Author: Greg Peters
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Reading Books: Quantity or Quality?
Well, Harry Potter has once again hit the stores, to the rowdy “Hurrah!” of millions of devotees (one of whom blogs frequently about the boy wizard on this website). I imagine that Amazon.com employees have really racked up the overtime this week while the US economy has likely stayed steady given that profits from Potter…
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Cuneiform tablets, big fish and God’s Word
I ran across an article today from the on-line edition of the London Times from July 11 entitled “Museum’s tablet lends new weight to Biblical truth.” For obvious reasons, this article caught my attention so I began to read. The verdict is this: from the 100,000 or so cuneiform tablets located in the British Library,…
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Ecumenical Honesty, Finally!
On July 10, the Vatican’s Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith released a document entitled “Responses to some Questions Regarding Certain Aspects of the Doctrine on the Church.” You may have heard about it already even if you have not read the document itself. Recalling and reaffirming the Roman Catholic Church’s teaching since, at…
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Remembering Benedict of Nursia
Today is the feast of Benedict of Nursia. Details of Benedict’s life come primarily from the second book of the Dialogues of Gregory the Great and from Benedict’s own Rule for Monks. Born in 480 in Nursia, just outside of Rome, Benedict was educated in Rome before adopting a life of asceticism. He spent three…
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Interpreting Texts on Interpretation
Does God withhold truth from believers? Now, I am not talking about the areas of physics, science, medicine, etc. Rather, my question is spiritual in nature: are there things about God and his creation that I cannot know while living on earth? Well, many Christians have already formed a response and, I am guessing, many…
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Birthdays and Eternal Life
That we all have to age and grow older is a fact of life, especially in this post-Edenic world. My own birthdays do not cause me much consternation, probably because I do little to acknowledge my own birthday. Sure, I will accept gifts from family and friends (who wouldn’t?) and I will even indulge by…
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Revisioning History in Turkey
Earlier this month I had the privilege of traveling to Turkey and Greece with 45 undergraduate students from the Torrey Honors Institute. First, it was a great trip! What a great opportunity for someone who wrote a doctoral dissertation on a twelfth-century Byzantine author (that’s me!) to visit the heart of the former Byzantine empire.…
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A Great Silence
Perhaps you have heard about the movie/documentary that was recently in limited release in the United States entitled Die Große Stille, translated into English as Into Great Silence. The movie by German filmmaker Phillip Gröning was “in the works” for about twenty-one years before its European release in 2005. In 1984 Gröning asked the notoriously…
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On Envy and Temperance
The medieval author Richard of St. Victor wrote, “The duty of the true preacher consists of two things; instruction in truth and exhortation to virtue” (The Mystical Ark, Appendix). In this post I hope to do the latter by continuing my musings on the vices and the virtues. Please recall that a virtue is a…
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On Avarice and Benevolence
The Christian life is a battle between good (i.e., God) and bad (i.e., Satan). As Paul reminds us in Ephesians 6:12, “For we are not fighting against people made of flesh and blood, but against the evil rulers and authorities of the unseen world, against those mighty powers of darkness who rule this world, and…
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On Anger and Justice
Regarding the vices and virtues, Athanasius of Alexandria writes, “It is required that not only with the body should we fast, but with the soul. Now the soul is humbled when it does not follow wicked opinions, but feeds on becoming virtues. For virtues and vices are the food of the soul and it can…
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On Gluttony and Contentment
As I mentioned in my last post, I will be blogging a series on the virtues and vices. This installment will consider gluttony and contentment. For my understanding of the terms “virtue” and “vice” see my previous post “On Sloth and Vigilance.” A standard dictionary defines a glutton as “a person who eats far too…