The Calvinist International
Since my time reading Dallas Willard in my early 20s, I’ve been interested in the practice of meditation. My diligence in the discipline has waxed and waned throughout my life, with periods where it had deep effect and others where I came up dry. Yet, my growing appreciation for Thomistic psychology has confirmed the potential […]
James 1:27 does typically give Christians some grief: how can “true religion” be properly equated with making charitable stop-overs to orphans? In an incisive discussion on the historical relationship between the terms religion (religio) and science (scientia) in his Territories of Science and Religion, Peter Harrison makes clear that we typically misunderstand the import of the […]
Amy Nelson Burnett points out that Zwinglians and Lutherans differed on the practice of offering private confession and absolution. Lutherans believed the practice to be a healthy replacement for mandatory auricular confession, while the Zwinglians considered it meaningless for one Christian to pronounce forgiveness over another. Martin Bucer initially supported the Zwinglians on this issue […]
An emphasis on the importance of prayer and purification for the task of theologizing can be found in some quarters at the moment, and I have touched on the topic previously myself in respect to Gregory of Nazianzus. At the same time, we should remember that there is nothing peculiarly “patristic” about this emphasis, and […]
The eminent English divine Henry More (1618-1647), like many of his Protestant forebears, believed that piety is an essential part of moral philosophy, that is to say, that moral philosophy is not a secular discipline. The individual who seeks true virtue, More believed, would not be satisfied until he discovers the ultimate source of virtue […]