Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
I was still a high school student the first time I read Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, but I will never forget the powerful impact the book had on me. Of course, as a second year student, I did not fully digest the book. In spite of subsequent readings, I…
Crises force questions of identity. Identities may remain assumed until some event, or series of events, challenge what may have been taken for granted. The search for identity is an anxious one precisely because it tends to happen in times of upheaval and uncertainty. In his recent book, Orthoxox Anglican…
Peter Leithart recently wrote a fascinating short piece about the Half Shekel Temple Tax as an atonement. Leithart argues three main points. First that the Sanctuary Shekel was heavier, i.e., more valuable than the everyday shekel. Second, he offers some analysis about the order of magnitude of the purchasing power…
There is no denial from the careful reader that 1 Samuel 24 and 26 are telling the same story. Perhaps we should say, virtually the same story. But that the stories are cut from the same cloth is undeniable. What we have over these three chapters—1 Samuel 24-26—is a very…
In his novel That Hideous Strength , C.S. Lewis is able to masterfully illustrate in narrative form so many of his insights about the subversive dangers of Leftist political dogma to Christian civilization. Perceptive essays from Lewis like “The Abolition of Man” and “The Inner Ring” are fleshed out in…
At a very practical level, the Evangelical Church has been injected with counterfeit spiritualities. We are a people looking for a city, whose builder may only be in office for four years. Our temptation to veer to the side of the temporal is striking in our day, especially as the…
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According to Pickstock, Augustine’s musical ontology is not a mere subordination of space to time, or a univocal “Dionysian flow”: “just as important as the priority of time, for Augustine, is the insistence on articulation into distinct musical units or phrases, the very move which allows a stress upon the simultaneity…
Nothing comes from nothing.  That seems obvious, and Christians have traditionally had some difficulty explaining why creatio ex nihilo is a defensible violation of that basic principle. According to Catherine Pickstock, Augustine viewed creation ex nihilo as the most rational position.  All around us, “things are continuously coming to be…
In responding to Milbank’s analysis of Augustine on the secular, RA Markus ( Christianity And the Secular (Blessed Pope John XXIII Lecture Series in Theology and Culture) ) borrows MJ Hollerich’s summary of Milbank that there is no “neutral public sphere in which people can act politically without reference to…
Jean-Marie Schaeffer ( Art of the Modern Age: Philosophy of Art from Kant to Heidegger (New French Thought Series) has a blast pointing out the contradictions in Kant’s aesthetics. Most of them arise from Kant’s insistence that the judgment of taste is founded on “the form of a finality” that…
Can effects double as causes? Kant, still working with some form of final causality, thinks so: There are cases when “the thing that for the moment is designated effect deserves none the less, if we take the series regressively, to be called the cause of the thing of which it…
Evidence that Hamann had Kant right: In explaining taste as a common sense, he notes that this common sense of beauty can be arrived at by a process of stripping off whatever belongs to our perception and prejudice. That is, we put “ourselves in the position of every one else,…
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