25 Jul 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
"Natura abhorret a vacuo" Nature abhors a vacuum, and so every people constituted as a political body is going to have a schedule of sacred observances, of holy days--days marked out as special in some way, whether because of their perceived relation to a polity's foundation or to its preservation....
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 → 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 → 03 Jan 2018
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
If one holds to some version of natural law or a natural knowledge of the virtuous and the vicious, it might seem to imply that nothing else is required for virtuous action. I mean, we all know what "the good" is, right? Well, yes and no. Affirming that everyone knows the distinction between right...
Read more → 31 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In a truly bizarre thread on Twitter yesterday--the eve of the 500th anniversary of the Reformation--started by our own Steven Wedgeworth, a number of traditionalist Roman Catholics speculated as to whether it would be a good thing for the church to take up the cause of burning heretics at the stake...
Read more → 12 Oct 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
We haven't had a Hemmingsen post in a while, and I know how it has made you pine. Fret not; I'm here for you. In their discussion of the virtues, the magisterial Reformers followed the classical tradition in considering religion to fall under the category of, or to be a part of, justice, which can be conveniently...
Read more → 03 Oct 2017
Posted by Mark Jones 
Paul Zahl and Tullian Tchividjian are busy writing love letters (See here and here) to one another on Tullian's personal website. Zahl's article makes the following contention: "I would go so far as to say that Tullian’s personal experience, as bad as you want to make it out, has qualified him (and...
Read more → 10 Aug 2017
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
Some of our friends are arguing about Capitalism and Marxism, so I thought we would do what we usually do-- turn to the archives! What did the stuffy dead guys say about this? That's a big task, though (and one that we have been doing piece by piece over time), and so, true to form, I'll here focus on Calvin....
Read more → 04 Aug 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In Politics 1259a-b, Aristotle distinguishes between the type of authority fathers have over children and that possessed by husbands over wives as follows: "Of household management we have seen that there are three parts—one is the rule of a master over slaves, which has been discussed already,...
Read more → 25 Jul 2017
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
It's 2017, and so we should remember that there were several, not just one or two, important facets of the project of Reformation undertaken in the sixteenth century. One of these was to exalt the estate of marriage as a high and holy one, and not simply an option for second-class Christians who can't...
Read more →