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One of the more familiar tropes of Roman Catholic historiography is the claim that the Reformation marked an immediate sea change in Christians’ understanding of salvation. On this account, a realist metaphysics of participation and transformation abruptly gave way to a nominalist, purely “forensic” account of the Christian life, in which God chooses arbitrarily to […]
Friday, 05 November, 2021 by John Ehrett
It’s impossible to read the works of most prominent Christian theologians from the latter half of the twentieth century without noticing a common theme: the ubiquity of distinctly ecumenical considerations. That is to say, such texts are animated by a strong sense of the possibility that longstanding distinctions between Christian communions might be overcome at […]
Friday, 08 October, 2021 by John Ehrett
As a proud son of the Reformation, I’m probably not the best person to comment on topics as arcane as intra-Catholic liturgical disputes. And yet I can’t help thinking that Pope Francis’s recent decision to restrict the celebration of the Traditional Latin Mass has to be one of the more befuddling decisions of his papacy. […]
Friday, 10 September, 2021 by John Ehrett
Lutheran theologian Jordan Cooper observed on Twitter a month or so ago that “[t]he ‘just have more kids’ approach to church growth would be more compelling if it was evident that the kids in our congregations actually remained in the church past confirmation.” It was a remark that particularly struck home with me, because after […]
Monday, 02 August, 2021 by John Ehrett
Not long ago, I finished reading (with a sleeping baby on my lap) Catherine Pickstock’s excellent new book Aspects of Truth: A New Religious Metaphysics. It is undoubtedly one of the most difficult—and yet profoundly stimulating—volumes I’ve read this year. I actually set it aside for a month or so between starting and finishing, wondering […]
Friday, 02 July, 2021 by John Ehrett
If you’ve ever found yourself straying into the distinctive online realm that is Weird Christian Twitter, sooner or later you’ll come to the conclusion that “Very Online” Lutherans are a pretty scarce bunch. It’s not hard to come across Catholics arguing over the possibility of distributism and the merits of Francisco Franco, “1689er” Reformed Baptists […]
Friday, 04 June, 2021 by John Ehrett
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 […]
Wednesday, 05 May, 2021 by John Ehrett
As a general rule, I try not to make a practice of writing about “wokeness” or “political correctness” controversies—the genre is burned-over ground, and much of the time these clashes are simply reducible to sheer polarization between the American left and right. Every so often, though, something distinctly theologically significant is at stake. While reading […]
Monday, 05 April, 2021 by John Ehrett
Over the last fifty years or so, the question of art and its relationship to mass culture has taken on increasing importance in Protestant circles. Historically, the best-known treatments of the subject have tended to focus on contrasting the glories of the classical tradition with the desiccated state of modern creativity. Most famously, Francis Schaeffer—with […]
Friday, 05 March, 2021 by John Ehrett
Early last year, just before the COVID-19 pandemic shut down cities and countries across the globe, I read Joseph Bottum’s book The Decline of the Novel, which contrasts the “chanson fiction” of the medieval Catholic imagination—which stressed the integrity of social roles, the accomplishment of duties, and the performance of civic scripts—with the “roman fiction” […]
Friday, 05 February, 2021 by John Ehrett
Predictably, the recent confirmation of Supreme Court justice Amy Coney Barrett triggered a fresh round of divisive political messaging, as Democrats and Republicans alike sought to capitalize on the moment. But the perception of politics as a clash between two unified ideological fronts masks an important, if hidden, reality: throughout the broadly right-of-center legal world, […]
Wednesday, 02 December, 2020 by John Ehrett
As a general rule, the mainstream academic guilds are not kind to American evangelicalism—regularly charging evangelicals with defending an ahistorical “Christian Nationalism,” promoting anti-intellectualism, obstructing social progress, neutering Americans’ incipient class consciousness, and so on. And so you’d be forgiven for expecting that High on God: How Megachurches Won the Heart of America—a recent sociological […]
Friday, 06 November, 2020 by John Ehrett
