January 2009
73 posts
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The Yale Whiffenpoofs sing William Butler...
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WatchTimelapse photography from Ettubrute’s flickr photostream. He describes the shoot thusly: On my night time flight back to SF from Amsterdam, I noticed that the lights from cities were making the clouds glow. Really spectacular and ethereal — it was really seeing the impact of urban environments from a different perspective. Each glow or squiggle represents one town or city! Luckily the...
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WatchJohn Polkinghorne on the problem of evil
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How God Turned Around Nixon's Hatchet Man →
Chuck Colson speaks at Harvard. Video from the Veritas Forum.
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More Alvin Plantinga, this time on solipsism. A...
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Quaerebam quid amarem
“To Carthage then I came, and a welter of corrupted loves assaulted me from all sides. I was not yet in love; I was in love with being in love. With secret yearning I despised myself for not yearning enough. I searched for an object of love, loving to love.”
—Augustine, Confessions, iii. 1.
Remember Veni Carthaginem when hearing of deadly nonsense such as “Japanese Launch Campaign to Marry...
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Narnia news
Douthat says the news on the continuation of the Narnia movie franchise is good and, perhaps, not bad.
That Dawn Treader may get better treatment than Prince Caspian is devoutly to be wished. As Douthat writes: “But this [Prince Caspian] achievement comes with a price—namely, the evisceration of Lewis’s major theme. If The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe is a story about rebirth and...
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Obama worship, continued →
This is creepy.
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WatchThe Rev. Dr. John Polkinghorne FRS KBE, formerly a theoretical physicist at Cambridge University, is an Anglican priest.
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“These are the days when the Christian is expected to praise every creed except...”
– G. K. Chesterton, Illustrated London News, 1928
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Alvin Plantinga, on the use of 'fundamentalist'
We must first look into the use of this term ‘fundamentalist’. On the most common contemporary academic use of the term, it is a term of abuse or disapprobation, rather like ‘son of a bitch’, more exactly ‘sonovabitch’, or perhaps still more exactly (at least according to those authorities who look to the Old West as normative on matters of pronunciation) ‘sumbitch.’ When the term is used in this...
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from an interview with Robert W. Jenson
Christian Century Magazine: Accounts of theological and political disputes in this country often pit the religious right against mainline or liberal Protestantism. How would you describe the main features of the American religious landscape and where would you locate yourself?
Robert Jenson: Contrasting liberal or left with conservative or right yields, in my view, a map of very limited utility. For my own part, I have been labeled both ways, depending on who was disapproving of me.
At least theologically, there are two effective divisions between American Christians. One is between those for whom the gospel is itself the norm of all truth and the person of Christ therefore the founding metaphysical fact, and those for whom some other agenda or "theory" is the overriding norm. The other is between those who use "justification by faith" — or in the especially aggravated case of Lutherans, the "law and gospel" distinction — to fund their antinomianism, and those appalled by this. The language in which I have described the alternatives will doubtless betray on which side of each division I find myself.
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“The world is not a lodging-house at Brighton, which we are to leave because it...”
– G. K. Chesterton
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Fyodor Dostoevsky died January 28, 1881 in St....
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View from the Catacombs
“I wouldn’t want to pose as a religious thinker,” he [Updike] says. “I’m more or less a shady type improvising his way from book to book and trying to get up in the morning without a toothache. At one time I held very strongly the opinion that Paul Tillich and religious liberals like him were traitors in the theological camp because they were trying to humanize...
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“Among the repulsions of atheism for me has been its drastic uninterestingness as...”
– John Updike, Self-Consciousness: Memoirs, chapter 3
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Let us walk through the door.
Make no mistake: if He rose at all it was as His body; if the cells’ dissolution did not reverse, the molecules reknit, the amino acids rekindle, the Church will fall.
It was not as the flowers, each soft Spring recurrent; it was not as His Spirit in the mouths and fuddled eyes of the eleven apostles; it was as His Flesh: ours.
The same hinged thumbs and toes, the same valved...
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“Sin, which is always itself the same old thing, has many faces; one is acting as...”
– Robert Jenson, Systematic Theology: The Works of God, New York: Oxford University Press, 1999, p. 99. [As I see it, Jenson and Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury, are the two most important theologians writing today.]
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Faithful Disbelief
Paul Tillich: "Existential doubt and faith are poles of the same reality, the state of ultimate concern." [Dynamics of Faith, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1957], p. 22.
