In his fourteenth-century Summa praedicantium, Johannes de Bromyard offers this lovely description of a creation returning thanks: “For if the flowers continuously taking in the rays of the sun ceaselessly render back bright colors and scent, it follows by a stronger reason that we who day and night constantly receive benefits from God, both of consolation and tribulation . . . .ought to give thanks back to God . . . . .Yet many who receive youth, beauty, health and... Read more
I offer some thoughts on the church’s response to the current debates and crises in American health care at http://www.firstthings.com/ Read more
John Paul II ( Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body , 181-5) argues from Genesis that “‘alone,’ the man does not completely realize [his] essence.” Without the woman, Adam does not possess the “basic conditions that make it possible to exist in a relation of reciprocal gift.” Genesis makes it clear “how fundamental and constitutive the relationship and communion of persons is for man. Communion of persons means living in a reciprocal ‘for,’ in a... Read more
Caleb Dalechamp wrote in his delightfully titled 1632 book, Christian Hospitalitie Handled Common-Place-Wise that “Hospitalitie falsely so called is the keeping of a good table, at which seldome or never any other are entertained then kynsfolk, friends and able neighbours . . . . This is no hospitalitie, though it be commonly graced with that title, but it is good fellowship or some such like thing.” Felicity Heal, who quotes this passage in a 1984 article in Past & Present... Read more
In the aforementioned article on giving in the early church, Neil makes this intriguing comment about the Old Testament and Jewish understanding of “the poor”: “Justice for the poor is a strong theme in rabbinic texts. Injunctions to act justly towards the poor are evident in the earliest books of Jewish law. They illustrate what [Hendrick] Bolkestein called the ‘Near Eastern model’ of social relations, whereby the weak who described themselves as ‘poor’ could call upon the mercy and protection... Read more
In a 2010 essay on “Models of Gift Giving in the Preaching of Leo the Great” in the Journal of Early Christian Studies, Bronwen Neil answers the title question with a depressing, Not much. While the early church took over the Jewish and New Testament rhetoric on behalf of the poor, in practice the church’s relief was stymied by a Roman political system that gave favors to citizens and exploited the weak and got ensnared in a patronage system that... Read more
At the beginning of her discussion of Christian architecture in the Renaissance and Reformation, Jeanne Kilde ( Sacred Power, Sacred Space: An Introduction to Christian Architecture and Worship ) writes: “In the Renaissance period, the medieval notion of the church as the City of Heaven yielded to new ideas about church architecture and space—ideas engendered by the very humanism the medieval church had introduced. The most radical reorganization of space occurred in the liturgical areas and the spatial relationships between... Read more
John Paul II’s meditations on creation as gift in Man and Woman He Created Them: A Theology Of The Body (180-1) are deeply stimulating. He begins from the observation that the gift of creation is a “radical” gift, that is, a gift that constitutes the recipient in the giving, “an act of giving in which the gift comes into being precisely from nothing.” Created existence is gifted in the most fundamental sense: It was not there to receive before God... Read more
In Piers the Plowman (9), William Langland recounts the story of the sons of God and the daughters of men. Though he extrapolates from the text, he gets the story right (I am quoting from the Penguin Classics edition, Piers the Ploughman (Penguin Classics) ): “All Cain’s progeny came to an evil end. For God sent an angel to Seth [the Middle English reads, noght thi kynde with Caymes ycoupled ne yspoused], saying, ‘I command that your issue be wedded... Read more
Hyde ( The Gift: Imagination and the Erotic Life of Property , 50-51) distinguishes between “work” and “labor.” The first is what we do by the hour. Labor has its own pace, and there is no timetable or tool to make it work more efficiency: “Writing a poem, developing a new calculus, resolving a neurosis, invention in all forms – these are labors.” Labor is something suffered, a passion: “Things get done, but we often have the odd sense that... Read more
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