Robert Brunstein, the TNR drama critic, offers this comment on Tom Stoppard: “Like Shaw, Stoppard has always been an omnivorous reader and has never been reluctant to share his scholarship with his audiences. If I still can’t get as excited about his playwriting as my fellow critics (and my Harvard undergraduates), that is because his wit and erudition have always seemed to be more on display than his capacity to penetrate the skin of human consciousness.” In my limited reading... Read more
Writing in the June 2004 issue of Commentary , George Weigel examines the European conflict between the “Cathedral and the Cube.” The cube in question is La Grande Arche in Paris, which houses the International Foundation for Human Rights; the cathedral is Notre Dame, visible from the rooftop terrace of the cube. Weigel asks, “Which culture, I wondered, would better protect human rights and secure the moral foundations of democracy: the culture that built this stunning, rational, angular, geometrically precise... Read more
The ubiquitous Victor Davis Hanson questions the conventional wisdom that the US needs to send more troops into Iraq to establish order and peace. He draws on a number of historical examples to show that it is perfectly possible to subdue and control with a comparatively small force: “Alexander the Great, who never led an army numbering more than 50,000 men, defeated hordes five times that size in battle, and consolidated his victories with forces that were likewise vastly outnumbered.... Read more
There’s something very appealing about the controlled chaos of many liturgical worship services. There are always a dozen things going on, lots of movement, lots of energy. In many respects, there is more freedom in a liturgical service than in many apparently freer liturgical traditions. In many Protestant services, the people sit and listen through much of the service, standing occasionally for singing or Scripture reading. Despite the stricter form found in more traditional liturgical services, there is in fact... Read more
Weddings are beautiful; few events are more so: The silken cascade of the bride’s dress, the sanctuary warm with candlelight, the austere elegance of a black tuxedo, the dignified choreography of procession and recession, the indescribable transcendence of Jupiter straining to burst the space of the sanctuary. Weddings are beautiful, and therefore weddings also evoke beauty. Something there is about a wedding that inspires beauty ?Ethat inspires art, music, poetry. What went on in the last frantic weeks before this... Read more
Trinity Sunday appears to stand out as an oddity in the church calendar. Israel’s calendar was filled with commemorations of events in Israel’s history, and the Christian calendar is predominantly about the events of the incarnation. And then comes Trinity Sunday and Trinity season, devoted to a “doctrine” rather than an event. I think that’s the wrong way to understand Trinity season. Rather, Trinity Sunday comes as the culmination of the redemptive-historical celebrations, as a clue to the inner meaning... Read more
Robert C. Solomon’s About Love (1988) is a wise and important book. I have some reservations about some themes: that love must be defined as the redefinition of the self in terms of another; his acceptance of a largely discredited opposition of eros and agape ; his non-Christian sexual morality; and a few other things. But the book is full of insight, and more useful than many Christian books on these topics. Here are, briefly, a few highlights: 1) Solomon’s... Read more
Sermons are rarely more tiresome than when they strive for relevance. Drawing from the latest headlines transforms the preacher into a one-man MacLaughlin Group, a Crossfire without the cross though perhaps with some of the fire, and leaves the congregation thinking, ?If I wanted Meet the Press , I could have stayed in bed.?E I spent some time once searching for the source of the exhortation, ?Preach with the Bible in one hand and a newspaper in the other.?E My... Read more
Among theologians, it has become de rigeur to attack liberalism. Several decades ago, George Lindbeck and Hans Frei formulated the foundations of what has come to be called ?postliberal?Etheology, and John Milbank and his Radical Orthodoxy colleagues attack liberal theology across the board. But I have my doubts. Bruce Marshall provides a case in point. In his stimulating Trinity and Truth (Cambridge), Marshall mounts an assault on liberalism and many of its basic premises. He rejects internalist accounts of the... Read more
Here is an article that was published elsewhere, but is offered here for those who don’t have access to the original publication. Denominationalism gets much bad press these days, for a variety of very good reasons. John Frame, professor at Reformed Theological Seminary in Orlando, Florida, has argued that denominations have no biblical warrant and cause much damage to the church. They destroy the unity of the church, always result from sin, and subject us to human organizations that cannot... Read more
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