Dr. Robert Sungenis

Review of:  Extraterrestrial Intelligence and the Catholic Church: Are We Alone in the Universe with God and the Angels? Authored by Paul Thigpen, published by Tan Books, 2022  ISBN: 978-1-5051-2013-4, hardback  Reviewed by Robert Sungenis September 2, 2022  Buckle up and prepare for a wild ride. After a lifelong contemplation of the subject, popular author Paul Thigpen has decided to make a case for aliens living on other worlds, and perhaps visiting ours. Catholics will be interested in what he has to say because Paul attempts to use scriptural, magisterial, and traditional sources to support his pro-alien view. The book is 433 pages, half of which is an historical overview of the subject from Plato to Pope John Paul II.  The research it must have taken to collect and collate everyone who ever had a published thought about aliens is remarkable. I think Paul’s is the first book to do so. So if you want a “Who’s Who?” on which side someone was in the deba...

Book Review of: God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says, by Michael Coogan ISBN: 978-0-446-54525-9 Reviewed for Culture Wars, September 2012 issue Reviewed by Robert Sungenis, Sr., Ph.D. Michael Coogan’s book, God and Sex: What the Bible Really Says, is one of the most revolting and heterodox pieces of prose I’ve read in a long time. Ironically, the book has no right to be called by its given title since, as we will see, Coogan doesn’t believe that God has anything to do with either the God or the sex he finds in the Bible; and what he believes “the Bible Really Says” is not what the Bible says at all. It is a figment of Coogan’s fertile imagination that he intends on using to create a new sexual revolution or, at the least, give traction to the one already upon us. The endorsement chosen from Bart Ehrman, the New York Times bestselling author of Misquoting Jesus, sets the pace. Ehrman says Coogan “shows how ancient authors viewed the world of sexuality, and how these...

Galileo scholar, Maurice Finocchiaro, has put forth a supposition that the Catholic Church’s decrees against Galileo were not based on the Church declaring that heliocentrism was a heresy. He suggests the “heresy” interpretation is a “myth” begun in 1633 and carried on until today. Instead, he suggests the Church decreed heliocentrism was merely “contrary to Scripture” but not heretical. For example, in one place he argues: Carafa’s conflation of “heretical” and “contrary to Scripture” was the first sign of how easy it would be to come to think that Copernicanism had been declared heretical, which was to become one of the most persistent myths in the subsequent controversy. To my knowledge, Finocchiaro is the only Galileo scholar to advance this novel thesis. At the outset, we must note that the idea of it being a “myth” implies there was no truth to the accusation of heresy; that it was completely fabricated; that it had no historical roots; as well as no precedent and no justif...

A review of Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives Author: Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict Published by Random House, 2012 ISBN: 978-0-385-34640-5 Reviewed by Robert Sungenis Headlines were made round the world a few months ago in the secular newspapers reporting that Pope Benedict apparently squashed a 2000-year old Catholic tradition as he rejected the belief that Jesus was born on December 25, 1 BC or 1 AD. The newspapers further remarked that the pope believes Jesus was not born in a manger and there were no animals at his birth. They had their fun with it. Now let’s get serious. In reading the reports one gets the impression that the pope wrote a lengthy treatise on Jesus’ birth date and concluded from his vast research that Catholic tradition was not to be trusted. The secular press would be quite happy with such a conclusion since it would bring yet another blow to the traditional faith and mores of the Catholic Church and add to the cultural distance the mo...

Review of Jesus of Nazareth, Part Two, by Joseph Ratzinger/Pope Benedict XVI 362 pages, published by Ignatius Press, San Francisco, CA, 2011, ISBN: 978-1-58617-500-9. Reviewed by Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D. Quo Vadis, Petrus? In the history of the Church it’s not often that a private book is published by a reigning pope, but Vatican II popes apparently started a trend. John XXIII published a couple of books; Paul VI doubled that; John Paul II doubled Paul VI, and now Benedict XVI has almost doubled John Paul II, and in half the time. Prior to Vatican II hardly any pope wrote a private book on theology. I’m not sure of the reason for this trend. I am more concerned with the fact that it tends to foster what E. Michael Jones calls the “I/We dichotomy” which “demeans the papacy by allowing the pope to become a celebrity” for the purpose of “establishing the bounds of permissible discourse according to a political agenda…”1 In other words, what cannot be said officially beca...

