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Reason Enraptured

Edward T. Oakes

Anyone who tries to evaluate the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar faces not only the sheer size of his work and his vast erudition but his great subtlety....

Bell’s Present Heaven

Edward T. Oakes

Explicit confession of the Lordship of Jesus is not necessary for salvation, at least under certain circumstances”very wide circumstances, it turns out”says Rob Bell in his Love Wins: A...

A Review of Mad World

Edward T. Oakes

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh and the Secrets of Brideshead by Paula Byrne Harper, 368 pp. $25.99 n Evelyn Waugh opened his most famous novel Brideshead Revisited with this monitory...

Newman’s Ideal University

Edward T. Oakes

Imagine you’ve just read Plato’s Republic and then—conscientious citizen that you’ve now become—you enter a Chicago voting booth on election day and scan the list of candidates. Anyone who...

The Ides by Stephen Dando-Collins

Edward T. Oakes

The Ides: Caesar’s Murder and the War for Rome by stephen dando-collins john wiley & sons, 288 pages, $25.98 No assassination of a politician has had a greater influence...

Shades of Infallibility

Edward T. Oakes

Papal Infallibility: A Protestant Evaluation of an Ecumenical Issue by Mark E. Powell Eerdmans, 226 pages, $40 Everyone, popes included, ad­mits that the Catholic doctrine of papal infallibility represents...

Atheists and Christians Together

Edward T. Oakes

The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic? by Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank MIT?Press, 416 pages, $27.95 In Untimely Meditations , Fried­rich Nietzsche spins a tale that goes like...

Richard’s Book Club

Edward T. Oakes

Some virtues may be learned, others are inborn. Punctuality, for example, can be taught, at least in the sense that the costs for procrastination can be made too high....

The Body of the Church

Edward T. Oakes

Can These Bones Live? A Catholic Baptist Engagement with Ecclesiology, Hermeneutics, and Social Theory by Barry Harvey Brazos, 318 pages, $24 .99 When the Vatican published Dominus Iesus late...

More on Balthasar, Hell, and Heresy

Edward T. Oakes Alyssa Lyra Pitstick

Alyssa Lyra Pitstick: In his reply in last month’s issue of First Things to my investigations of Hans Urs von Balthasar, Fr. Edward Oakes says his “chief worry” is...

The Road from Damascus

Edward T. Oakes

Paul of Tarsus: A Visionary Lifeby Edward Stourton.Paulist, 224 pages, $24. St. Paul is, to put it mildly, a controversial figure. Among Jews, Paul tends to grate on sensibilities...

A Jesus Just for Me

Edward T. Oakes

At least you can say this for Garry Wills”he isn’t afraid to change his mind. Whether that malleability is good or bad depends, I suppose, on your view of...

What Do Zombies Think?

Edward T. Oakes

I once attended a lecture by a philosopher who, in the midst of a tirade against the Christian right, interrupted himself and admitted that his atheism also had a...

The “I” of Christ

Edward T. Oakes

Saint Cyril of Alexandria and the Christological Controversy by John McGuckin St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press 430 pp. $22.95 paper All great writers, all important writers, sooner or later fall...

John Wesley: A Biography

Edward T. Oakes

John Wesley (1703-1791), the founder of Methodism, proves to be a biographer’s dream come true. The man was a bundle of contradictions”and what biographer does not love to portray...