22 Aug 2016
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Did you know Melanchthon wrote poetry? Well, did you? And did you know he wrote a lot of it? I didn't realize until recently that he did, and until very recently just how much of it there was. Last week The Imaginative Conservative ran a piece of mine on one of Melanchthon's prefaces to Cicero's On...
Read more → 20 Jun 2016
Posted by Simon Kennedy 
Further to my previous post on Hobbes and Vermigli, the latter wrote in 1555 following on from his denunciation of those who understand Naaman the Syrian's example to allow for attendance at Mass and so on: Neither did Eliseus [Elisha], as our men do think, grant Naaman licence or liberty to do so as he had said,...
Read more → 16 Jun 2016
Posted by Simon Kennedy 
In his massive chapter on ecclesiastical power in Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes argues that people can rightly bow before idols, or deny belief in Christ as Messiah. He writes that if a civil magistrate forbids one to believe in Christ, it does not matter: To this I answer, that such a forbidding is of no effect,...
Read more → 27 Apr 2016
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
In a comment on Colossians 3.7 ("In these too you once walked, when you were living in them" [ESV]), John Calvin makes use of the distinction between actus and potentia to explain the difference between "walking" and "living" in the verse (after having a little dig at Erasmus for what Calvin considers...
Read more → 20 Apr 2016
Posted by Steven Wedgeworth 
One of our ongoing goals here at TCI is to rebut the notion that "Calvinism" or "Reformed Theology" has maintained an antagonistic attitude towards natural revelation, natural philosophy, natural law, and wisdom gleaned from pagan sources. This is certainly true of more recent forms of it, what is sometimes...
Read more → 05 Apr 2016
Posted by Simon Kennedy 
In Leviathan Thomas Hobbes writes that faith in Jesus Christ is not attainable, except by the sovereign gift of God. He says the following, in the context of a discussion about the role of the Christian person in a Christian commonwealth: It is the doctrine of St. Paul concerning Christian faith in general,...
Read more → 30 Mar 2016
Posted by Andrew Fulford 
One of the most provocatively titled books I have ever come across from a contemporary ethical philosopher is Sarah Conly’s Against Autonomy: Justifying Coercive Paternalism. The book’s gist is just as punchy: Since Mill's seminal work On Liberty, philosophers and political theorists have accepted...
Read more → 29 Mar 2016
Posted by Andrew Fulford 
In his stimulating The Pretenses of Loyalty, John Perry conveys a seminal moment in John Rawls’ life from autobiographical comments: To the extent that Christianity is taken seriously, I came to think it could have deleterious effects on one’s character. Christianity is a solitary religion: each...
Read more → 29 Feb 2016
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Consider this an exercise in the the analysis of the evolution of the heroic temper. Lewis and Vergil In his chapter on Vergil in A Preface to Paradise Lost, C.S. Lewis speaks of Aeneas’ “reluctant yet unfaltering search for the abiding city (mansuram urbem)” (emph. orig.). The passage in question...
Read more → 05 Feb 2016
Posted by E.J. Hutchinson 
Several months ago, I wrote a brief post on beauty's relation to cognition, rather than desire, in Thomas Aquinas. Aesthetics, that is, must have its relation to the rational and the real,1 rather than to some unspecified or underdeveloped sense of longing. Perhaps some confirmation is found in the first...
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