In the course of explaining to Boso why God must have created man in a state of righteousness, Anselm ( Cur deus homo ) analyzes rational nature. Rationality is a power of discrimination ( potestatem discernendi ), and particularly a power of moral discrimination: It distinguishes right and wrong ( iustum et iniustum ), good and evil ( bonum et malum ) and also between the greater and lesser good ( maius . . . minus ). Reason is the... Read more
Timothy Larsen reviews Susan Jacoby’s The Great Agnostic: Robert Ingersoll and American Freethought , and finds it to be an “endearing” sample of a disappearing genre of historical writing: hagiography. Larsen observes, “Christian historical writing has now matured to the point where it has dispensed with hagiography. Christian scholars are convinced that we have as much to learn from the weaknesses and blind spots of our saints as we do from their strengths and achievements. The fledgling American atheist community,... Read more
During a graduate seminar yesterday, one of the students highlighted the language of confinement and imprisonment in Galatians 3:23-24. Before faith appeared (presumably a reference to Jesus, Pistos , Revelation 19:11), “we were kept in custody under the law, being shut up to the faith later to be revealed.” “Kept in custody” translates phroureo , used literally in 2 Corinthians 11:32 to refer to King Aretas’s watch over Damascus. “Shut up” translates sugkleio , “to enclose,” used of nets enclosing... Read more
The Trinity House web site is live. Today, Pastor Rich Lusk gives a primer on Ash Wednesday and explains how Lent edifies the church. Read more
Ron Rosenbaum thinks Jane Austen is overhyped . Not, he insists, overrated. But lost in what he calls “the tsunami of schlocky, rapturous, over-the-top, wall-to-wall multiplatform of celebration of the 200th anniversary of Pride and Prejudice . He’s got plenty of evidence to back it up: Erotic Austen, Tweeting Elizabeth Bennet, TV Austen, and “Austenland,” a film about an Austen lover who falls in love at a theme park. What he finds most dispiriting is William Deresiewicz’s A Jane Austen... Read more
Sarah Beckwith ( Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness ), further exploring the disruption of language in the aftermath of the Reformation, notes that two paths forward opened up. The first was magic, which the Reformers detected in the hocus pocus of the mass. This evaded the problem by bypassing human action and intention. Say the words and bread becomes body. Protestant theology, though, “had its own way of bypassing human expression: this emerged in the disdain and suspicion of... Read more
Shakespeare’s plays are are a response to the crisis of authority and sacramental efficacy induced by the English Reformation, argues Sarah Beckwith in Shakespeare and the Grammar of Forgiveness . She writes of “an unprecedented, astonishing revolution in the forms and conventions of speaking, hence of modes of human relating. Confessing, forgiving, absolving, initiating, swearing, blessing, baptizing, ordaining – these were a mere few of the speech acts so transformed in the English Reformation” (4-5). After the Reformation, it was... Read more
Rupert Shortt offers some thoughts on the Pope’s resignation : “Even John Paul II, renowned for the doggedness with which he pursued his ministry in the face of chronic ill health, is said to have entrusted his private secretary with a resignation letter to be published if he reached a certain level of incapacity.” John Paul toughed it out, but Shortt suggests that “the effect on the Church was very mixed. The barque of Peter was steered this way and... Read more
Last year I tweeted through Lent, and compiled my thoughts here . Read more
Those who doubt that Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare,” writes Garry Wills in Verdi’s Shakespeare: Men of the Theater , “are working, usually from a false and modern premise.” They think of Shakespeare as something like a modern playwright who writes a play, shops it around, and finds a producer to put on the play. In Elizabethan England, by contrast, “the process began with the actors. They chose the playwright, not vice versa. They owned the play, to publish or withhold it... Read more
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