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abortion
Abortion

Letters on Abortion, (Part 1)

What is below is fairly self-explanatory. This is an exchange I had with a local liberal clergyman on the subject of abortion. The circumstances of the debate are included in the text itself. I initially e-mailed this out to a list of clergy in our city after a local (and…

by Richard BledsoeNovember 17, 2015
wall-2
Ezra

The Perfumed Butler and the Wisdom of Civil Obedience

The seemingly humdrum parts of the Bible often hide overlooked wisdom. Take, for example, the books of Ezra and Nehemiah. Their stories aren't exactly the most gripping or memorable. They are far less concrete than, say, the story of the Exodus. No one in Ezra is stricken blind or devoured…

by Christian LeithartNovember 10, 2015
sparkler
Happiness

"Happy! Happy! Happy!" Authentic Happiness and Its Knock-Offs

For most of the past century, philosophical perspectives on life in the western world have been overtly grim and pessimistic. The optimism of the Enlightenment, generated by confidence in the scientific method and the potential of an increasingly civilized humanity to redress the evils of the world, was shattered by…

by Bill DeJongNovember 5, 2015
aaron-burden-1ebsmyrau-s-unsplash
Hermeneutics

How Does a Chiasm Mean?

Chiastic structures are found all over the Bible, and in recent decades commentators have become more adept at spotting them. But identifying these literary structures is only part of the challenge. There remains the challenge of understanding what they mean. Part of the answer is found in the recognition that…

by Steve JefferyNovember 3, 2015
last-supper
Eucharist

How To Change the World, (Part 2)

Part 1 can be found HERE . Clearly, more than just getting worship right is important in changing the world, but since worship is the central act of God’s people, performed on the first day of the week at the center of the world before the very face of God,…

by James B. JordanOctober 29, 2015
solomonsidolatry
Biblical Theology

Big Love: A History of Stolen Fruit

“Blessed is the womb that bore you, and the breasts at which you nursed.” ( Luke 11:27 ) Arguing for Christian morality in a secular society is difficult. A culture which accepts evolutionary dogma has no intellectual place — or inherent desire — for absolute morality, since it believes morality…

by Mike BullOctober 27, 2015

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Modernity's Wager

A dam Seligman compares Modernity's Wager to Pascal's: Pascal’s wager of the seventeenth century, of reason for faith, was replaced in the eighteenth century by a wager over the terms of sacrality. Modern culture and politics, I argue, staked its all on the ability to construct an authoritative locus of…

December 16, 2016

Tale of Two Monsters

T imothy Beal ( Religion and Its Monsters ) analyzes Fritz Lang's film Metropolis (1926) as a tale of two monsters. First is “unhindered industry . . . as a cult of human sacrifice to the industrial machine.” The city's “power house” is a “giant, steam-spewing industrial machine . .…

December 16, 2016

Medieval Figures

I n his recent study of figural exegesis, Time and the Word , Ephraim Radner traces the “fate of figural reading.” The Middle Ages form a crucial stage in that history. Drawing on the work of Friedrich Ohly, Radner argues that the “medieval typology was part of a long-standing outlook…

December 16, 2016

Lessons from Alabama

F ellow Alabamian Quin Hillyer says that Trump should pay attention to what's happening in Alabama if he wants to help American workers. Forbes.com rated Mobile America's top mid-sized city for manufacturing growth in 2015, and the growth has come from foreign companies: With 4,200 employees, Austal Shipyards is the…

December 16, 2016

Berkeley's Book of Nature

C ostica Bradatan wants us to attend to The Other Bishop Berkeley . The Berkeley that is most often studied is the one who addresses issues of interest to contemporary philosophy. Bradatan looks instead at Berkeley's sources and the uses he makes of them. From this angle, it becomes apparent…

December 16, 2016

Novel-Reading and Enlightenment

A llison Coudert ( Religion, Magic, and Science in Early Modern Europe and America ) speaks of an “anthropological revolution” taking place in the eighteenth century, as Europeans became optimistic about the future prospects of human evolution and improvement. This was partly the result of assaults on the doctrine of…

December 16, 2016

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