Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing, if they continue in faith and charity and holiness with sobriety. (1 Timothy 2:15) Years ago, the wife of a prominent American theologian recognized that even in Christian circles mothers were under a kind of social pressure to justify the worthwhileness of their…
I caught my five year old washing his hands again. He had already washed them several times that hour, so I asked him if he was okay. He told me he didn’t want to get “the virus”. That was before I had told him anything about coronavirus, but we did…
Very early in life, I developed the habit of walking and thinking and meditating. I came from a rather strict home, and the only way I could get out of the house at night was to walk the dog. So, I did. I would walk the dog for miles and…
From lightning and tempest; from plague, pestilence, and famine; from battle and murder, and from sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us. The Fourth Deprecation from Thomas Cranmer's 1544 Litany 1 A deprecation, such as that above, is a prayer to be spared from disaster, its Latin root deprecari meaning to…
In the previous essay in this series, we saw that Jesus’ words about coming on the clouds were spoken on more than one occasion, first to the disciples on the Mount of Olives (Matthew 24:30; Mark 11:36; Luke 21:27), then, a few days later, to the high priest and Jewish…
The following is excerpted from an essay first published at Church Life Journal . We are grateful to the editors for permission to repost here. The word “science” at its root means “to know” and the word “theology” at its root means “to think about God.” Can we know anything…
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Latour is tired of being accused of having forgotten Being, and offers this clever brush-off of Heidegger: “If, scorning empiricism, you opt out of the exact sciences, then the human sciences,, then traditional philosophy, then the sciences of language, and you hunker down in your forest - then you will…
Postmoderns, Latour suggests, think they are still modern, but in fact they have greatly oversimplified the modern Constitution. Postmoderns might emphasize the separation of subject and world, and stretch that opposition to a breaking point (Latour vividly describes them as doing the splits to keep subject and world apart); but…
In his very good section on modern temporality, Latour argues that modernity assumes that everything in the present, modern moment, is purely modern, novel. Anything that appears that is not up-to-date is a “archaism,” and moderns worry constantly that this or that event or trend might “turn back the clock.”…
One of the key moves made since the 17th century, Latour argues, is a distinction between modes of “representation.” In the laboratory Boyle is representing things before selected witnesses through scientific experiments, giving mute nature a voice through the scientist, while in politics Hobbes suggests that the Sovereign speaks for…
Bruno Latour’s We Have Never Been Modern (Harvard 1993) is a rich study. He describes modernity in terms of a dual process of “purification” and “hybridization.” Purification involves the clean construction of a nature (and science) separated off from society and the self, while hybridization involves mixtures of nature and…
And/Or: Virgil is aware that the furor of civil war can be curbed only by an opposing, and more intense, furor. That, as Milbank says, is the way of paganism - peace established only by superior violence against violence. But in those tears Virgil expresses the the painful recognition -…
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