Category: Blog

The January 2007 issue of First Things is already available, and in the “Briefly Noted” section you’ll find my review of Alexander the Corrector, a book about Alexander Cruden of Cruden’s Concordance fame. The editors at First Things snipped a few words here and there to make it fit better, generally improving the review. If…

Last week I was asked to give a talk in one of the dormitories here on campus entitled “A Theology of Christmas.” Realizing that tired university students likely did not want to hear a three-hour theological discourse in the midst of finals week I thought long and hard about how to talk about Christmas theologically.…

Remarks from a college honorary society induction ceremony, Dec. 15. As a young man around the year 1723, America’s greatest theologian, Jonathan Edwards, wrote out a series of personal resolutions, usually published as “Resolutions of a Saintly Scholar.” These 70 numbered resolutions are soul-searching commitments to lead a life of which he would not be…

The late Colin Gunton (1941-2003), in a flurry of productivity just before his untimely death, put out a bunch of books that are remarkable for containing enough ideas that they could each have been expanded into more books. Looking for a half-remembered quotation, I recently skimmed back through my copy of his book The Triune…

The written works of Aristotle, what we have of them, contain ideas that have influenced generation upon generation of thinkers. His philosophical investigations are deep and provocative providing us with work that is the fodder for countless philosophical discussions. He is the intellectual father of thinkers like Averroes and Aquinas. Dante calls him, “The master…

Three fundamental categories for theologizing are nature, grace, and glory. These terms indicate things you’ve already thought about before, but they don’t quite map onto other terms you might already know. Nature is what a thing is in itself. Human nature is a created good, a thing with its own integrity and a recognizable completeness…

I have a half-baked theory that evangelicalism was a much greater spiritual force about a hundred years ago. I’m not a historian or sociologist, and I don’t have a lot of interest in figuring out exactly what went wrong between our time and the golden age. It’s enough to know that sometime around the first…

Words from J.H. Jowett, written in 1910: It is possible to evade a multitude of sorrows by the cultivation of an insignificant life. Indeed, if it be a man’s ambition to avoid the troubles of life, the recipe is perfectly simple — let him shed his ambitions in every direction, let him cut the wings…