Much of the following wedding sermon was inspired by Eugene Peterson’s recent Christ Plays In Ten Thousand Places . I read from the first chapter of John’s First Epistle. What was from the beginning, what we have heard, what we have seen with our eyes, what we have looked at and touched with our hands, concerning the Word of Life— and the life was manifested, and we have seen and testify and proclaim to you the eternal life, which was... Read more
Bones are the last part of a person to decay, and so in Scripture they are often used to designate the person in a state of death or a continuing existence after death (cf. Joseph’s bones). The bones of a nation are the remnant that are left after a nation’s body is destroyed, after the predatory nations surrounding have had a chance to pick over the carcass. When bones are destroyed, it is a symbol of complete destruction, a death... Read more
Eugene Peterson’s latest book, the first of a five-volume spiritual theology, takes its title from some lovely lines of Gerald Manley Hopkins: Christ plays in ten thousand places, Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his To the Father through the features of men’s faces. Read more
In an essay in What’s Wrong With the World , Chesterton challenges the complaint that home-making is narrow and demeaning for women. On the contrary: “woman is generally shut up in a house with a human being at the time when he asks all the questions that there are, and some that there aren’t. It would be odd if she retained any of the narrowness of a specialist . . . . when people begin to talk about this domestic... Read more
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem – the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system – has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians now know they can never reach rock bottom; in fact, there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-subsistent reality independent of the human activity that mathematicians carry on.”... Read more
Kurt Godel’s incompleteness theorem – the claim that every formal system of mathematics contains an undecidable formula and that a system’s consistency cannot be proven within the system – has been hailed as the mathematical equivalent of relativity and quantum mechanics, evidence, in the words of William Barrett, that “Mathematicians now know they can never reach rock bottom; in fact, there is no rock bottom, since mathematics has no self-subsistent reality independent of the human activity that mathematicians carry on.”... Read more
A priest of Auxerre writing in the early middle ages recorded some details of the Easter celebration: “Having receive the pilota [a leather ball] from the newest canon, the dean, or someone in his place, in former times wearing an amice on his head and the other clergy likewise, began antiphonally the sequence appropriate to the feast of Easter, Victimae paschali laudes. Then taking the ball in his left hand, he dance to the meter of the sequence as it... Read more
In a statistically rich discussion of global trends in family life, Castells notes that in the US “The number of sex partners in the last 12 months shows a limited range of sexual partnerships for the overwhelming majority of the population: 66.7 percent of men and 74.7 percent of women had only one partner; and 9.9 percent and 13.6 percent respectively had none. So, there was no widespread sexual revolution in American in the early 1990s.” This would be an... Read more
Fundamentalism in its “actual content, experiences, opinions, history, and theories” is “so diverse as to defy synthesis.” So writes Berkeley sociologist Manuel Castells in The Power of Identity (Blackwell, 2004). Yet, thanks to an exhaustive study commissioned by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences published under the title Fundamentalisms Observed , we now “know” – know , mind you – “that ‘fundamentalists are always reactive, reactionary’” and we also know that “fundamentalists are selective” in their use of the... Read more
Do secular democracies have the right to engage in “high justice,” that is, “the attempt to balance the cosmic books, to stabilize a shaken universe” to answer the blood that cries from the ground by shedding blood? That is the question Jody Bottum raises in a fascinating article in the August/September issue of First Things. Bottum argues that all governments have the authority to wage war to defend citizens, and also in extreme circumstances have the authority to execute criminals... Read more
Leithart
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