Max Thurian (Mary, Mother of All Christians) has a wonderful treatment of Mary’s role at the wedding feast at Cana. He starts by noting some of the symbolic dimensions of the event. The wedding takes place on “the third day,” initiating a theme that runs through the rest of John’s gospel (several times Jesus acts “after two days). The third day is also the seventh mentioned day in John 1-2, completing a creation week with a Sabbath feast. Thurian points... Read more
Sex is a mystery. Sex is a mystery because masculinity and femininity are elusive qualities. Sexual desire is a mystery, so spontaneous and powerful that we might almost forgive ancient pagans for thinking of sex as a goddess, a divine power. Sexual intercourse is a mystery of mutual indwelling that points to the mutual indwelling of the persons of the Trinity. In what follows, I don’t pretend to unravel the mystery of sex; I only intend to examine a few... Read more
Douglas Axe (Undeniable) is out to defend our intuition that something as intricate as a living things must have a designer. One of his tactics is to prick the bubble of scientific pretension. We don’t know nearly as much as we pretend we know. For instance: “the giant panda has a protruding bone in its wrist that serves a thumb-like role, enabling the bear to grasp bambo . . . . The fact that this bone (called a radial sesamoid) isn’t... Read more
Writing at USA Today, W. Bradford Wilcox sums up his and others’ research on children born into or growing up in a home with unmarried parents: “Cohabiting families in America, partly because they are characterized by markedly lower levels of commitment, are also characterized by markedly higher levels of instability. In fact, children born to cohabiting parents in the United States are almost twice as likely to see their parents break upby age 12, according to my research. That instability... Read more
Saba Mahmood and Peter G. Danchin examine religious liberty cases from Egypt (publicly an Islamic state whose laws are based in sharia), the European Union, and the U.S. Despite differences, they highlight the remarkable similar dilemmas that arise in these very different legal systems. The common antinomies emerge because of the basic structure of modern secular law’s treatment of religion. They conclude that “modern secular power . . . incessantly raises the question of where to draw the line between... Read more
In 1969, Carlo Lancellotti writes in Commonweal, the journal “Esprit published an exchange between two of the best-known Catholic intellectuals of the time. One was Jean-Marie Domenach, who in 1957 had succeeded Emmanuel Mounier as editor of Esprit and de facto flag-bearer of ‘progressive’ French Catholicism. The other was Thomas Molnar, the distinguished Hungarian-American philosopher and historian (and a regular Commonweal contributor).” The topic was “the impasse de la gauche, the “dead end of the left,” at the end of the 1960s.” For Molnar, “the left... Read more
In a scathing TLS piece, John Gray describes the “un-liberty” of “hyperliberalism,” today most clearly evident on university campuses. Under the older liberal regime, “Academic disciplines cherished their orthodoxies, and dissenters could face difficulties in being heard. But visiting lecturers were rarely disinvited because their views were deemed unspeakable, course readings were not routinely screened in case they contained material that students might find discomforting, and faculty members who departed from the prevailing consensus did not face attempts to silence... Read more
JN Figgis isn’t a household name these days, but he was an important Christian political thinker of the early twentieth century. Raised in a Calvinist home, he abandoned his childhood faith for some years, before returning to Christianity while at Cambridge. But his real “conversion,” according to David Nicholls (The Pluralist State) came later, during his time as a rector at Marnhull: “Gone was the optimistic humanism of his Cambridge days; he became, at once, more evangelical and more catholic... Read more
Johannes Zachhuber argues, against Richard Cross, that Gregory of Nyssa holds to a “collection theory” of universals. That is, universals are collections of individuals, but genuine wholes, not merely a summation of individuals. For Gregory, this is not nominalism; universals are real. And the universal is indivisibly immanent in each individual. Whatever the merits of this take on Gregory’s theory of universals in general, it has some interesting results when applied to the creation of man. In Zachhuber’s summary, Gregory... Read more
In a 2016 article, Rogers Brubaker describes a trend in European politics. Having defined the enemy of European civilization as “Islam,” rightists in Europe have come to define themselves in religio-civilizational terms as well. They are posing as defenders of “Christianity.” Problem is, many of their beliefs are distinctly at odds with Christian orthodoxy and Christian tradition. Arguing that secularism and liberalism have Christian roots, they defend contemporary European order as a defense of Chrisitanity: “In Northern and Western Europe... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In