From the World of Biblical Study

Reader Kevin Birnbaum writes:

In case you or your readers might be interested:

I’m planning to read through the New Testament this year (one chapter each weekday) and blog about it, and it would be great if any of your readers wanted join in and interact in the comments.

Thanks!

Meanwhile, over at Gregorian Rite Catholic, Janice Kraus continues her obsessive war on converts by warning the Truly True Catholic against the dangers of trusting any unqualified layperson but her on how to study the Bible. Kraus, who has no particular credentials to hold forth on the matter, holds forth against people who have far more credentials than she does in the arena of Scripture scholarship. Predictably, she disses Scott Hahn–who only has a doctorate in Scripture study and regularly teaches in Rome–for the crime of being a Protestant convert (and therefore intrinsically incapable of every being a Truly True Catholic). In addition, she weirdly warns her readers away from Catholic Answers as a source of biblical scholarship, a claim I’ve never remotely heard CA make. They offer apologetics materials, Janice, not Bible studies. She also warns that some faceless group of “neocon fundamentalists” is laboring to subvert the Pontifical Biblical Commission, but give no examples or documentation of this dumb claim.

To be fair, some of her recommendations are reasonable, but her poisonous loathing of converts and those who do evangelization (which bring in more of those awful unwashed former Protestants) pretty much queers the pitch. Whimsically, she does not allow comments from people who point out that (to paraphrase somebody named “Janice Kraus”), “All she’s giving you is her opinion, which is no better than yours.”

Janice’s basic message to the Evangelical convert is this: “My Church of perfectly celebrated liturgy according to my rigorous aesthetic is the the only source of salvation on the face of the earth–and YOU are not welcome! Get lost!” She and guys like Arturo Vasquez have some new cockamamie theory that because the Faith is enculturated, those who do not hail from a Catholic culture can never really be Catholic. Arturo even goes so far as to declare English an “apostate language”. (And they say Rad trads aren’t creative.) Because, of course, the gospel is all about holding the grace of God captive to the confines of human culture. What else is Acts 15, the epistle to the Galatians and the book of Romans all about?

Oh, but there I go again, doing my Protestant thing of citing Scripture instead of surrendering to the Mystery of bigoted Rad Tradism which alone preserves Truly True Catholic Faith.