Michael Burleigh’s study of European religion and politics requires us to imagine a very different Europe than the one we behold today—not the polity of bureaucrats in Brussels but a Europe of statesmen and revolutionaries who aimed at the most extravagant notions of national . . . . Continue Reading »
Consider the obituary column in your local newspaper—not the obituary of anyone famous but just an ordinary obituary of an ordinary person from an ordinary place. Consider it first as a surviving family member or friend, the one who has to gather the information for the obituary and select . . . . Continue Reading »
Social teaching consists of behavioral norms for social conduct in conformity with the gospel. While the principles remain constant, the proximate norms are not free from contingency because society itself is in . . . . Continue Reading »
Lasch concluded that an emphasis upon mercy is perhaps the most difficult virtue for humans generally, and modern man especially, to sustain. And yet it is a message needing repetition and renewal, even in the face of likely failure. Hope demands nothing . . . . Continue Reading »
That extraordinary writer of stories about the “Christ-haunted” American South, Flannery O’Connor, was frequently asked why her people and plots were so often outlandish, even grotesque. She answered, “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost-blind you have to draw large and . . . . Continue Reading »
Hans-Georg Gadamer: A Biographyby jean grondintranslated by woel weinsheimeryale university press, 512 pages, $35 It is reasonable to be dubious about biographies of philosophers, even when they are good. For what, after all, is the life of a philosopher? How much a novelist lived the events he or . . . . Continue Reading »
“History is God’s theatre, . . . God’s jousting place.” Martin Luther In the spring of . . . . Continue Reading »
The Resurrection of the Son of God by n. t. wright. fortress. 740 pp. $39 The past decade or so has produced numerous challenges to reading the Bible as a trustworthy historical witness. Scholars in the field of Old Testament studies question every detail of the pre-exilic corpus. As for the New . . . . Continue Reading »
As modern men and women—to the degree that we are modern—we believe in nothing. This is not to say, I hasten to add, that we do not believe in anything; I mean, rather, that we hold an unshakable, if often unconscious, faith in the nothing, or in nothingness as such. It is this in which . . . . Continue Reading »
evil in modern thought: an alternativehistory of philosophy by susan neiman princeton university press, 358 pages, $29.95 René Descartes, the father of modern philosophy, begins his Meditations(1641) on the self and its place in the world by supposing that a demon, no less powerful than God, . . . . Continue Reading »
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