Karl Barth: "There is certainly a justification for the doubter. But there is no justification for doubt itself (and I wish someone would whisper that in Paul Tillich's ear)." [Evangelical Theology: An Introduction, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, Doubleday, 1963], p. 117.
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Mark Noll, the leading Church historian (and a...
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“What do I gain if, humanly speaking, I fought with beasts at Ephesus? If the...”
– The Apostle Paul, 1 Corinthians 15: 32
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Watch
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Peter Kreeft, Pro-Life Logic
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How to Pray for the President. A sermon preached...
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“O Lord, our heavenly Father, the high and mighty Ruler of the universe, who dost...”
– A Prayer for the President of the United States, and all in civil Authority, The Book of Common Prayer, 1789.
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“Christianity, and nothing else, is the ultimate foundation of liberty,...”
– Jürgen Habermas, philosopher and self-proclaimed secular atheist, in his 2007 essay “A Time of Transition”
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“The Founding Fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural...”
– John Updike
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Patrick Deneen on how Wendell Berry’s thought...
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Conserving Liberalism?
As a whole what this meant was that American “conservatism” became considerably anti-traditional. In occupying the abandoned space of Lockeanism, it resided with the deep anti-traditionalism that lie at the heart of Locke’s philosophy. “Traditionalism” is, of course, almost as meaningless a word in the abstract as conservatism: what it most fundamentally seeks to signal is the legitimacy of...
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Dana Gioia talks about the life and work of Henry...
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“Politics is about power — how to exercise it, how to construct institutions to...”
– Professor William K. “Sandy” Muir, in his syllabus for “Introduction to American Politics” at The University of California at Berkeley. If Potomac were closer to Berkeley, I’d take every course taught by Dr. Muir. High on the list of things I most look forward to every...
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“I’m the only flood you want in your basement.”
– Dan Flood, a fourth-generation plumber, as he finished fixing a break in the water line to my second-floor bathroom.
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Limits and Hope: Christopher Lasch and Political...
To say that Lasch feared we had lost our moral bearings is to understate. I wish that he had spent more time rummaging about in the underpinnings of his conclusion. But that wasn’t his way. If he had, I believe he would have detected the wholesale—or nearly so—abandonment of the faculty of judging or discerning at work in late twentieth century American culture. The “victimization...
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"I do not know the answer."
[Nicholas Wolterstorff is Noah Porter Professor of Philosophical Theology at Yale University. He has been president of the American Philosophical Association and of the Society of Christian Philosophers.]
Christian Century [magazine]: You are perhaps most widely known for your moving book Lament for a Son, about the death of your son Eric. That book ends with a vision of God bearing the suffering of the world in tears. Perhaps that vision is the end of theodicy, or the dissolving of theodicy. In any case we wonder how you might respond to a classic theodicy question: Why did God create a world that God must endure in tears?
Nick Wolterstorff: My little book Lament for a Son is not a book about grief. It is a cry of grief. After the death of our son, I dipped into a number of books about grief. I could not read them. It was impossible for me to reflect on grief in the abstract. I was in grief. My book is a grieving cry. In the course of my cry I hold out the vision of God as with me in my grief, of God as grieving with me; God is with me on the mourning bench. I know that one of the attributes traditionally ascribed to God is impassibility—the inability to suffer. I think the traditional theologians were mistaken on this point. I find the scriptures saying that God is disturbed by what transpires in this world and is working to redeem us from evil and suffering. I do not see how a redeeming God can be impassible.
The traditional question of theodicy is, Why does God permit moral evil and permit suffering that serves no discernible good? If we hold that God is not impassible, then in addition to that question we have another. Why does God permit what disturbs God? Why does God allow what God endures in tears? I do not know the answer. In faith I live the question.
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From Russ and Beth White, Tenwek Hospital, Kenya
Enoch weighed a little less than 4 pounds, and had severely underdeveloped lungs with pneumonia. He was requiring a form of artificial ventilation just to keep oxygen flowing to his body before we ever even considered surgery. I looked him over and decided that there was just about no way this child could survive, regardless of how much work and time I devoted to him. I talked to the head nurse in...
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“Do not fear for I have redeemed you. I have called your name, you are mine. When...”
– Isaiah 43: 1 – 2. The words are engraved on the four curves of the new cruciform font recently installed at Salisbury Cathedral.
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