According to Romans 6:7, justification is God’s liberating judgment that delivers the baptized from sin, death, and from the reign of injustice. By baptism, one is transferred from the realm of Adam to that of the Last Adam. As the latter half of Romans 6 teaches, the life of the justified is a life of justice. Having died in baptismal union with the death of Jesus, we are freed to offer the members of our bodies in a liturgy of justice,... Read more
When the Reformation and humanism are discussed together, the question is typically how the latter helped produce the former. Erika Rummel (The Confessionalization of Humanism in Reformation Germany) turns the question around: How did the Reformation change humanism? One effect was in education: Protestant school orders, drawn up in the late 1520s and early 1530s, adopted humanistic ideals in placing emphasis on language training and in portraying education as a civic duty rather than a luxury. Yet in no other area was... Read more
Jimena Canales has written a history of A Tenth of a Second. It seems an arbitrary cut-off. Why not 1/100 or 1/1000? After all, we’ve been able to measure in finer units than 1/10 of a second: “In 1878 Eadweard Muybridge famously photographed running horses galloping in a manner never seen before, seizing them in a 1/500th of a second by using multiple cameras. In 1882, single-lens photographs made by the French physiologist Étienne Jules Marey surpassed this limit. By 1918, Lucien Bull, the last assistant... Read more
“During the first eighty-eight years of [the 20th] century,” writes R. J. Rummel (Death by Government) “almost 170 million men, women, and children have been shot, beaten, tortured, knifed, burned, starved, frozen, crushed, or worked to death; buried alive, drowned, hung, bombed, or killed in any other of the myriad ways governments have inflicted death on unarmed, helpless citizens and foreigners. The dead could conceivably be nearly 360 million people. It is as though our species has been devastated by... Read more
Michael Oakeshott (Hobbes on Civil Association, 38-39) states Hobbes’s solution to the dilemma of human violence in evangelical terms. Human existence is plagued by the fear of death, and for Hobbes the only salvation lies in greater fear. The saviour is not a visitor from another world, nor is it some godlike power of Reason come to create order out of chaos; there is no break either in the situation or in the argument. The remedy of the disease is homeopathic. The precondition... Read more
“Originally and properly,” writes John McManners (Death and the Enlightenment), the term “dechristianization” refers “to the anti-religious manifestations of the French Revolution,” which were “neither homogenous in character nor unambiguous in meaning.” Dechristianization refers in part to administrative, institutional changes: “The transfer to the secular authorities of the registration of births, marriages, and deaths, and the institution of divorce marked an overthrow of the concept of a ‘Christian civilization,’ of the hope that the Republic would be as ‘Christian’ as... Read more
In Destroyer of the Gods, Larry Hurtado reminds us that “in the Roman era the sexual use of children, including young adolescents and also younger children, was widely tolerated and even celebrated lyrically by some pagan writers of the day, such as Juvenal, Petronius, Horace, Strato, Lucian, and Philostratus.” Greek had a “whole vocabulary” that carried “no connotation of disapproval” (167). He cites the work of John Martens who “has shown that early Christian condemnation of the practice even led to... Read more
Maurice Glasman (Unnecessary Suffering, 35–36) observe that the phrase “Christian Democracy” first appeared during the 1848 Paris uprising. From Lamennais, the Christian Democrats argued for democracy as a product of Christian teaching. Democracy provided a framework for negotiating competing interests in society and for the protection of civil rights. The outlook was a reconciliation of Republicanism with Catholic social teaching. Catholics argued that “the Revolution of 1789 . . . had a moral quality as an institutional fulfillment of freedom and equality,... Read more
Jehovah’s Witnesses refuse to salute the American flag. In the case of Minersville School District v. Gibitis (1940), the Supreme Court rejected the Witness argument that being forced to salute the flag was comparable to the Nazi demand that Germans acknowledge Hitler. Felix Frankfurther dismissed the analogy: “It mocks reason and denies our whole history to find in the allowance of a requirement to salute our flag on fitting occasions the seeds of sanction for obeisance to a leader” (quoted... Read more
The closer we look at “modernity,” argue Jean and John Comaroff in Modernity and Its Malcontents, the more “rapidly [it] melts into air” (xii, riffing on Marx). This is partly because there are always, and have always been, “many modernities” (xi). Modernity “becomes especially vague when dislodged from the ideal-typical, neo-evolutionary theoretical framework that classically encased it, defining it less in reference to the ‘real’ world than by contrast to that other chimera, ‘tradition.’” Binary contrasts of this sort, they argue, are... Read more
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