Senator Albert Beveridge described our mission in 1898: “God has . . . made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among svage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of... Read more
Senator Albert Beveridge described our mission in 1898: “God has . . . made us the master organizers of the world to establish system where chaos reigns. He has given us the spirit of progress to overwhelm the forces of reaction throughout the earth. He has made us adept in government that we may administer government among svage and senile peoples. Were it not for such a force as this the world would relapse into barbarism and night. And of... Read more
In his recent Republic of Grace , Charles Mathewes describes the widely known but still startling demographic crisis of Europe: “By midcentury, including immigration, Europe’s population is projected to be 13 percent smaller, with the working age population declining by 27 percent, and the median age increasing by a third, reaching fifty years . . . . compared to the rest of the world, European shriveling is even more prominent. By 1950, the population of Europe accounted for about 22... Read more
Elizabeth Shakman Hurd ( The Politics of Secularism in International Relations ) notes the role that Islam plays in Western views of its own secular order: “More than any other single religious or political tradition, Islam represents the ‘nonsecular’ in European and American political discourse. This is because secularist traditions, and the European and American national identities and practices with which they are affiliated and in which they are embedded, have been constructed through opposition to Islam . . .... Read more
James Jordan offers this argument to conclude that only firstborn between the ages of one month and five years died at Passover: 1. The redemption payment for the excess number of firstborn, when the Levites replaced them, was five shekels apiece (Numbers 3:46-48. 2. In the redemption schedule in Leviticus 27, five shekels is the redemption price for a male “from a month even up to five years old” (Leviticus 27:6). 3. He also makes the commonsensical statistical argument that... Read more
Thomas (ST II-II, 2, 1) offers this neat spectrum of varieties of “acts of intellect” that have “unformed thought devoid of a firm assent”: Thos that “incline to neither side” are doubts; those that “incline to one side rather than the other, but on account of some slight motive” are “suspicions”; those that “incline to one side yet with fear of the other” are “oipinions.” Belief differs from each of these. It “cleaves firmly to one side, in which respect... Read more
Deuteronomy 10:18: The Lord executes justice for the orphan and widow, and shows His love for the alien by giving him food and clothing. As Pastor Sumpter said in his sermon, the city of God is a city of love, and it’s no accident that the central ritual act in this city is a common meal. For Scripture, the shared meal is the paradigm of generous, self-giving love. You can give alms to a beggar; you can write a check... Read more
During the fourth century, the church had in an intense debate about the nature of the Son who became flesh. Does the Father choose to create a Son, as Arius believed? Or is having a Son essential to the Father’s very existence as God? These debates seem tedious and irrelevant. Can anyone really know? Does it really matter? It mattered to the church fathers. They believed the entire Christian faith hinged on getting this right. Unless they got this right,... Read more
Anatolios sums up a wonderful exposition of Nyssa’s epistemology with this: “The distinctive character of Gregory’s epistemology . . . lies not so much in delimiting the extent of information that can be gleaned by the mind (he insists there is no limit) as in locating the act of knowledge radically within the movement of receptivity and wonder . . . . Authentic and understanding contact with reality accepts its own irreducible stance of receptivity with regard to the always... Read more
Anatolios is careful not to claim that Nyssa is “fashionably postmodern,” but by characterizing Eunomius’s viewpoint as “logocentric” he acknowledges some “irresistible, if fragmentary parallels” between Nyssa and postmodern sensibilities about the signifying of signs. For Eunomius, the signifier “Unbegotten” “really makes present the divine essence.” Gregory responds by denying that we can gain “such a simple, commanding grasp of an essence,” whether we are seeking to know God or other people or ourselves: “the act of knowing is not... Read more
Leithart
Ad-Free & Subscriber Log-In