President Obama wants European countries to do a better job of assimilating Muslims. Easy for an American President to say. Much harder for European nations to accomplish. George Friedman argues at Stratfor that “The current crisis has its origins in the collapse of European hegemony over North Africa after World War II and the Europeans’ need for cheap labor. As a result of the way in which they ended their imperial relations, they were bound to allow the migration of Muslims... Read more
John Milbank has written that John Duns Scotus is “the turning point in the destiny of the West.” Milbank focuses on Scotus’s notion of the “univocity of being,” which, according to Milbank, treated God and creation as encompassed by the larger, common reality of “being.” On the Scotist view, God’s being was different from created being only in degree. God and man are as a result contestants in the same space, competitors in a relation of power. Scotism was the... Read more
The TLS review of the two-volume collection of The Poetry of Robert Herrick (edited by Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly) gives a brief review of Herrick’s reputation in the modern world. That reputation has been determined by attitudes to what the reviewer calls Herrick’s “gargantuan” appetite for the miniature. As with many poets, that reputation was determined by TS Eliot, who was not taken with Herrick’s delight in tiny things, and found that his fragmentary poetry lacked a grand scheme and... Read more
Robin Parry’s The Biblical Cosmos is packed with good things. His opening discussion of the “living cosmos” of the Bible is wonderful – emphasizing the fact that God speaks to and commands animals, plants, stars, mountains, and the sea, and that these “inanimate” objects speak about God, and are even called to worship him (2-3). He concludes that though ancient Israelites didn’t believe that the “speech” of the cosmos was literal, they did see “something analogous to life, to consciousness, to... Read more
Mike Allen and Scott Swain summarize John Owen’s account of the “spiritual habit of grace” (Reformed Catholicity, 39-40): “According to Owen, in regenerating fallen human beings, the Holy Spirit plants a new spiritual habit within them, replacing the old sinful habit inherited from Adam and purged by the blood of Christ. This new spiritual habit exists preeminently and in the fullest measure in Jesus Christ, the head of the new humanity, and flows to the church from Jesus Christ, who... Read more
Everyone is talking about blasphemy since the murders last week in Paris. Many on every side of the political spectrum are saying that, much as they abhor blasphemy, everyone should have the right to blaspheme. The right to blaspheme is the cornerstone of liberty. This is the liberal response, and the fact that it has come from every side of the political spectrum shows, once again, that everyone (virtually everyone) is a liberal now. Left and right are locked in... Read more
Dallas Denery’s The Devil Wins is a “history of lying from the garden of Eden to the Enlightenment.” Denery’s leading question is, Is is ever acceptable to life? and he looks at answers to this question from several angles. The book explores theologians’ treatments of the deceptions of the devil, God’s deceptiveness, and the legitimacy of human deception. In the final two chapters, Denery examines lying among non-theologians, courtiers and women in particular. Denery isn’t convinced by the simple popular myth... Read more
Someone needs to write a monograph, at least an article, about justification in Job. Perhaps someone already has. Job would shed some important light on the subject. The term “justify” is used a number of times in the book. Elihu joins the fray because he’s angry that Job “justified himself before God” (32:2). Elihu hears ll of Job’s self-defense is a self-justification, and not only a self-justification before the three friends but in Yahweh’s court. Elihu somehow intends his speech... Read more
Many modern theologians have argued that sacrifice is no longer a meaningful category with which to discuss the atonement. Frances Young (Sacrifice and the Death of Christ) begs to differ, and lays out a fine summary of the advantages of sacrificial accounts: “For the early church, sacrifice was an image which could focus with peculiar intensity the full significance of the life and death of Christ for the salvation of the world” (90). Sacrifice was able to encompass the notion... Read more
Robert Louis Wilken, noted church historian and Chairman of the Board of the Institute on Religion and Public Life, will deliver the second annual Nevin Lectures on February 20-21, at the Hodges Chapel of the Beeson Divinity School, Birmingham, Alabama. Wilken will give three lectures on “The Catholic Roots of Religious Freedom.” The lectures are free. You may register here. Read more
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