Depart from me, Lord. Depart from me, for I am a sinful man. Why have you come to me? Why have you called me? You know me. You’ve searched me . . . And so you already know there’s nothing that you will find in me. I have nothing to offer you. Only weakness. Weakness and [...]
As a literary scholar, C.S. Lewis’s principal concern in his "Reflections on the Psalms" is to vindicate the Psalms as poetry and, therefore, vehicles of beauty, delight, and even (as he boldly puts it) “mirth.” These are things which, Lewis says, modern humanity needs badly. One of the great constants in my life has been [...]
Jesus Christ is the perfect image of the invisible God. He is the perfect self-portrait because he is not just a representation of God, he is God himself. We no longer try to guess at the Artist through his works. Instead, we are brought into a real relationship with the Artist himself. For from the greatness [...]
God did not provide us with something to offer, but someone. In Christ, our offering becomes pleasing. In Christ, the act of perfect worship is accomplished. When it comes to the worship of God, we quickly realize how little we are and how little our offering is in comparison to God’s greatness and majesty. In his [...]
In God, through the sacrifice of Jesus, we are made whole and entire. The warfare within, in our passions, at the division between flesh and spirit, is ended. Now we are “built upon the foundation of the apostles and prophets, Christ Jesus himself being the cornerstone.” “The stone which the builders rejected has become the [...]
Grace alone determines whether we go to Heaven or Hell. But our good works determine whether we go through purgation or not, en route to Heaven. November 2 is the feast of All Souls. The point of the day is to remember those who have gone before us—but not necessarily the saints (those in Heaven). [...]
John 16:20-23 20 ‘In all truth I tell you, you will be weeping and wailing while the world will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn to joy. 21 A woman in childbirth suffers, because her time has come; but when she has given birth to the child she forgets the suffering [...]
The Lord promises a real solution to sin and death. We have new hearts as far from sin and death as the east is from the west. He takes hearts of stone and makes them capable of life—death’s very contradiction. As far as the east is from the west so far does he remove our [...]
Why should an adult take time out of his busy schedule to learn classical languages? Latin and ancient Greek unlock the cultural heritage of the West. When it comes to ancient languages, many people seem to believe that there is an incredibly small window of opportunity for learning. I encounter this belief frequently, since I [...]
In the liberal tradition, Adam is described as the one who must toil against a surrounding lack in order to be properly made man. But Genesis undercuts the idea that toil is man’s “lot,” if by it one means that toil is man’s by nature, in the order of Creation, rather than by punishment, in [...]
Consumption of content is increasingly through audiobooks, podcasts, or YouTube videos—in other words, through oral tradition. We may thus be witnessing a technological revolution that not only takes us forward into a brave new world of communication, but also backward to the time of the Old Testament patriarchs. A few years ago I was able [...]
The founding of nations always involves a willful forgetting and subsequent divinization of the founding fathers. The Scriptures are an acid that dissolves every attempt to produce an untainted origin story, and so a new nation. Throughout his City of God, Augustine accuses the Romans of willfully forgetting their origins. The philosopher Varro, Augustine says, [...]
Whatever other methods of prayer we may at times find helpful, we must never forget and always turn back to the Scriptures as the Christian prayer book par excellence. Lectio Divina – Divine Reading In vocal prayer, despite the time given to brief moments of silence, we have been doing most of the talking. However, [...]
Is Psalm 81 false? Will God not help us at once? Is God really helping us when we surrender to him if following the Lord so often involves trials? What if God assists us precisely by afflicting us? With the Sacred Scriptures as its principal source-text, each Lectio Divina (“Sacred Reading”) essay offers a prayerful [...]