Anglican	1534	Henry VIII
Calvinist	1536	John Calvin
Mennonites	1536	Menno Simons
Presbyterian	1560	John Knox
Congregationalist	1582	Robert Brown
Baptist	1605	John Smyth
Dutch Reformed	1628	Michaelis Jones
Methodist	1744	John & Charles. Wesley
Unitarian	1774	Theophilus Lindley     .
Mormonism*	1829	Joseph Smith
Seventh-day Adventism	1860	William Miller, Hiram Edson, Joseph Bates, Ellen Gould White
Salvation Army	1865	William Booth
Jehovah's Witnesses*	1879	Charles Taze Russell
Christian Scientist	1879	Mary Baker Eddy
Pentecostal	1900	Charles Parham, William Seymour
Fundamentalism	1909	Various

*Theologically, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (the Mormons) and the Jehovah’s Witnesses are not Christian and therefore not truly Protestant Groups.

Book/Film Recommendations

10 Books that Screwed Up the World and 5 Others that Didn't Help by Benjamin Wiker, Ph.D. will help you understand the wrong thinking of many of those mentioned in our last episode of "Great Moments in Church History." This book is available at the Hoover library.

A great book on the life of St. Thomas More is The King's Good Servant but God's First from Ignatius Press. And one of the best films of all time is A Man for All Seasons. Hope you've all seen it.

By the way, we just watched (again) The Agony and the Ecstasy with Charleton Heston and Rex Harrison. Excellent film that will help you understand the time of Michelangelo and Julius II.

I haven't used my Facebook account in a long time but have just started up again. If anyone wants to check it out, click HERE for the link. Happy to add as friends any and all of you who have studied with us.

Mark

For anyone having trouble logging in to view the videos

I'm sure I'm not the only one having trouble remembering how to log in to view the online content at Ascension Press (for those who purchased the study guide).

Here's the link I was given in my confirmation email: https://evangelization.com/login. I then get the login page, so put in my user name and password, and click login.

Then I get a page that looks like this:

Click on "View Study Content" and you'll get a page that looks like this:

Now you can watch any and all of the sessions.

Hope that helps!

Recommended Reading:

Mark recommended the book he's reading right now, The Concise History of the Crusades by Thomas Madden. What's odd is that Amazon shows "A New Concise History of the Crusades", but the publication date is earlier than this one.

Mark is really enjoying this. We heard of it from Father Mitch Pacwa who recommended it on his Open Line (EWTN radio) show.

There are many recommended books listed in the study guide. I'll list them briefly here:

Belloc, "The Crusades, the World's Debate"
Karsh, "Islamic Iimperialism, a History"
Pernoud, "The Crusaders, the Struggle for the Holy Land"
Pernoud, "Those Terrible Middle Ages!"
Peters, "Inquisition"
Riley-Smith, "What Were the Crusades?"
Strayer, "The Albigensian Crusades"
Walsh, "Characters of the Inquisition"

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For those who were not present Monday night, we wanted to inform those of you who know Theresa Brown that her nephew died Sunday of an apparent drug overdose. She and her sister Connie were on their way home from a conference at Franciscan University when they got the phone call that David was found dead. So Theresa is now in Virginia helping her sister with funeral arrangements.

Please pray for Theresa, Connie, their family--and especially for the repose of David's soul.

And many thanks to those who prayed for me to get a good night's sleep--I did! Now can you keep it up? I haven't slept as well as I did Monday night.

By the way, if you want to view my prayer request blog, check it out here. And feel free to submit requests--after you read the "about" page.

Mondays from now on

Note that we will be meeting tonight at 6:30 and on Mondays through the end of the study--except for June 30.

Please also note the new tab for the Schedule. Try it out now!

Hey, today is St. Justin Martyr's feast day--we learned about him in one of our first sessions. Read this for an eyewitness testimony of his martyrdom.

And while I've got you, tonight Steve Weidenkopf will continue to talk about the Monophysite heresy and then introduce the Monothelite heresy. If you'd like to hear correct pronunciations, click the audio link that will come up on the following words:

• Monophysite. Monophysitism doesn't have it's own audio file, but you can hear "Monophysitic" below to give you the idea.
• Monothelite. The audio for Monothelitism is below, although I think most scholars would not make the 4th syllable "layh" but simply "li".

Quote of the week/Pentecost novena

The best line of the Epic study this week came from St. Jerome who was grieving the fact that everyone had become their own scripture scholar:

Builders, carpenters, workers in material and wood, websters and fullers, makers of anything cannot become an expert without a teacher; physicians are trained by physicians. The art of scripture is the only art claimed by all. 

