The Calvinist International
At the Diet of Worms in 1521, Martin Luther famously didn’t say: “Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Gott helfe mir! Amen.” (“Here I stand. I can do no other. So help me God! Amen.“) Though he didn’t use precisely these words, they quickly came to be associated with him, and now everyone “knows” he […]
Exeunt Omnes? Is it appropriate for Christians to think of life in theatrical terms? Despite the present popularity of the dramatic metaphor, one could be forgiven for thinking we should not. After all, does it not lead, even subliminally, to our construing our lives as one big game of make-believe, with our selves (as created […]
Though Ross Douthat was easily able to take apart its over-confident assertions, there’s still something important to Adam Gopnik’s (very well written) essay, “Bigger than Phil: When did faith start to fade?” He gives a helpful short history of the rise of modern “atheism” and “skepticism,” but he also points out the practical side. Note well this […]
David Brooks’s latest raises a lot of questions. He basically calls for a return to neoconservativism– who knew that it had been lost?– but he conclude with this point: The solution is not to go back to 1980. It’s to imagine what kind of values Americans should have, and what kind of limited but energetic […]
Writing for The New York Times, Simon Romero tells an amazing story about the racist founding of Nueva Germania, Paraguay: The year was 1887 when two of the best-known German anti-Semites of the time put down stakes here in Paraguay’s remote jungle with 14 German families screened for their racial purity. The team of Bernhard […]
Peter Leithart here draws attention to libertarian guru Ludwig von Mises’ animosity toward Christianity. Mises’ charges are old ones, whose most recent variants include Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity as resentment-driven Sklavenmoral. This is not to say that there’s nothing at all to the thesis that Christianity deliberately upsets fixed settlements of inequity. It is in fact true. […]