Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
In The Meaning of History , Nikolai Berdyaev argues that the ancient Greeks had no concept of history and no philosophy of history because their concept of God and the world did not allow for it. “They conceived the world aesthetically, as a finite and harmonious cosmos. The most representative…
You know how the curtain parts at the beginning of a play, and you see a new scene, with characters and sets and incidents that had remained hidden up til then? Church last week was like that. Except the curtain was made up of all the things I thought were…
Genesis 3 records the terrible day when humanity fell into sin and shalom was violated. This was a moment of cosmic treason, when Adam and Eve violated their relationship with God by rebelling against His command and fell into the severe ignobility we all experience. The entrance of sin wrecked…
One of the most important contributions of twentieth-century Catholic nouvelle théologie , and of Henri de Lubac and Jean Danielou in particular, was its rehabilitation of the typological interpretation of the Bible practiced by patristic and medieval theologians. Typological interpretation assumes that events and institutions of the Old Testament present…
The Catholic News Service has reported that Pope Francis has called for the abolition of not only the death penalty, but also of life in prison. In a meeting with representatives of the International Association of Penal Law, the pontiff called for all “Christians and people of good will” to…
Each year, the United Nations designates November 25 as the International Day for the Elimination of Violence against Women. U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon explains, “Violence against women and girls takes many forms and is widespread throughout the globe. It includes rape, domestic violence, harassment at work, abuse in school, female…
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“T he time has come,” writes Luigino Bruni ( The Wound and the Blessing ), “to rewrite the economic and civil history of societies, taking seriously the civil and economic role of charisms.” It's impossible “to understand either the past or the present situation in European economics deeply (or well…
I n Adam Smith and the Character of Virtue , Ryan Patrick Hanley explains why Smith considered the “inequality of precommercial societies [to be] infinitely more pernicious than the inequality to be found in commercial society.” He does this by demonstrating “how the conditions that afford the powerful with maximal…
A t the Daily Beast , Joel Kotkin exposes the “arrogance of Blue America,” expressed in talk of Blue State secession and contempt for Red State Trump country. According to Kotkin, “The blue bourgeoisie’s self-celebration rests on multiple misunderstandings of geography, demography, and economics. To be sure, the deep blue…
I ’ve quoted this before, often, but it's so good it merits re-quotation. From Luther's 1528 “Confession”: These are the three Persons and the one God, Who has given Himself to us wholly with all that He is and all that He has. The Father gives Himself to us, with…
R eviewing Adrian Forty's Concrete and Culture in the TLS , James Hall summarizes the shifting fortunes of concrete as a building material: “Reinforced concrete's global heyday spanned roughly from the 1920s to the 60s, when exposed, cantilevered concrete was all the (modernist) rage. Then a pragmatic and/or postmodernist reaction…
D on-John Dugas's recent Shakespeare for Everyman offers a revisionist account of the rise of “authentic” stagings of Shakespeare in the twentieth century. The very meaning of “authentic” changed, as Sally Barnden explains in her TLS review of Dugas's book: “Authentic Shakespeare performance was no longer understood to be that…
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