St. Jerome, Ad Paulinum, Epist. 5

Mark found the full reference for it at New Advent.org: St. Jerome/Letters/Letter to Paulinus #53:

6. ...Husbandmen, masons, carpenters, workers in wood and metal, wool-dressers and fullers, as well as those artisans who make furniture and cheap utensils, cannot attain the ends they seek without instruction from qualified persons. As Horace says: 

Doctors alone profess the healing art
And none but joiners ever try to join. 

7. The art of interpreting the scriptures is the only one of which all men everywhere claim to be masters. To quote Horace again: 

Taught or untaught we all write poetry.

The chatty old woman, the doting old man, and the wordy sophist, one and all take in hand the Scriptures, rend them in pieces and teach them before they have learned them.

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We would like to invite you all to join in a novena we are saying both as a preparation for Pentecost and also to support Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone, the much-persecuted Archbishop of San Francisco. To read more, view the novena prayer, and to join Celine's weekly prayer list, please visit the blog here.

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Recommended reading:

Harry Crocker's Triumph
Mike Aquilina's Mass of the Early Christians and Fathers of the Church

            


See you Tuesday at 6:30!

No class this week

Just a reminder that there is no class this week. We will resume next Tuesday, May 14, with Session 4, "Conversions and Counsels, Part 1"--preceded by "The Christian Era and the Barbarian Invasion" from Great Moments in Church History. (Complete schedule is below.)

Mark's recommended reading list:

1. Eusebius, History of the Church. Online versions: CCEL or New Advent; PDF version; Book
2. Rod Bennett, Four Witnesses
3. William Jurgens, Faith of the Early Fathers

           

Don't worry about missing classes

Several people have apologetically told us that they can't attend many classes and hope it's all right with us. Others aren't coming at all because they feel they can't commit to 20 weeks. Since we started leading Bible studies 6 years ago, we've been saying that even if you only come to one class, you'll still learn something you didn't know before. Believe us when we say that we don't mind at all if you only show up once in a while.

But the new program Ascension Press is offering where you can view the study content online--with the purchase of a study guide from them--lets you view the entire thing from home if you like. The link to order a book for this class is here. (Yes, it says it's at St. Theresa's in Leeds--we had to be associated with a parish.)

If you haven't been able to come to the first 2 classes, don't worry about it--many others haven't been able to either. We don't mind. Really.

Epic Session 2 Notes

In Session 2, Steve Weidenkopf spoke of persecutions to the Church, plus the beginning of heresies and schisms. The study guide has charts for all of these in the Appendix; for those who are not using the guide, here are online sources for you:

Persecutions

Persecuting Roman Emperors (this is not a Catholic site, but it seems accurate)
The Empire and the Early Church, a Tale of Persecution and Justice. An essay by Christopher Check, president of Catholic Answers.

Heresies

The Great Heresies from Catholic Answers

A Short Guide to Ancient Heresies by Kenneth Whitehead

Schisms

This entry from the Catholic Encyclopedia is quite long and isn't the easiest to read, but if you scroll down, you'll find a list of the principal schisms in the Church.

Recommended Reading

The Letters of St. Ignatius 

Kenneth Whitehead: One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic 

Schedule for Epic & Great Moments in Church History

Note the change of date from June 29 to June 30.
This is in Guadalupe Hall on the grounds of EWTN. See posts below for more details. We invite you to come to as many or as few sessions as you like.

Session	Epic	Great Moments in Church History	Monday	Tuesday
1	Introduction & Mustard Seed			April 14
2	Persecution - Part I	From Christ to Constantine		April 21
3	Persecution - Part II			April 28
4	Conversion & Councils - Part I	The Christian Era & the Barbarian Invasion		May 12*
5	Conversion & Councils - Part II			May 19
6	Missionaries & the Emperor - Part I	Beginning of the Middle Ages		May 26
7	Missionaries & the Emperor - Part II		June 1
8	Crusaders & Scholars - Part I	The Crusaders	June 8
9	Crusaders & Scholars - Part II		June 15
10	Crusaders & Scholars - Part III	The Late Middle Ages & the Renaissance	June 22
11	Weak Leaders & Schism - Part I	The Protestant Revolt		June 30
12	Weak Leaders & Schism - Part II		July 6
13	Protectors & Defenders - Part I	Henry VIII’s Revolt & the Counter Reformation	July 13
14	Protectors & Defenders - Part II	The Church vs. the Total State & Revolution	July 20
15	The Catholic Reformation - Part I	The Church & the United States	July 27
16	The Catholic Reformation - Part II	The 19th Century Catholic Revival	Aug 3
17	Revolutions & Modernism	The Century of Martyrs	Aug 10
18	A World At War	The Church in WWII & the Cold War	Aug 17
19	The New Springtime	Vatican II to John Paul II	Aug 24
20	The Threshold of Hope & Conclusion		Aug 31

* No class May 5