Over the last several years, I’ve developed a morbid sort of fascination with the phenomenon of humanities academics calling for the demise of their own disciplines. For one thing, it’s a curious inversion of Upton Sinclair’s aphorism that “it is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not […]
Admirers of Simonetta Carr’s Christian Biographies for Young Readers series will be delighted to know that Carr has written an equally engaging, edifying book for readers not so young. In Questions Women Asked, Carr profiles 31 Christian women “who have either posed or examined a variety of puzzling questions, striving to find biblical answers.” While […]
Most Christians who enjoy a healthy life of the mind have some acquaintance with doubt. It is not always very pronounced, and perhaps some get over it entirely. But for the majority of us mortals, occasional bouts of doubt (sometimes substantial) remain a stubborn feature of religious life. Occasionally, there is an attempt to dignify […]
The Pastoral Heart of Reading While Black The title for Esau McCaulley’s book, Reading While Black, is a play on Driving While Black, a sardonic description of racial profiling on America’s roads. Recent research confirms African American anecdotes. By his reckoning, McCaulley has been “stopped somewhere between seven and ten times on the road or […]
In the earlier days of our nation’s history, this dilemma, though always present in theory, was not especially troublesome in practice, since the vast majority of people–the “men on the street”–at least gave lip service to the biblical faith. But now religious and philosophical diversity has reached such a point in the United States that […]
Like the ancient Gnostics faced by the early church, society today has adopted an escapist, anti-materialistic, anti-intellectual, anti-institutional, anti-sacramental spirituality. This is as true for non-Christians, with New York business executives attending New Age seminars taught by Stanford instructors. Both the past and the future are perceived as irrelevant intrusions into the present moment of […]
God’s revealed truth can be attacked outright by those who deny cardinal biblical doctrines on the basis of supposedly new revelations or through spurious skeptical arguments against the supernatural. The most insidious challenges to Christian orthodoxy, however, often insinuate themselves into the fabric of culture so that their presence subtly undermines crucial Christian perspectives on […]
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Alexander Solzhenitsyn began his 1970 Nobel lecture with a striking image, saying that we moderns hold art as a “puzzled savage” holds some newfound but obscure object, not knowing whence it came or able to dream of its higher function. We misuse it for wealth, for pleasure, for power. We use it “for all the […]
TRANSLATED BY JOHN BIRCHENSHA Johann Heinrich Alsted (1588–1638) was a professor of philosophy and theology at Herborn and, late in his life, at the University of Weissenburg. He was also a deputy to the Synod of Dort. More a compiler and codifier, his writings range very widely, including a philosophical encyclopedia and large theological treatises, […]
Diagnosis Modern ethics—in the broad sense of “ethics since Kant,” in the narrow sense of “the notion of ethics that people now living have absorbed,” and in whatever other meaning of the term you might care to adopt—is not doing so well. A diverse chorus of witnesses (including G. K. Chesterton, Franz Kafka, Dorothy Sayers, […]
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