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American Religion

Protestantism's Lost Soul

D. G. Hart’s The Lost Soul of American Protestantism vividly clarifies the differences between evangelical and Confessional Protestantism. In part the book is a manifesto for historians of American religion. Hart argues that historians of American Protestantism have operated with a simplistic binary contrast of evangelical/conservative v. liberal/progressive. At best,…

by Peter LeithartAugust 18, 2015
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Books

The Idiot and the Limits of Compassion

Dostoyevsky’s novel, The Idiot , like his other major works, is a complex evaluation of the human condition—a juxtaposition of the innate goodness and innate evil that resides within every human heart. There is much one can say about The Idiot . I am no specialist of Russian literature, or…

by Gerald HiestandAugust 13, 2015
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Homosexuality

If There is “Natural Law” How Can People Believe in Same-Sex Marriage?

At risk of violating some secret handshake agreement on some important nuance to “natural law,” I will sum up what I understand in my own words. As far as I can tell natural law is supposed to be an area of knowledge that all people should be able to agree…

by Mark HorneAugust 11, 2015
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Biblical Studies

Cosmic Language, 2

The first installment of this article may be found here . The Image of Man This brings us to a substitutionary atonement which we do understand, the fulfilment of the cruciform Tabernacle in the cross of Christ. Although Jesus’ execution was Physical and Social, it was primarily Personal . Beginning…

by Mike BullAugust 6, 2015
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Genesis

Every Noise Appalls

The first two essays in this series drew attention to the structure of the first part of Macbeth and to the way Shakespeare incorporates the Garden of Eden into his story. Macbeth , we saw, is a temptation story in which, compared to the Biblical story, the temptation itself is…

by Ralph Allan SmithAugust 4, 2015
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Revelation

The Warrior and the City: A Wedding Homily

Revelation 19:6-9 Then I heard something like the voice of a great multitude and like the sound of many waters and like the sound of mighty peals of thunder, saying, “Hallelujah! For theLord our God, the Almighty, reigns. Let us rejoice and be glad and give the glory to Him,…

by Peter LeithartAugust 3, 2015

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Cities Ascending and Descending

The Bible ends with a vision of the descent of a jeweled bridal city Jerusalem descending from heaven. Before the city descends, though. a city ascends: Babylon is destroyed and her smoke rises forever and ever. God's city descends only after the city of man is sent up to God…

August 14, 2015

Anti-Labor, Anti-Catholic

David Sehat argues ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom ) that the American moral establishment was undermined by the labor movement: “By the last quarter of the nineteenth century the corporation had joined the family, the church, and the school as an institution perpetuating Christian moral authority” (189). This…

August 13, 2015

Myth and the Fragmentation of Humanity

Paganism, writes Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy ( Christian Future ), “is best understood . . . as primitive man's response to the fear of death.” That means not only personal death but also the death of those groups to which he is bound—family, race, country. The problem is that “all finite forms…

August 13, 2015

The End For Which God Made Us

“The patristic concept of theosis is the most precise and compendious possible evocation of the end for which God creates us,” writes Robert Jenson in a characteristically dense essay in The Catholicity of the Reformation . It doesn't imply that the Creator-creature distinction is somehow erased; that difference is “indeed…

August 13, 2015

What Cantwell Achieved

David Sehat ( The Myth of American Religious Freedom , 222-3) observes that Cantwell v. Connecticut (1940) was the first Supreme Court decision to incorporate the religion clause of the First Amendment to the States. In the case, Jehovah's Witnesses were denied a license to proselytize. The Court struck down…

August 12, 2015

Creating Genocide

Emmanuel Katongole ( A Future for Africa , 98-101) argues, as others have, that the racial division behind the Rwandan genocide was forged during Western colonization. “Before the colonial occupation of Rwanda,” he writes, “the Hutu and Tutsi were not ‘clearly distinct and rigidly separated ethnic groups.'” The distinction existed,…

August 12, 2015

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