Advent: Remembering, Being Vigilant, Doing My Job

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Photo taken by a member of the ISS Expedition 53 crew: '...the sweep of the coastline of the eastern Mediterranean Sea. The cluster of lights at image center includes the major population centers of the Levant. The brightest lights are the cities of Tel Aviv in Israel, Amman in Jordan, and Beirut in Lebanon.....' (September 28, 2017)

Quite a bit has changed over the last couple millennia. And some things haven't.

One of the things that hasn't changed is human nature: which is good news and bad news, depending on how I look at it.

I'd started writing about that, when my oldest daughter and I ran into an all-to-common opinion about religion.

The narrator of a video we were watching said that religion was silly. Then he said something like 'isn't that an unforgivable sin?'

The phrase is fairly common in English-speaking cultures. It's "Biblical" in the sense that it refers to a sentence in Matthew.

Since I'm a Catholic, I do not think the unforgivable sin is using the wrong fork at a formal dinner. I'll get back to that.

At any rate, here's my shorter-than-planned review of (comparatively) recent events, along with how I see sin (original, unforgivable and otherwise); and why Advent matters:

More at A Catholic Citizen in America.

(Two millennia, a very quick review. Sin: original, unforgivable and otherwise. Why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is a bad idea. Being a Christian and a Catholic.)

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