30 Jan 2020 
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson
In today's post, Zanchi continues his response to the objection that Christians should not have festivals through an analysis of the Fourth Commandment. Zanchi here makes the important distinction between substance and accident in the commandment; notes an important parallel with gentile festivals that...
Read more → 29 Jan 2020 Posted by E.J. Hutchinson
In clearing out some old papers, I came across something I had meant to do here, but didn’t get around to it; so I’m doing it now. That “something” is a series on an interesting bit of Girolamo Zanchi’s commentary on Colossians: an excursus De Festis (“On Festivals”) in his comments on Col....
Read more → 16 Jan 2019 Posted by Steven Wedgeworth
One of the dangers inherent in "complementarianism" is the perception that ordination to ecclesiastical office is a matter of semi-arbitrary positive law and private zones of jurisdiction, that male leadership in church is only a question of ordination or specific church polity and only because a few bible...
Read more → 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 → 15 Jul 2018 Posted by Steven Wedgeworth
So let's talk about effeminacy. This came up as final point of criticism in my Mere Orthodoxy critique of the gay Christianity of Revoice and Spiritual Friendship. Now, I knew that "going there" would upset a lot of people. It's basically touching the third rail to even say the word "effeminate" today....
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...
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