The Calvinist International
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. And yet, it’s […]
In the fictional story of the Fall into Modernity (coming soon as a Netflix Original Series), Sir Francis Bacon sometimes plays the role of a big baddie for banishing formal and final causality from natural philosophy (i.e. science; what he calls “physic”). Never mind the benefits this has for, you know, the progress of ACTUAL […]
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 […]
It is well known that the Apostle Paul appeals to his Roman citizenship to notify the Roman military tribune in Acts 22 that he should not be flogged. He later, in Acts 25, appeals to Caesar in order to gain a just hearing with respect to the charges leveled against by the “chief priests and […]
In On Obligations 3.21-2, Cicero says: If a person deprives his neighbour of something, and furthers his own advantage by another’s loss, such behaviour flies in the face of nature more than death or poverty or pain or anything which can affect our persons or our external possessions; for first and foremost it undermines the fellowship […]
Today, December 7, is the anniversary of the murder/assassination of the great Roman statesman Cicero. He was far from perfect, but a reasonable person can still express some measure of gratitude for his erudite and variegated work. I append here Plutarch’s account of his ignominious and underhanded demise from his Life of Cicero. So then Quintus, […]
Today we go back in time to Cicero’s Laws 1.42-5. There he elucidates the necessary foundation for positive law, which is justice. Without it, there is merely opinion and power. Laws are not ultimately “established” by will and the decisions of the powerful. If they were, one could say that there is a “right” to theft, […]
(Some readers may already be familiar with what follows, but it may be news to others; and it should be of interest to all!) According to Johannes Aurifaber, Martin Luther wrote the following words–the last ones he wrote, in fact–on a scrap of paper and placed them on his bedside table shortly before he died, […]
What? As one of the epigraphs to the first chapter of his Imitating God in Christ: Recapturing a Biblical Pattern (which I’m enjoying immensely, by the way, and which I may review at some point in this space), Jason Hood quotes Herman Bavinck as follows: Homer attributed human properties to the gods; I would prefer to […]
What is the historian supposed to do? How does his task relate to that of other kinds of writer? This is a question that exercised ancient historians and others who theorized about history in antiquity. Cicero was one of those who did the latter, and in On the Laws 1.4-5 he gives a brief summary […]