Prepare the Way: Overcoming Obstacles to God, the Gospel and the Church
Sharing the gospel with family and friends (or a stranger on the computer screen) can be challenging enough. When they won’t even hear you out, because of all the mental roadblocks they’ve built up, it’s even harder.
In Prepare the Way, Karlo Broussard helps you tackle that essential first step to apologetics and evangelization: getting people to listen with an open mind.
So many in our culture today are trapped behind mental, moral, and personal obstacles that prevent them from even glimpsing God—or considering the claims of Christ and the Church. They may be earnestly seeking truth but infected with relativism. They may be otherwise open to the Good News but think that Christianity is only for people who reject science and hate women. Or perhaps they might listen to what you have to say about Catholicism—if only that religion wasn’t so full of ignorance and superstition.
Even our best witness can bounce right off folks like these if we don’t prepare the way first, breaking down the barriers and leaving minds and souls free to encounter the truth. So Karlo gives you not just evidence and arguments but step-by step strategies, based on asking the right questions, that you can use—along with prayer and gentle charity—to help them overcome their obstacles and make a straight path for the Lord.
Meeting the Protestant Challenge: How to Answer 50 Biblical Objections to Catholic Beliefs
Every Catholic has heard the challenge:
“How can you believe that? Don’t you know the Bible says…”
It’s a challenge we have to meet. If we can’t reconcile apparent contradictions between Scripture and Catholic teaching, how can our own faith survive? And if we can’t help our Protestant brothers and sisters overcome their preconceptions about “unbiblical” Catholic doctrines and practices, how will they ever come to embrace the fullness of the Faith?
In Meeting the Protestant Challenge, Karlo Broussard gives you the knowledge and tools you need to answer fifty of the most common Bible-based objections to Catholicism.
- How can the Mass be a sacrifice when the Bible says it’s just a memorial?
- Why do Catholics stress good works when the Bible says we’re saved by faith?
- Scripture says that all have sinned—so what Catholics believe about Mary being “immaculate” is plainly false.
- Jesus said to call no man father, yet that’s what Catholics call their priests! How much clearer could it be?
For these challenges and many more, Karlo provides a step-by-step plan for understanding the roots of the objection, breaking down the context and full meaning of the Scripture passages, anticipating followup arguments, and offering your own friendly counter-challenge to help Protestants begin to see how the Bible and Catholic teaching actually coexist in harmony.
Don’t get caught off guard! When the next biblical challenge comes, be ready to meet it with confidence.
Purgatory is for Real: Good News About the Afterlife for Those Who Aren’t Perfect Yet
To some, the Catholic doctrine of purgatory is murky and mysterious—even scary. What is this shadowy state between earth and heaven supposed to be? Others wonder how it’s even possible for saved souls to be suffering in the afterlife if Jesus has already redeemed them.
No wonder that non-Christians imagine purgatory in sensationalistic ways and Protestants condemn it as an “unbiblical tradition of men.”
In Purgatory Is for Real, Catholic apologist Karlo Broussard (Meeting the Protestant Challenge) definitively tackles this most-misunderstood teaching, giving you the evidence and arguments to see (and explain to others) that purgatory is neither contrary to Scripture nor some fantastical dogma that Rome invented. Rather, it is firmly rooted in biblical truth and the faith and practice of the earliest Christians.
Even more importantly, Karlo shows that purgatory is not a cause for dread but a hopeful, even joyful sign of God’s love for us. It is a great consolation, a call for all Christians to pursue deeper holiness, and an opportunity to build loving solidarity with those who have gone before us
Meeting the Protestant Response: How to Answer Common Comebacks to Catholic Arguments
When Protestants Strike Back…
Thanks to apologetics, millions of regular Catholics have learned to give good reasons for the things they believe, usually to Protestants who challenge their faith with a Bible verse or historical claim.
But those critics of the Church have been paying attention, and now they have their own answers to rebut the standard Catholic proofs.
In Meeting the Protestant Response, Karlo Broussard follows up his bestselling Meeting the Protestant Challenge by looking at the fresh counter-arguments that Evangelical pastors and scholars have developed and taught their followers to make. On subjects like the Eucharist, the papacy, salvation, and the veneration of saints, Karlo breaks down these new comebacks, shows how they don’t actually disprove the classic Catholic argument, and offers more biblical, logical ways to explain and defend the doctrines and practices of our faith.
The New Relativism: Unmasking the Philosophy of Today’s Woke Moralists
Do you remember when relativism was the nemesis of Christians and all people of right reason? This idea that “you have your truth and I have mine” was so pervasive and insidious that Pope Benedict XVI warned it was a “dictatorship” that threatened all our freedoms.
Then, seemingly overnight, we’re being told that it’s not a problem anymore. Why? Because in today’s “woke” world, most people are now moralists, not relativists. They impose a litany of new, seemingly absolute “commandments” to make sure we’re never racist, sexist, judgmental, bigoted, “anti-science,” or a host of other deplorable things. So, relativism must dead; yesterday’s news.
Not so fast, says Karlo Broussard in The New Relativism. The dictatorship of relativism isn’t dead; it’s just hiding—behind the mask of woke moralism. Scratch these modern commandments we’re supposed to live by, and lurking underneath you’ll find the same basic errors of relativism: mutated into new forms, perhaps, but no less dangerous to our world and our faith.
Drawing on examples both timeless and fresh as today’s news, Karlo unpacks the various styles and flavors of the new relativism, shining a light on their modern woke disguises and showing how to dismantle them piece by piece. Even more importantly, he shows you how to replace them with better “commandments” that reflect a moral and intellectual universe of objective truth.
Karlo Broussard does the important and foundational work of refuting wokeism without polemics or ridicule, but with the simple conviction that we are made for truth. In a time of much coercion and confusion, The New Relativism is a clarifying and compelling read. -Noelle Mering, author of Awake, Not Woke
The Saints Pray for You: How the Christians in Heaven Help Us Here on Earth
When you think of saints, what image comes to mind? Maybe halos and angel wings, or maybe a football team from Louisiana. Or maybe you think of one of the most difficult stumbling blocks that Catholic belief presents for Protestants: the doctrine of the communion and intercession of the saints.
Why do Catholics pray to dead people? How can we expect those same people to pray for us . . . and why would they want to? What about bowing to relics and statues? And where is all this in the Bible? Doesn’t it say that we’re all saints?
These questions and others can keep other Christians at arm’s length from Catholicism—or worse, force them to conclude that Catholics have hopelessly mixed up true biblical religion with superstition and remnants of paganism.
But in The Saints Pray for You, Karlo Broussard brings the answers, backed up with the Bible. He shows how the communion of saints is not a medieval fantasy, and their intercession is not a joke the Church plays on us. Appealing to the witness of Scripture and the practice of the early Church, while neutralizing the misguided prooftexts that Protestants deploy, Karlo convincingly defends the ancient Christian belief that the saints are our family in heaven and our prayerful allies in the work of our salvation.