Wesley Hill

This was published last summer in the NYT, but it’s just now coming to my attention (via  Luke Neff ):  “Friends of a Certain Age: Why Is It Hard to Make Friends Over 30?” An excerpt: In studies of peer groups, Laura L. Carstensen, a psychology professor who is the . . . . Continue Reading »

Krister Stendahl’s classic 1963 essay, “The Apostle Paul and the Introspective Conscience of the West” makes the case that Augustine and the Western (Protestant) Christian tradition, preoccupied as they were and are with personal human guilt, present us with a drastic misreading of Paul. Unlike his fourth-century reader who poured out confessions of sin and misery to God, Paul was relatively untroubled by a sense of personal failure. According to Stendahl, himself an ordained Lutheran clergyman, Paul was very different from Augustine and Luther insofar as Paul possessed a “robust conscience.” … Continue Reading »

It’s become a commonplace in modern literature on the apostle Paul to observe that he wasn’t a systematic theologian. One need look no further than a standard textbook from the last century, which offers the colorful exhortation not to “rank the tent-maker of Tarsus along with Origen, Thomas Aquinas, and Schleiermacher.” … Continue Reading »