Everyone wonders – children, “savages,” men and women at one another. Philosophers wonder too, Rosenzweig says (Understanding the Sick and the Healthy), but they respond to wonder differently from the rest of us. The rest of us are “adrift on the river Life, borne on, wonderment and all.” We drift and go on living, and “at last, the numbness caused by his wonder passes” (40). The philosopher i.e. one who cannot wait, who is “unwilling to accept the process of... Read more
Sociologists, Rosenstock-Huessy charges, often formulate their theories in this fashion: “an obscure Force A and a Relation B . . . affect Mr Y.” Sociologists “pretend that their science address a nameless world” (In the Cross of Reality, 4). No such nameless world exists: “X and Y are unknown to reality, and so are ‘if A, the B’ scenarios.” If sociologists are going to deal with reality itself, they need to take a different approach: “First of all, a state... Read more
Matthew Levering devotes a dense chapter of his Engaging the Doctrine of Creation to a defense of divine simplicity. As one would expect from a leading Catholic thinker, Levering relies on Thomas. God, Levering argues, must be pure act in order to be something other than “a being among beings”: “God can be the source and cause of all finite being, the creator, only if God ontologically transcends all finite being. If divine being were finite, God could not [in... Read more
The following excerpt is taken from the first volume of my Matthew commentary, recently published by Athanasius Press. Jesus announces the new law from the mountain; He is Moses on a new Sinai. But in this passage, Jesus assumes another role for a few moments – the role of Solomon the sage. The end of Matthew 6, more than any other, resembles the wisdom literature, especially the book of Proverbs. Like Solomon, He points us to the natural world to... Read more
An old piece, first published in Touchstone magazine. Contemporary horror films have nothing on Dante. His Inferno is full of terrors that even the most jaded film-maker would shrink from putting on screen: Nightmarish landscapes flowing with streams of boiling blood, deserts of burning sand showered by fire from Heaven, pits and rivers of black pitch, excrement, and muck, a lake eternally frozen that holds Satan, eternally munching on his victims. Noxious smells and putrid fogs fill the air, and as Dante... Read more
In Liberalism and Empire, Uday Singh Mehta calls attention to the neglected link between British liberalism and the British empire. He writes, “We rightly think of liberalism as committed to securing individual liberty and human dignity through a political cast that typically involves democratic and representative institutions, the guaranty of individual rights of property; and freedom of expression, association, and conscience, all of which are taken to limit the legitimate use of the authority of the state. Moreover, at least... Read more
Henry de Candole was one of the leaders of the early liturgical movement in the Church of England. In his 1935 The Sacraments and the Church, he explores “the corporate nature of Christianity” and places sacramental theology firmly within ecclesiology. He hits many, many of the right notes. He begins by asking whether the church is a “self-chosen” or a “natural” society. While acknowledging the element of choice, he insists (surprisingly to some, no doubt) that the church is a... Read more
The following are my opening remarks at the fifth annual Nevin Lectures, February 16-17, 2018. Sixty years ago, British Pentecostal leader Donald Henry Frere Gee wrote that the Pentecostal Movement passed Jesus’ test: “By their fruit you shall know them.” While Pentecostalism “makes no claim to perfection,” he wrote, its “great and solid achievements in missionary work; its fervent contribution to the cause of true Revival; and most of all its utter loyalty to the Lord Jesus Christ in... Read more
Between July and October 1936, WH Auden wrote a long, amusing poetic letter to the long-dead Lord Byron. Among other things, Auden catches the poet up on literary trends in the time since his demise, and among these is the triumph of the novel. And in this context he includes some famous observations on Jane Austen: I must remember, though, that you were dead Before the four great Russians lived, who brought The art of novel writing to a head;... Read more
Amos Yong (Renewing Christian Theology) insists that the charismatic gifts exist not to puff up the charismatic Christian but to edify the church and evangelize the world: “The spiritual gifts are bestowed by God upon and exercised by the body of Christ and its members for the common good of both the church and the world. The charismatic manifestations of the Spirit are never for the self-aggrandizement of those so equipped but are rather intended to accomplish God’s mission of... Read more
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