Doubting 101

questions

This week Fred Sanders posted a link to a meditation on Barth and the experience of doubt in the life of a Christian, and especially of a theologian. The article deals with two forms of Christian doubt, one innocuous, one dangerous, but both negative. While this post rightly identifies two ways doubt can go wrong, [...]

Towards The Eternal City: St. Augustine’s Theology of History

Augustine

It is quite common to hear from various Christian circles on how we must influence Washington with Christian values, and that bringing our nation to a more Christian footing morally, cultural and politically must be a top priority.  But even if we did succeed in creating this optimum Christian society, what are the chances of [...]

Giles of Viterbo: The Humanist Scholastic

Lombard

The Commentary on the Sentences of Petrus Lombardus, by Giles of Viterbo.   Giles of Viterbo (1469-1532) was the most active and creative theologians who tried to bring together two worlds: the Renaissance and its call to return to the sources of classical antiquity, and the medieval scholastic tradition. Nothing brings out this creative syncretic [...]

Progress for the Sake of…

dna

As I was driving around LA the other day listening to NPR, two stories run back-to-back caught my attention. The first was a story about the recent Nobel-prize winners John B. Gurdon and Shinya Yamanaka, who have uncovered a means for turning any cell into a stem cell from which an organ or even a [...]

John Hick (1922-2012), Philosopher of Religion

John Hick, a major philosopher of religion, has died at age 90. Friends and students had just brought out a festschrift in his honor weeks before his death. Hick’s theological conclusions were decidedly on the liberal side of the spectrum, and his intellectual legacy will be the greatest among those who are least concerned about [...]

Excerpts & Essays: The Great Books Reader

Here’s a 656-page grand tour of some of the greatest moments in Western civilization: The Great Books Reader, edited by John Mark Reynolds. I highly recommend it. Then again, since I contributed to it, work with or for many of the contributors, and already like all the classic authors and modern writers in the volume, [...]

Needy and Rational: Existential Reasons for Belief in God

Once you’ve encountered solid evidence for belief in God, it’s hard to settle for anything less. That is, if you think you have reasons for affirming that the Christian God is real, and that believing in him means having actual knowledge about reality, it’s hard to listen to people who say things like “I believe [...]

Jews and Arabs in Search of Wisdom: Two Book Reviews

Scholars and students who have worked their way through Seyyed Hossein Nasr’s and Oliver Leaman’s masterfully edited work, A History of Islamic Philosophy (Routledge, 2001) will, if they had bother to read the two introductions by Nasr and Leaman respectively, come away with an appreciation for how difficult it was to define the parameters of [...]

Literally, Plato

“This is intended to be a literal translation,” says Allan Bloom in the preface to his 1968 edition of Plato’s Republic. And it is, famously, or infamously, literal. Bloom puts his head down and digs out as word-for-word a translation as he can. What drove him to do so? He explains his motivation in the [...]

Boethius according to C.S. Lewis

In 1962, C.S. Lewis made a “ten books that have influenced me most” list at the request of The Christian Century. Read it here. (He agreed to do this even though, in a letter to Clyde Kilby in 1958, he had worried that publishing anything whatsoever in the Century “may merely be putting up the [...]