Mormons must appreciate Richard Mouw’s good faith effort to find common ground between us and “orthodox” Christians, as well as First Things’s according him the space to publish this effort. I reply in the same spirit, hoping both correctly to identify common ground and to explain . . . . Continue Reading »
Is there a fact of the matter about a person’s gender? To answer in the affirmative is to adopt a realist stance on questions of gender identity. We could formulate such a realist position as follows: there is a mind-independent feature of reality that decides a person’s gender, and it is not . . . . Continue Reading »
When Daniel Berrigan died recently at the age of 94, obituaries throughout the world described the legendary Jesuit as a defiant pacifist, who will be remembered most for his political protests, legal trials, and time in prison. But there was also a more contemplative side—one that reveals his . . . . Continue Reading »
This volume accompanies another substantial collection, Christianity and Freedom: Volume 1, Historical Perspectives, prepared by the same editors. Professor Hertzke is a member of the Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences as well as the faculty of the University of Oklahoma. Mr. Shah is associate director of the Religious Freedom Project at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs and associate professor in the Government Department at Georgetown University. Continue Reading »
God forms Adam from dust, breathes life into his nostrils, and places him in a garden in the land of Eden. We know from Ezekiel (28:13–14) that the garden is planted on a mountain, but we could have inferred that from Genesis 2, since a river flows out of the garden and downhill to Assyria, Cush, . . . . Continue Reading »
The man to whom I was pastor, 1988 thereabouts, owned and operated an Amoco service station (long before it became BP Amoco). To his surprise he learned the Evangelical Lutheran Church in America (ELCA), to which he belonged, along with several mainline denominations, had called for a boycott of . . . . Continue Reading »
The Catholic love affair with the United States of America is heading into rough and uncharted waters—and not only in this 2016 election cycle, but for the foreseeable future. U.S. Catholics have, in a sense, been there and done that, given that the history of the Church in this country includes . . . . Continue Reading »
The most screenshotted sequence in Beyoncé’s visual album Lemonade is “Hold Up.” After discovering her husband’s infidelity, she walks down the street smashing storefronts with a baseball bat, finally crushing a row of cars in a monster truck. Viewed alone, the song seems like a simple . . . . Continue Reading »
Abraham Kuyper was fond of appealing to John Calvin’s authority on various subjects, but when he turned to the subject of art in his 1898 Stone Lectures at Princeton Seminary, he did so in a rather odd way. He said that he was going to look for insights from the Genevan Reformer on the subject . . . . Continue Reading »
Hymns are chimerical critters. Their bodies are made of poetry, and their breath is music. The natural ligature of these beasts is rhyme. But sweet rhyme has fallen on strange times in both poetry and music. In poetry, rhyme is terribly out of fashion. It has come to serve more as a rhetorical . . . . Continue Reading »