Amidst the sporadic single-session talks I will be giving in the coming year, I will also be conducting three different full-length courses in various localities. They are as follows:

Venue: St Joseph’s Church, Sentul, Kuala Lumpur

This course comprises of a series of eight talks, and it highlights the main similarities and differences in the practices and beliefs of Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant Christians.

It ends by emphatically echoing the words of the Holy Father, Pope Benedict XVI, that the search for authentic Christian unity is a sacred duty.

The course was initially designed to be taught as a parish-based course in my own local parish, but it has now been adopted by the Kuala Lumpur Archdiocesan Ministry of Ecumenical and Interreligious Affairs (AMEIA) as a part of its course offerings to the various parishes in the Archdiocese.

Venue 1: Church of the Immaculate Conception, Penang
Venue 2: Carmelite Monastery, Seremban, Negeri Sembilan

The Holy Father Pope Benedict XVI had declared that June 2008 to June 2009 will be the year of St Paul in celebration of the 2000th anniversary of the saint's birth. But who was St Paul really? How much has he impacted Christianity as we know it today? And what did he really teach in his multiple volumes of letters written to the Christians in various part of the world? And most importantly, what do his teachings mean for us?

In conjunction with this declaration of the Holy Father, it is fitting that Catholic Christians undertake a deeper study of the person of St Paul and the message that he brought to the Christians of the Early Church through his epistles. This course comprises of six talks, and it guides participants through a study on St Paul’s background and missionary journeys, the Apostle’s teachings on righteousness and sin, Jesus and the cross, faith and life in the Spirit, the Church, and the last things.

Venue 1: Chapel of St Theresa Nilai, Negeri Sembilan
Venue 2: Carmelite Monastery, Seremban, Negeri Sembilan

Why must Catholics have tradition and not just Scripture alone? Do Catholics worship Mary? Why do Catholics seem to communicate with dead people? Was the Apostle Peter really a leader among the first Apostles as the Catholic Church believes? Is it reasonable to hold that the Pope is infallible? Is purgatory not just some Catholic superstition?

These are some very crucial questions about the Catholic faith, among many others, asked by a good many people from other Christian communities. Unfortunately, not many Catholics are actually able to answer these questions, especially when other Christians demand evidence for these teachings from the Scriptures. This eight-session course aims to help Catholics to better understand the Scriptural and theological bases for such Catholic beliefs which are usually difficult to explain.