Speech arises, Rosenstock-Huessy claims, from shock. The beauty of the world, the “it” outside us, shocks us with amazement, and loosens our tongues. A command from another confronts us and forces us to say Yes or No in response. Suffering evokes the cry of the “I.” If we confront beauty, command, and suffering together, all forms of speech are suspended, and we are left with the grammar of prayer. For Rosenstock-Huessy, speech is central because life is central, because experience... Read more
2 Chronicles 10 is a fall story. The Chronicler’s long account of the reigns of David and Solomon (1 Chronicles 11-2 Chronicles 9) has portrayed an ideal. David and Solomon form a joint new-Adam, overseeing the Levites who stand to serve in the garden-temple, guarding Yahweh’s bride, Israel. William Johnstone describes it this way: “The status of the king of the house of David has been expounded in sacramental terms. He sits on no merely human throne, but on the... Read more
Protestants have always emphasized that salvation comes through faith, yet most Protestants have baptized babies. How can these two things hold together? Read more
Last week, I summarized Thomas Aquinas’s argument to the effect that human beings do not create. As Thomas would have expected, there’s another side to the story – a sed contra – neatly outlined by Robert Miner in his Truth in the Making. Miner agrees that Thomas denies the existence of human “creativity,” but points to lines of argument that strengthen the analogy between human making and divine creation. Thomas sometimes uses craft analogies to describe creation: “the scientia Dei is to... Read more
Writing at The American Conservative, Bonnie Kristian explains why the “few bad apples” defense of American policing doesn’t work. She offers seven lines of evidence to show that police brutality is systematic rather than occasional. For instance: “Only one out of every three accused cops are convicted nationwide, while the conviction rate for civilians is literally double that. In Chicago, the numbers are even more skewed: There were 10,000 abuse complaints filed against the Chicago PD between 2002 and 2004, and... Read more
Stuart Schwartz knows that his All Can Be Saved “goes against the grain in many ways. First of all, it is an examination of attitudes of tolerance among common folk, not philosophers or theologians. Second, it deals with both the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking worlds, which are normally treated apart” (8). He’s writing a history of mentalities, of attitudes of “tolerance” rather than policies or philosophies of “toleration.” His research reveals that, contrary to caricature, Spain was full of people who... Read more
Fintan O’Toole highlights the “border issue” that may undo Brexit. He’s referring to “the question of whether a hard customs and immigration border is to be imposed between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic.” It’s not merely a technical question of “borders and customs, of tariffs and passports.” It’s fiendishly difficulty because it’s fundamentally “a problem of national identity—how it is to be conceived and expressed, how it is to be given political and institutional form. . . . Ireland... Read more
David Lachterman (Ethics of Geometry) suggests that the specific novelty of the modern age is that it doesn’t regard itself as a period of history. It’s instead “consummate,” in two senses: “as the ‘final’ period which brings to a permanent close all prior epochs by exposing their imperfections and as the one period without a temporal finale. Its immanent end or telos is endlessness. Hence, the image of growth from historical infancy to historical adulthood, often figuring in early modern... Read more
In the course of a review of Vittorio Montemaggi’s Reading Dante’s Commedia as Theology, Rowan Williams offers these observations on Inferno and Purgatorio: “There is still a tendency among not very attentive readers – not to mention people who have read almost nothing of the work but have picked up the odd juicy morsel – to think of the Inferno as the really ‘interesting’ section of the poem, the part where recognizable human emotion is most dramatically depicted and evoked:... Read more
“God’s work in history,” writes Mark Searle (Liturgy Made Simple), “is to gather into one the scattered children of God, to overcome divisions, to provide a place for the homeless and the lonely, to give support to those whose burdens are heavy, and to create an oasis of community in the midst of a world painfully divided into the haves and have-nots” (21). There’s a lot to do, so why spend so much time in worship? Searle answers that the... Read more
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