09 Jul 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
As we continue our thoughts on gay Christianity and “spiritual friendship,” we need to take an important detour. My original plan to was to move from concupiscence to the topic of effeminacy, but as I worked through Augustine’s writings on concupiscence, I was confronted with his peculiar theories...
Read more → 06 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
The next writer in Auden's judgmental catalog of poets is William Blake. Like Dante and his Commedia, Blake was included in the syllabus of the literature course Auden taught at the University of Michigan the year after he wrote New Year Letter, "Fate and the Individual in European Literature" (the...
Read more → 04 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Prologue. If one is reading a secondary source but also wants to be sure he, you know, knows something, it is advisable to track down primary sources in order to check the veracity of claims made about some figure, text, or whatever. "Trust, but verify," as the Gipper said. Scene: Someone poring over...
Read more → 28 Jun 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
Picking up from my previous post on the problem of gay-but-chaste Christianity, I want to talk about concupiscence. Jack Bates criticizes me for introducing concupiscence into the discussion in an over-generalized and therefore simplistic way. Bates writes: Wedgeworth’s treatment of concupiscence...
Read more → 26 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
This is for the philistines, to help you get in touch with your inner non-philistine and slay the Goliath within you. Dare to be a David! Name-checking one's literary influences has a long pedigree. One might mention Ennius' Pythagorean dream in which the ghost of Homer appeared to him and told him that...
Read more → 25 Jun 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
My essay over at Mere Orthodoxy on the Spiritual Friendship conversation has generated a fair amount of discussion these past few weeks. Much of it has been very good. Some of it was of the predictable online partisanship variety, which, while inevitable, is still too bad. There was a sort of blind partisanship...
Read more → 22 Jun 2018
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
In his Commentary on the Heidelberg Catechism, following his commentary on Q&A #7, Zacharius Ursinus enters into an extended discussion of sin. He gives a basic definition and then makes several distinctions between varying kinds of sins. The first is the common distinction between "original sin"...
Read more → 22 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Yesterday we saw that Kierkegaard distinguished between a genius and an apostle via the following kinds of binaries: immanence vs. transcendence; inborn talent vs. the exterior call; aesthetic vs. authoritative appeal. A different model of authority that presents some problems for that of Kierkegaard...
Read more → 21 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In Of the Difference between a Genius and an Apostle, Søren Kierkegaard discusses, well, the difference between a genius and an apostle. A "genius," for him, is always immanent, always assimilable, never paradoxical (a favorite word of Kierkegaard's)--even if he appears paradoxical, it is only temporary,...
Read more → 20 Jun 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In his perhaps unfortunately named work Bowels Opened, Richard Sibbes makes a connection between the cloud God used to guide the Israelites to the Promised Land out of Egypt and the reference in the letter to the Hebrews to the "cloud of witnesses" ("Therefore, since we are surrounded by so great a cloud...
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