It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a “millennium series” of . . . . Continue Reading »
Dragon in a Three-Piece Suit: The Emergence of Capitalism in China by doug guthrie princeton university press, 302 pages, $39.95 In the famous account he gave of his twenty-four years away from his native Venice, Marco Polo was not above embellishment: the gold and silver said to line the walls of . . . . Continue Reading »
What to do about the female saints? Arriving at an acceptable consensus regarding the holy women of Christianity has been a persistent problem for feminist theologians. The first wave of the women’s movement tended to take a disparaging stance toward the nuns, lay spinsters, wives, mothers, . . . . Continue Reading »
Graham Greene was a great novelist of a special kind. Unlike many literary practitioners in this century, he did not experiment with language, subvert traditional narrative, or choose exotic subjects. He simply used the powerful imagination that led him to speak of his work as a “guided dream.” . . . . Continue Reading »
In Defense of Natural Lawby robert p. georgeclarendon/oxford university press, 343 pages, $65 In his influential book The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins asserts that “Like successful Chicago gangsters our genes have survived . . . in a highly competitive world, . . . [and so] a predominant . . . . Continue Reading »
The beginning of the ninth century of the millennium now almost past was promising enough. The Congress of Vienna in 1815 marked, at long last, the end of the Napoleonic wars and heralded a period of enduring peace-peace under the auspices of emperors and monarchs of dubious legitimacy and . . . . Continue Reading »
The sixteenth century was a period of tumultuous change in Western Europe. The need for some kind of moral and intellectual shake-up within the church had been obvious for some time. Many religious and political writers of the fifteenth century had been aware of the weaknesses of the medieval church . . . . Continue Reading »
Murderous cruise missiles crash into factories, office buildings, farm houses, all just across the border in Serbia, while on the other side of the frontier twelve million Hungarians stare apprehensively into their television sets thinking, “There but for the grace of God goes Hungary.” Yet, . . . . Continue Reading »
TechGnosis: Myth, Magic, and Mysticism in the Age of Information by erik davis. harmony. 368 pp. $25.Early on in this fascinating survey of the spiritual dimension of cyberculture, Erik Davis observes that “the spiritual imagination seizes information technology for its own purposes.” The . . . . Continue Reading »
Living in Two Cities: Augustinian Trajectories in Political Thought.By Eugene TeSelle.University of Scraton Press. 227 pp. $19.95 Augustine is a thinker for all seasons and all times in the portrait that emerges from Eugene TeSelle’s Living in Two Cities. TeSelle is intimately . . . . Continue Reading »
