Robert Louis Wilken

I have had many friends in the course of my life, but only since growing older have I given much thought to the nature of friendship. I have amassed a collection of quotations on this theme that have impressed me deeply. The English essayist William ­Hazlitt: “He will never have true friends who . . . . Continue Reading »

No Christian writer of the early centuries elicited greater hostility among critics of the new religion than did Origen of Alexandria. He was born toward the end of the second century, at a time when Greek thinkers began to sense that Christians presented a formidable social and intellectual . . . . Continue Reading »

Athanasius, the heroic bishop of Alexandria in the mid-fourth century—who was sent into exile five times—is best known for his defense of the creed of the Council of Nicaea (325 a.d.) against its Arian detractors. The three-volume treatise Against the Arians is his most . . . . Continue Reading »

Christianity is an affair of things. The things we see and touch and smell are bearers of the living Christ over time. As inspiring and edifying as the works of great artists are—Caravaggio’s The Calling of St. ­Matthew in the Church of San Luigi dei Francesi in Rome, . . . . Continue Reading »

Any account of the rise of religious freedom must give a large place to the intellectual contributions of Christian thinkers. Continue Reading »

I taught at the University of Virginia for twenty-five years. Thomas Jefferson, who founded the university, did not call the graduation ceremony “commencement.” He deemed it more fitting to call the occasion the “final exercises,” and it is called that to this day. Continue Reading »

The Richard I knew and loved was a man of prayer and of liturgy. He knew that the greatest gift we could offer to God was not our words, not our ideas, not our projects, but a heart ablaze with the fire of love. “Honor and glory belong to God alone,” said St. Bernard, “but God will receive neither if they are not sweetened with the honey of love.” . . . Continue Reading »

Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a friar named Riccoldo da Montecroce left his Dominican house in Florence to make the long journey to the Middle East, . . . . . . Continue Reading »

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by peter leithart ivp academic, 373 pages, $27 Anti-Constantinianism is a form of ecclesial primitivism. Like other modern historical theories of the “fall of the Church”—for example, Adolf von Harnack’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the Enlightenment it has been fashionable to denounce Christians for prostituting the legacy of classical culture. Edward Gibbon wrote that Christians had “debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind” and “extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science” that had shone . . . . Continue Reading »