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In the first volume of Mary, Mother of the Son, Mr Mark Shea addressed the sources from which the Church developed her teachings concerning Our Lady (or anything else, for that matter). Now, in the second volume, titled First Guardian of the Faith, he now sets his sights on four of the 5 Marian dogmas* of the Church: Theotokos (God-bearer), Mary's Perpetual Virginity, her Immaculate Conception, and her Assumption (Body and Soul) into heaven at the end of her life. Here, he gives a cogent defense of these dogmas by explaining how the doctrines have developed, examining some scriptures which hint at these dogma, and by rebutting Protestant readings of select verses which seem to counter these dogma.

Concerning these alleged proof-texts, Mr Shea states at the outset that
Marian dogmas are not derived from Scripture. They are, rather, reflected there. That is, they're what you get when you read Scripture through the lens of the apostolic Tradition as preserved by the Spirit-guided Body of Christ in union with the bishops and pope in succession from the apostles. In short, they have the same descent as the canon of Scripture itself, the doctrine of the Trinity, the rejection of polygamy, and the teaching that human life is sacred from the moment of conception. To reject such teaching, it's not sufficient to show that it's not absolutely in Scripture alone, since none of the teachings I just mentioned earlier are, either. Rather, one must show that Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts it. And, as we shall show, not only is there no place where Scripture clearly and unequivocally contradicts Catholic Marian teaching, there are actually many places where the Bible bears surprising witness to it.

“When people cease to believe in God, they don’t believe in nothing; they believe in anything.”

So wrote the ever-witty writer G.K. Chesterton, the apostle of common-sense and prophet of the century to come. As men turn increasingly away from belief in a supernatural God, they are increasingly places their trust in the natural sciences, and particularly in physics. Physics is, after all, the basis for most of the other natural sciences, for it is the laws of physics which govern the motions and even formations of the stars in the cosmos and the rate of reaction amongst molecules; and in turn these may govern biology and geology, and the atmospheric and oceanic sciences. Indeed, physics is the most exact of the sciences, perhaps because it is the most exactly mathematical; as such, it has no limits amongst the things with material, quantifiable properties.