Dear brother StevenDunn,
One of my good friends is an Eastern Orthodox whose parents are Coptic Orthodox. His family came to the United States from Egypt before he was born and now attend a Roman Catholic parish. We’ve had several discussions on the differences between Catholicism and Orthodoxy, and passed some materials back and forth.
What I would really like is a good resource on the Coptic tradition I could give him, not so much as an apologetic work for Catholicism but as a way to show him the interplay between the Latin, Byzantine and Coptic traditions. I would like him to see that the Apostolic Tradition is wider than EO polemics. He doesn’t read Arabic with any fluency, so the resources have to be in English.
Thanks and God bless!
I wish I had more time. Over the years I have been with CAF, I have provided links not only to Coptic sources, but to OO sources in general, indicating the similarities between the Latin CC and the OOC.
There is a movement within Orthodoxy to highlight the similarities between the OO and the EO for the sake of unity. That is wonderful and holy in and of itself, but it comes with an insidious agenda of trying to ostracize the unity that Catholics have with the OO and EO. Differences between EO and OO, differences that are similarities between OO and CC, are blithely overlooked in this search for “unity,” while those same differences between EO and CC, or OO and CC are magnified.
One should note that that you will find OO polemicists on the net, just as you will find EO and CC polemicists, whose purpose is to highlight differences among the great Apostolic Traditions of Christendom.
I wish I had more time to give you a detailed account right now. I don’t suspect I will have the time for another two weeks. For now, please do an advanced search for posts by “mardukm” with the keyword “oriental.” Make sure to indicate the timeframe for the posts as “Any time.” Also, make sure that the search will result in “posts” instead of “threads,” which will make it easier.
Within the next two weeks, if you have specific topics to discuss, I hope I will have time to help.
For now, here is my testimony on how I became Catholic. Perhaps it will give you some ideas and you can expand your search or this discussion from there:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showthread.php?t=202141
Also, here is a recent thread that came to mind discussing the distinctions between EO and OO and the similarities between OO and CC on the matter of Original Sin:
forums.catholic-questions.org/showpost.php?p=5748606&postcount=5
Again, not to deny the similarities between EOC and OOC that they don’t share with CC, but there are also a lot of similarities between OOC and CC that they don’t share with the EOC (also, EOC and CC, for that matter, share certain similarities that are not shared with the OOC).
Blessings
