Category: Misc.

One of my favorite G. K. Chesterton Poems, entitled “A Second Childhood.” When all my days are ending And I have no song to sing, I think that I shall not be too old To stare at everything; As I stared once at a nursery door Or a tall tree and a swing. Wherein God’s…

Augustine was the type of student who set the curve on a test. He describes his academic pursuits in his work Confessions. At the age of 18 he was reading Cicero’s Hortensius in which Cicero defends the importance of philosophic study within a society. At the age of 20 he read Aristotle’s Ten Categories. While…

It is hard for people today to respect commentary as an actual exercise of the intellect. We can’t help thinking that great minds, when engaged in worthwhile thinking, must surely strike out on their own. If you want ideas, you should look to modes of thought such as argument, analysis, persuasion, polemic, enquiry, or advocacy,…

I wouldn’t believe this if it didn’t come straight from the prolific and estimable Ben Witherington. He has been working hard equipping churches to respond intelligently to the DaVinci Code as the movie release draws near. On his blog he reports that Andy Griffith and Ron Howard recently chatted about the movie: …I was privy…

Augustine’s City of God is a thick brick of a book, provoked by the troubled geopolitics of late imperial Rome, but ranging over all of human history and, before it’s over, providing the first classic attempt at a full-fledged Christian philosophy of history. The book’s cultural and political legacy is equally vast, as it has…

From John Updike’s The Carpentered Hen, published 1958. Professor Varder handles Dante With wry respect; while one can see It’s all a lie, one must admit The “beauty” of the “imagery.” Professor Varder slyly smiles, Describing Hegel as a “sage;” But still, the man has value—he Reflects the “temper” of his “age.” Montaigne, Tom Paine,…

Who is the Holy Spirit? What is his characteristic personhood, which distinguishes him from the Father and the Son? How is it that he isn’t simply interchangeable with the ascended Jesus Christ, or on the other hand interchangeable with the invisible Father, or on the other other hand, identical with the one divine essence? He…

Thoughts after six hours of discussing Søren Kierkegaard’s beautiful, terrible little book Fear and Trembling, which puts forward Abraham as “the knight of faith,” who is greater than all the wise and strong of the world: great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that…

Charles Wesley wrote: O Love divine, what has thou done! The immortal God hath died for me! —which is a bold thing to say, because it claims so much. “God…died.” The Bible itself says it that bluntly in a few places, such as Acts 20:28, “God purchased the church with his own blood.” This is…

After posting about Cheynell’s 1650 Trinity book, I looked again at the title page and realized he didn’t publish it as a book about The Divine Triunity, but about the Divine TriNunity. As far as I can tell, he meant to spell it that way. Later readers who wrote about his book sometimes got the…

Back in the seventeenth century, you could write a book and give it a title that included most of the content. In fact, as far as I can tell, Cheynell’s Divine Triunity has a title page which is nearly a chapter long. If I were to assign this book in class, I’m sure the first…

The Gospel According to St. Hereticus Scripture Lesson for Easter “St. Hereticus” was Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001), a good old-fashioned left-leaning American theologian who published a series of satirical jabs under his heretical pseudonym for many years around the middle of the twentieth century. This piece was published in Christianity and Crisis, March 16, 1959.…