Review of On the Third Secret of Fatima, authored by Kevin J. Symonds,  ISBN: 978-0-9988940-5-8, published by En Route Books and Media, 2017 Although Jeff Langan recently wrote a review of Symonds’ book for Culture Wars’ July-August issue, I asked Mike Jones if I could do a counter-article on Symonds’ book. Whereas Mr. Langan’s review was more or less positive, mine is rather critical, but as you will see, for good reason. Perhaps some in the Culture Wars audience may not like or agree with my approach, but I think we should all at least be aware of what is commonly called, ‘the other side of the story.’ DOWNLOAD PDF

“The Jewish Revolutionary Spirit and Its Impact on World History” A Review  By Robert A. Sungenis, Ph.D. (NB: This review appears in the May 2008 issue of Culture Wars) http://www.culturewars.com/ • Hardcover: 1,200 pages • Cost: $48.00 plus $8.00 S&H • ISBN: 0-929891-07-4 • Publisher: Fidelity Press • Order #: 574-289-9786 Reviewing a work as long (1000+ pages), as detailed (1000+ footnotes), and as provocative (the Jews) as E. Michael Jones’ book, The Revolutionary Jew is certainly no easy task, but it has been one of the most enriching and mind-opening endeavors I have ever undertaken. To do justice to this wonderful work would take a book in itself. I will quote from it extensively if for nothing else than to lead you to those pages and its surrounding context so that you will read them for yourself. So packed is it with mind-numbing facts and insightful commentary that one is tempted to embark on a trip to a remote place and lock oneself up in a ...

Review of : The Controversy of Zion by Douglas Reed ISBN: 0-945001-38-X First Published: 1978 Reviewed by Robert Sungenis In his day, “Douglas Reed was on everyone’s lips; his books were being sold by the scores of thousand, and he was known with intimate familiarity throughout the English-speaking world…one of the world’s leading correspondents,” says the writer of the Preface, Ivor Benson. But by the end of the 1940s Reed had almost vanished from the scene. The likely reason for his exile was Reed’s book, Far and Wide, which took a critical look at the history of the United States. We might say the second and decisive reason was his discovery of Israel’s connection to that history. Of himself Reed says, “I am a fairly obscure person and when I went to America in 1949 was almost unknown…the publication of most of my books having been prevented by the methods above described. I found that the ADL watched me like a hawk from my arrival and from this first realized its i...

Book Review of : The Israel Test by George Gilder reviewed by Robert Sungenis, Ph.D. “Israel has fewer flaws than perhaps any other nation—Israel is the pivot, the axis, the litmus, the trial.” George Gilder on the Jews “As far as my experience goes they are also no better than other human groups, although they are protected from the worst cancers by a lack of power. Otherwise I cannot see anything ‘chosen’ about them.” Albert Einstein on the Jews “All critics of Jews should not be tagged as anti-Semites…that the Nazis are brutes does not make us angels....Criticism is not the same as hatred, and critics are not our enemies. The greatest friends of a people are not those who praise but those who honestly find fault. A people without criticism is either a dictatorship or a community so deeply embedded in smug self-satisfaction as to be on the road to decadence.” William Zuckerman, Jewish author. Perhaps the best place to start in reviewing The Israel Test is wit...

Book Review of Augustine and the Jews: A Christian Defense of Jews and Judaism Author: Paula Fredricksen,  published by Doubleday, 2008, 488 pages. ISBN: 978-0-385-50270-2 Reviewed by Robert Sungenis Paula Fredriksen is a Jewish professor at the Religion department of Boston University. She resides both in Boston and Jerusalem. She has written a number of books about Christ and Christianity, including Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews: A Jewish Life and the Emergence of Christianity, which won her the 1999 National Jewish Book Award, and From Jesus to Christ: The Origins of the New Testament Images of Christ, which was used as a working document for a popular Frontline documentary. In addition to Augustine and the Jews, she has also written Augustine on Romans. In 2004, she was highly critical of Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ, claiming, inter alia, that the movie was “inaccurate” in many places. It is my understanding that Ms. Fredriksen does not claim ...

A Review of David Klinghoffer’s: Why the Jews Rejected Jesus (Doubleday, 2005) by Robert Sungenis, Ph.D. “No authentic Messiah would inspire a religion that ended up calling upon the Jews to reject the manifest meaning of Sinai. It is really that simple.” David Klinghoffer, Why the Jews Rejected Jesus, p. 215. As we can see from the above citation, Klinghoffer has thrown down the gauntlet against Christ and Christianity. To set the stage for his treatise, Klinghoffer tells us that his book is the fruit of a twenty‐year interest. In college he was challenged by a very astute Christian who concluded that Klinghoffer really didn’t understand his own reasons for not converting to Christianity. After college, Klinghoffer considered marrying a very spiritually minded Catholic girl with whom he had many theological discussions, but he was still quite ignorant of his own Jewish religion. This changed when he met his future wife, a Jewish girl who, after being baptize...