When I moved to England to start a Masters degree in theology, I knew I wanted to study St. Paul’s letter to the Romans. Like many of my counterparts in the Reformed theological orbit, I was enthralled with questions of law and grace, election and final judgment. During my first year of undergraduate study, I’d sat out on the front lawn of the college green, sweating in the spring sunshine, reading N. T. Wright’s What Saint Paul Really Said. I was certain that the most important questions I could write about in my postgraduate study would have something to do with Jews and Gentiles in Christ in those dense later chapters of Paul’s Romans. Continue Reading »
The Moral Arc: How Science and Reason Lead Humanity toward Truth, Justice, and Freedom by michael shermer henry holt, 560 pages, $32 The world was a dark and gloomy place until the Enlightenment came along, after which people began to think for themselves and break free from the shackles of . . . . Continue Reading »
I was recently interviewed by C-Span about my book Conscience and Its Enemies. For any readers who might be interested, here’s the video: Continue Reading »
The New Republic posted a little forum yesterday under the title “Do Humans Still Need to Study the Humanities?” The editors asked four former presidents of major institutions to answer the question. All of them state their commitment to humanities instruction and their regret that the fields have become marginal in recent years. Continue Reading »
Aquinas at Prayer: The Bible, Mysticism and Poetry? by paul murray, o.p. ?bloomsbury, 288 pages, $27.95 How did Thomas Aquinas pray? In Aquinas at Prayer, Paul Murray, O.P., sheds light on Thomas’s more mystical side by commenting on the prayers and liturgical poetry that he wrote as well as . . . . Continue Reading »
The books of 2014, like the books of any year, utterly exceed our grasp. In one aspect, they suggest (they mimic, we could say) the divinely gratuitous excess of Creation; seen from another angle, their multiplicity reflects our fallenness, our propensity to error, our confusion. We need to hold . . . . Continue Reading »
A Change of Heart: A Personal and Theological Memoir by thomas c. odenintervarsity, 384 pages, $40 Autobiographies are typically opportunities for the display of ego and the rationalizing of error. They have been so at least since Julius Caesar’s military memoirs. In our day, it is not just . . . . Continue Reading »
The Father’s Will: Christ’s Crucifixion and the Goodness of God ?by nicholas e. lombardo, o.p. ?oxford, 288 pages, $99 Sound Christian theology,” writes Nicholas Lombardo, “must keep a clear distance between God’s will and the moral evil of Christ’s crucifixion.” This is easier said . . . . Continue Reading »
Two weeks ago, I reported on a poll by Scholastic demonstrating the importance of parents reading aloud to their children well past the age that children can read on their own. There is another aspect to the poll worth mentioning, and it’s backed up by what adolescents say about reading. Continue Reading »
Everybody knows how important it is to read to toddlers. Apart from the emotional element, reading out loud every day during the pre-K years sends a child to kindergarten with a significantly larger vocabulary than a child without that experience possesses. And what happens in kindergarten and after is that the gap grows (because of what is called the “Matthew Effect”). Continue Reading »
