Explore our collection of theological essays, biblical studies, and reflections on faith and culture.
“13th of July, 4:50 pm. I'm sorry. I know that means little at this point, but I am. I tried, I think you would all agree that I tried. To be true, to be strong, to be kind, to love, to be right. But I wasn't. And I know you…
CS Lewis's 1948 essay on “Priestesses in the Church” strikes a reader today as simultaneously quaintly naive and trenchantly prescient. The naive part comes near the beginning, where Lewis describes the decision to take “a revolutionary step.” It would “cut ourselves off from the Christian past and to widen the…
Imagine a version of the Lord of the Rings beginning with Sauron riding into the Shire and lopping off heads in a mad search for the ring, driving Frodo to flight from the beginning, helter-skelter and harried. While, no doubt, some Hollywood exec is at this moment scrambling to reboot…
A Communist Confession of Faith states that the aim of the Communists is “to organize society in such a way that every member of it can develop and use all his capabilities and powers in complete freedom and without thereby infringing the basic conditions of this society.” This aim can…
The story of the Fall enjoys a peculiar place in Christian thought. Together with the creation account in the two chapters that precede it, it is one of the few Old Testament narratives consistently to escape the relative neglect the Hebrew Scriptures often suffer. While the characters of Abraham, Moses,…
In the previous essay, we saw that fire is a work of the Holy Spirit. The two are related so closely that they cannot be separated. Now we turn our attention to the Spirit's relationship to water. Many have understood Spirit baptism to be a dry baptism, one that is…
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Notoriously, the Marquis de Sade stole some consecrated wafers, pushed them into a prostitute’s vagina, and had sex, saying, “Avenge yourself, if you are God.” He meant this as blasphemy, and it is. But his blasphemy only shows just how insurmountable Jesus is. Sade thought himself innovative, but he only…
Individualism treats us as splendidly isolated beings, our real selves fountains of ideas and desires but impenetrable to anything from the outside. How ever did we get this idea? By ignoring the body. If the body is at all a clue to the secret of human life, it shows us…
To grasp what Rosenstock-Huessy says about tribalism, we need to recognize that he sees the tribe as one moment in the development of ancient civilization. In The Fruit of Lips, he describes the origin of the tribe: “The ancient cycle began in the primitive tribe, among a little group of…
In his chapter on the Bolshevik Revolution, Rosenstock-Huessy spends a number of pages digressing about Marx and Marxism. The following notes summarize his treatment of Marxism. Marx, Rosenstock-Huessy begins, is the culmination of the protest against the “order of things” from within Western civilization itself. Marx is biographically well-positioned for…
Rosenstock-Huessy’s brief essay on Descartes (included in I Am An Impure Thinker, extracted from Out of Revolution) highlights a number of recurring themes in Rosenstock-Huessy’s work: He discusses his own formula, Respondeo etsi mutabor, in contrast to the cogito of Descartes; he attacks the abstractions of science and modern thought;…
Anti-sacramental, anti-ritual evangelicalism emphasizes a personal relationship with God, but tends to encourage what Anthony Giddens calls “pure relationship,” a relationship that is not tacked down with external anchors and supports. A live-in relationship, without benefit of the rites and legalities of marriage, is a pure relationship. Evangelicalism tends to…
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