Despite the multitude of Christian denominations that have sprung up over the last 500 years, there seem to have been few, if any, important divisions among Christians about the authenticity of the canon of the New Testament since the Catholic Church promulgated it at the Council of Rome more than 1,600 years ago. I. The [...]
When trying to understand Scripture, we need to establish an analysis of concrete terms. But if we aren’t careful, we just might explain away the beauty of descriptive language in the Bible. Saint Augustine of Hippo encountered the same issue, and not just among his youngest students. In humanities coursework, we often train students to [...]
What do we make of the four “Almost Sacraments”? Among other things, we might note how they bear upon a common interest that is, sadly, more and more neglected in today’s Church: young men. How many sacraments are there anyway? Seven? Two? Two-and-a-half? If you are Roman Catholic today, your Church has handed down this [...]
St. Gregory the Great once observed that we would all immediately read a letter sent to us by an earthly emperor, but most of us ignore the Scriptures even though they are personally addressed to us by the divine emperor. What kind of response, though, is due to the Scriptures? Under the Gaze of the [...]
The psalms of the Old Testament remain the prayer of the New. By their bringing together and by their lyrical exaltation of all the clearly marked themes included in revelation from the beginning, the psalms are the providential means to aid us in discerning the abiding reality of the Word. The Bible and the Gospel, [...]
Whether Roman Catholic, Eastern Orthodox or orthodox Protestant, the Bible is the basic book of the Christian faith. One may well ask if it has anything to say about how we should live, not only about the fruits of salvation, but about what kind of government we are to have or what kind of economy? [...]
John 17:11-19 11 And now I am no more in the world, but they are in the world, and I am coming to you. Holy Father, keep them in your name, which you have given me, that they may be one, even as we are one. 12 While I was with them, I kept them [...]
Richard Weaver desired to “restore culture,” and countless twentieth and twenty-first century pilgrims have been helped by his wisdom. Many have certainly moved from despair to hope (or from naïve utopianism to a more profound hopefulness) because of Weaver. But to restore “culture” means of course to restore persons. Somewhere along the way, many twentieth-century pilgrims [...]
Medieval civilization proved the Bible’s power to incorporate all the tales of the pagans. It was never the goal of Augustine, Jerome, and their successors to save classical literature, although that resulted from their efforts. What they wanted to know was Christ in the Scriptures. Despite the current enthusiasm over classical education, there is little [...]
The values and principles reflected in the U.S. Declaration of Independence resonate with the biblical ideas of innate human dignity, natural human rights, government by consent, self-governance, seeking redress, and a revolutionary spirit. Consider six biblical principles embodied in the United States of America Declaration of Independence. 1. Innate Human Dignity. From the beginning, the Bible [...]
Why is it that wherever the gospel goes the academy follows? What does the gospel have to do with the mind? I have tried—across five major themes—to delineate something of the relationship between the Christian vision of God, man, and the world and the intellectual life. The two theses I have argued are: 1. The [...]
Authentic discipleship transforms all aspects of life, every day, at work, at home, in all relationships. My discipleship to Jesus is, within clearly definable limits, not a matter of what I do, but of how I do it. Dallas Willard One of the great oaks among us is fallen. Dallas Willard, who died [...]
The psalms offer themselves as a constant companion through life, anticipating and giving voice to every spiritual concern we may have. They contain a world of thought and feeling, imagery and lyricism. And they supply the profoundest substance to all those of us who need material for our prayer or who don’t always pray as [...]
To be sure, the Bible is a challenge to us: it presents us with a world we did not create, did not reason ourselves into. It is in some places thorny and obscure, in others lucid and consoling, and very often majestic and grand. The world of reason and research can help us make sense [...]