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The Lady and Her Jewels: An Epiphany Meditation

And a great portent appeared in heaven, a woman clothed with the sun, with the moon under her feet, and on her head a crown of twelve stars; she was with child and she cried out in her pangs of birth, in anguish for delivery (Revelation 12:1-2). Then Joshua spoke…

by Richard BledsoeJanuary 6, 2015
extreme-unction
Anointing

Fattening Our Suffering

In his post asking Ought we Anoint the Dying? Peter Leithart makes an excellent and important point about our suffering as members of Christ. However, he only parenthetically mentions that the verb in question in James 5 is not chrio but aleipho . By assuming that these words are interchangeable,…

by Robert MaddoxDecember 30, 2014
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James

Death as Frenemy

We spend a lot of time in the church talking about what it means to live like a Christian. But what does it mean to die like a Christian? If we are to follow Christ in life, what does it mean for us to follow him in death as well?…

by Rich LuskDecember 23, 2014
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Literature

Was Shakespeare A Christian?

How would one go about answering the question posed by my title? That depends on what the question means. Obviously, different definitions of the question would require different approaches to an answer. Right off hand, I can think of at least three possible — though not necessarily mutually exclusive —…

by Ralph Allan SmithDecember 23, 2014
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American Culture

Phobophobia

In recent weeks and months, we have seen events that are not the event. The drama around these events is not the events themselves, but the anxiety about the events, and then even the anxiety about the anxiety about the events. That is the real event. The events in Ferguson,…

by Richard BledsoeDecember 22, 2014
anointing-david
Anointing

Ought We Anoint the Dying?

Anointing the sick, including the dying, is one of the traditional seven sacraments of the Catholic Church. The Reformers denied that the rite qualified as a sacrament. Formally, this was because anointing did not have a direct authorization from Jesus; more theologically, it was not one of the marks that…

by Peter LeithartDecember 18, 2014

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They Knew God

Natural law arguments often conclude that every human being can know, without the help of revelation, that there is some deity, an ultimate reality, an absolute. Paul says that human beings know “about God” from creation, but also that they “knew God ” (Romans 1:19, 21)—that is, from creation they…

January 21, 2014

Apocalyptic Politics

My latest First Things column sparked some reflections on apocalyptic politics from the Economist’s Erasmus columnist. He moves my observations about apocalyptic philosophy to apocalyptic politics. It comes up in all sorts of places. “Iran’s former president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, seemed obsessed with eschatology to a degree that irritated the country’s…

January 21, 2014
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Bashing Twitter’s Bashers

Roger Cohen is tired of Twitter bashers: “It’s not easy, being of a certain generation, to avoid the dinner conversation that veers into a lament about the short attention spans, constant device distraction, sad superficiality and online exhibitionism of a younger generation geared to life in 140 characters or less.…

January 21, 2014
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Charismatic work

“Work is charismatic,” writes Craig Keen in After Crucifixion (80-1). Keen elaborates in a beautiful passage: “What we are given to work upon precedes us, a gift sent our way the first five days of creation, the days when the Spirit hovered over the face of the waters, before our…

January 21, 2014
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Progress(es)

Progress, Eugen Rosenstock-Huessy points out ( Christian Future ), was originally a plural term. “ Les progres ” was Condorcet’s phrase. What he had in mind were improvements, new gadgets and machines and gizmos. The singular form of the term came from early Christianity and referred to the spiritual improvement…

January 21, 2014
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Science and Society

Sciences today often occupy ruts, separated from each other, each as incomprehensible to non-specialists as languages were at the tower of Babel, and separated too from the larger currents of culture. But it is a myth, Rosenstock-Huessy says ( Christian Future ), to believe that “sciences can advance without regard…

January 21, 2014

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