Author: Fred Sanders

“There are souls too in the world which have the gift of finding joy everywhere, and of leaving it behind them when they go. Joy gushes from under their fingers like jets of light. There is something in their very presence, in their mere silent company, from which joy cannot be extricated and laid aside.…

Dear Miss Lonelyhearts, I have been invited to attend a “Superbowl Party” this coming Sunday afternoon. Although the invitation was rather circumspect regarding details, I am given to understand that the event being celebrated involves a televised competition between two sports collectives, possibly from different countries, or perhaps different regions of the same country. Although…

Jaroslav Pelikan (1923-2006) wrote a book in 1959 called The Riddle of Roman Catholicism (Abingdon: 1959). While parts of it are dated, it’s also a wise and patient Lutheran interaction with the phenomenon that is the Roman Catholic Church. In chapter 16, “The Challenge of Roman Catholicism,” Pelikan muses about what American Protestantism can learn…

In the year 381, the second ecumenical council (also known as the First Council of Constantinople, or Constantinople I, to distinguish it from two later councils in the same city), met to make decisions on Christian doctrine and order. The main thing the fathers of the first Council of Constantinople would want us to say…

The first ecumenical council was Nicaea, in the year 325. As all the later councils are at pains to attest, the Council of Nicaea is the most important of all the councils. The heresy which provoked this epochal council was Arianism, the teaching that the pre-existent Logos who took on flesh in the incarnation was…

There are a lot of parts to theology, and although over-specialization is always bad, some division of labor makes a lot of sense unless you’re personally interested in earning degrees in everything from Hittite to Herodias to Haplography to Heidegger’s Hermeneutics of Hegel’s Historicism. Here’s how I see the labor divided. While the various theological…

Christology is one of the most important doctrines in all of theology, and also one of the most difficult. The standards of proof here are high, because the claims —that this man is God, one of the Trinity, the eternal Son— are so outrageous. It is incumbent on all Christians, I think, to be able…

“As far as theology is concerned, “www” might stand for “wild, wild west.” Whatever law may hold sway in the civilized territories of academic theology, it is unenforceable out on the range. Internet theology, unlike other academic disciplines, has not been guided or normalized by the presence of any established institutional presence. With a few…