Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
The first quotation at the heading of PART 1 is from J. D. Unwin's Sex and Culture, a 676 page volume published in 1934. The second quotation is from a lecture given by Freud at the University of Vienna, and it parallels the theme of his book, Civilization and Its…
Sometimes a man has been heard to declare that he wishes both to enjoy the advantage of high culture and to abolish compulsory continence. The inherent desire of the human organism, however, seems to be such that these desires are incompatible, or even contradictory. Any human society is free to…
Genesis 2:5 says that no shrub yet existed in the earth and no field plant had sprouted for two reasons. The first is that "Yahweh God had not caused rain upon the earth," and the second is that "there was no man to serve the soil." Then v. 6 explains…
This hymn was written by Brian Daigle and is based on the Epiphany lectionary readings. It follows the tune of "We Three Kings." Brian is Headmaster and teacher at Sequitur Classical Academy and Director of Chesterton College . Brian lives in Baton Rouge with his wife, Lauren, and their three…
As a rite of command performance worship, danced before the throne of God for His pleasure, the Church Year is a form of covenant recital or covenant rehearsal. The recital of the covenant in Scripture takes two forms. The first is the recounting of the great acts of redemption that…
The recent developments of the #metoo and #churchtoo movements has shed new light on sexual assault in the United States. Its impact has been felt at the highest court in the country. Amid this, a new statement distinguishing the gospel from social justice was published by some within conservative evangelicalism.…
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Prudentius’s Psychomachia (5 th century AD) is one of the first and one of the most influential of medieval allegories. It is the source of the battle of Virtue and Vice that was one of the key themes of medieval allegory, which carries right into the Elizabethan allegory of Spenser's…
R omantic thinkers like Johann Gottfried Herder, developed an organic conception of nationhood. For Herder, a nation is an extended family, and so a perfect nation, the most natural state, is “one nation, an extended family with one national character." (I rely on this essay by Richard White.) People have…
Nations are “imagined communities,” and one of the ways nations imagine themselves is to imagine themselves as very, very old. The Finnish epic, the Kalevala , serves as an illustration of the nexus between ancient literature and national identity. Anderson writes ( Imagined Communities , 74-5), “In the eighteenth century…
In a contribution to Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the Complete Works Teodolinda Barolini contrasts the love poetry of Petrarch's Rerum vulgarium fragmenta (also known as the Canzoniere ) with that of Dante. Petrarch continues the courtly paradigm. His interest is in the shifting psychology and drama of the male…
In his E nglish Literature in the Sixteenth Century , CS Lewis makes two deflationary comments about the effects of Renaissance humanism. First, “The ‘barbarous’ books [of medieval Latin] have survived in the only sense that really matters: they are used as their authors meant them to be used. It…
Conrad Rudolph's The Mystic Ark is the product of impressive scholarship. Its focus is on the image of the mystic ark, a complex cosmic portrait showing “the Majesty” (looking like Jesus) enthroned, flanked by angels, holding a large disk, inscribed with a square turned sideways like a diamond. Inside the…
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