The Calvinist International
Augustine, that is, on the spirit proper to theological inquiry, from Book 1 of De Trinitate: Accordingly I have undertaken the task, by the bidding and help of the Lord my God, not so much of discoursing with authority respecting things I know already, as of learning those things by piously discoursing on them. (On […]
It’s easy to take things for granted. It is easy, particularly, in thinking about the moral leaven of the Christian faith in forming societal assumptions. This is due, I should think, partly to an abiding awareness of, and consequent sheepishness about, the failures and foibles of the church through the ages, and partly–and perhaps more […]
We are delighted to be able to share with you an interview recently conducted with Allan Carlson, whose book Third Ways was reviewed in this space in January. You can also see a survey of Dr. Carlson’s political and economic thought here. We are deeply grateful to Dr. Carlson for taking the time to respond […]
Spurred on by the recent two-minutes hate regarding The Great Gatsby, Sam Sacks has a provocative little essay at the Page-Turner blog at The New Yorker online. His thoughts on democracy and criticism–on the sociology of criticism, as it were–are interesting, and form part of a conversation that is very much worth having. A couple […]
An interesting interview with literary critic Adam Kirsch (New Republic, New Yorker, etc.) in the UK Prospect. A teaser: Last year there was a lot of debate among critics like Laura Miller and Daniel Mendelsohn about whether literary critics should refrain from writing very negative reviews, especially given the notion that literary culture is “under threat.” […]
In his classic introduction to late antiquity, Peter Brown notes that the idea of the “patron saint” is an outgrowth of the social dynamics of the late Roman Empire, in which common people – clients – needed advocates at a distant court to which they did not have access. It was, then, not an outgrowth […]
Last week I referred to the “progressivist” strain in Greek cultural thinking, which was associated with Prometheus and which tracked a general advancement of mankind from his earliest days to the present. But there is another strain as well, the “primitivist” one, in which the history of mankind is described as a general decline over […]
In the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, written possibly near the end of the 6th century BC, there is contained one of the earliest pieces of evidence for a principle of due process in Greek thought. Early in the hymn, the infant Hermes steals 50 of Apollo’s cattle and will not admit what he’s done. Apollo […]
A couple of addenda. Yesterday, as I said, I was engaging in a bit of larkishness. But there is in fact a serious point behind it, one which, not surprisingly, Bavinck anticipated a century ago. For one of two things is true: either religion essentially belongs to human nature and is therefore native to it, […]
This post is something of a lark, apropos (maybe?) of some of Peter’s recent writings on nature and supernature, and also (maybe?) of Steven’s on Adam and evolution. There is a stream, which can be called progressivist, in the Greek mythic tradition in which man as originally constituted was lacking in particular gifts that allowed […]