It was my turn to preach in chapel. I was given John 11:1-44 at the beginning of the semester, and since, in God’s providence, it was just two days after my father finally died after a long year of tremendous suffering, we held a memorial service in conjunction with chapel that day. I had long […]
Judging by much of the art and literature, sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Europe was fairly morbid. Amid all the optimism of the Golden Age, an entire genre grew up called memento morte, which involved meditation on suffering and death. This is not surprising given the fact that about half of Europe’s population in some parts had succumbed […]
"Suffering is the badge of all our tribe" are the words of Shylock, the Jew, in Shakespeare's play The Merchant of Venice. Although he spoke insincerely, what he said was not devoid of truth. But now that Jesus, the Messiah, has come all who believe in him are the people of God in a world […]
In a famous review of Richard Wright’s Black Boy in 1945, Ralph Ellison eloquently describes the blues as a form: The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of […]
In the spirit of our occasional "Free Space" interview section, the editors offer this piece by U2's Bono on the Psalms, the blues, and the comfort of grace. We make no claims to Bono's orthodoxy, but we find his own words strangely familiar to many of the other sentiments presented in this issue. This piece […]
For a long time, we've known that the reformers had a high view of preaching, grounded in the conviction that God creates and redeems by speaking words. We are saved by hearing, not by seeing (Rom. 10:17). We've also been learning from both secular and Christian sources that our modern culture has been systematically bent […]
I initially approached this collection of essays on "classic Puritan works" with the dread of pending disappointment, fearful that no such collection could do justice to breadth and scope of the movement. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by The Devoted Life. The essays gathered here introduce "some of the very best literature" from the Puritan […]
The Rebirth of Orthodoxy is a personalized and popularized distillation of Thomas Oden's core theses and scholarly insights in a realm in which he has but few equals. In short, the book is an introduction to the study of what Oden calls "paleo-othodoxy," i.e. the 'orthodoxy' that "holds steadfast to classic consensual teaching, in order […]
