Turning to Tradition by d. oliver herbel oxford, 256 pages, $27.95 In 2010, Eastern Orthodox Christians in America awoke to a painful realization—there aren’t very many of us. Since the 1920s, various prelates and the pages of archdiocesan yearbooks have claimed that there were as many as . . . . Continue Reading »
As my daughter and I travelled home over the Wicklow Mountains, our voices echoed between the cliffs, turning the heads of passing sheep as we rolled into the wooded hollows below. She knows these songs by heart from years of lullabies and sing-alongs since, but doesn’t yet realize that children . . . . Continue Reading »
A funny thing happened when Michael Novak brought Herbert Marcuse to lecture to his students. It was the early-1970s when campus rebellion had entered its darker phase, and Marcuse was an idol of the Movement. His theory of “repressive tolerance” served as an essential touchstone for protest, and his volatile mix of Marx and Freud seemed an edgy, relevant style of intellectualized activism. Continue Reading »
Catholics, Orthodox, and not a few Protestants have been known to reject theological novelties with a wave of the hand and an appeal to tradition. “Shouldn’t we follow the tradition rather than the judgments of an individual scholar?” Sometimes the modifier “idiosyncratic” is added to “judgments” for rhetorical oomph. “Tradition” is implicitly capitalized, for who can argue with a capital letter? Continue Reading »
Are Evangelicals adopting tradition for its style or substance? Continue Reading »
Awell-known account of creativity sets the scene for a celebrated act of creation, and a bleak scene it was: “In the beginning … the earth was without form and void, and darkness covered the face of the abyss.” On that occasion, creativity consisted in bringing something out of . . . . Continue Reading »
The ideas of “tradition” and “creativity” seem at first glance to be opposed and incompatible. Tradition says continuity; creativity says innovation and hence discontinuity. With the proper distinctions, however, it may be possible to show that the two are not only compatible but mutually . . . . Continue Reading »
The traditions Gregory Jones explores in Transformed Judgment are grand ones: Aristotelian virtue-centered moral philosophy; Thomism, especially as it elucidates the relation between the sacraments and friendship with God; Trinitarian thought; Wittgenstein’s philosophy of language. One . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
