Beauty is the word that shall be our first. Beauty is the last thing which the thinking intellect dares to approach, since only it dances as an uncontained splendor around the double constellation of the true and the good and their inseparable relation to one another. Beauty is the disinterested one, without which the ancient Continue reading

Socrates: Education is not what the professions of certain men assert it to be. They presumably assert that they put into the soul knowledge that isn’t in it, as though they were putting sight into the blind. Glaucon: Yes, they do indeed assert that. Socrates: But the present argument, on the other hand indicates that Continue reading

In no other way could we have learned, wrote Irenaeus, of God’s way of redeeming humanity from sin and evil than by the death of the mediator on the cross. In a single packed sentence (among the most influential in early Christian teaching of salvation), Irenaeus distinguished between the violence of the Deceiver and the Continue reading

Perhaps most Christians view the Radical Reformation’s concept of a free church in a free state as the ideal, but its very limited implementation had often consigned it to theory rather than fact. Coupled with the new and dynamic concept of the church was a closer scrutiny of the sacraments, an attempt to rediscover their Continue reading

The most exposed and vulnerable aspect of the academic critics of scripture is the social location of the critics themselves. It is a neglected area of critique. While they are criticizing the social location of classic Christianity, their own social location has not been carefully enough observed and reported. The telling evidence is that they Continue reading

I have sat in empty streets and watched by lamplight while others retreat to their beds. I have felt the pangs of sorrow, the tragic joys of an inexpressible beauty. I have sat listening, quietly, to the thoughtless chatter of the television and wondered whether I am any different. I have felt the oddness of Continue reading

One of the side effects of the notion that questioning comes out of our commitments is that not everyone will find our questions equally interesting or important, as they do not share our beliefs. Whether hell exists and whether anyone is in it are important questions to us Christians. But they have a good deal Continue reading

The dialectic of Job 28, which looks back to confident experience and forward to inscrutability, is perhaps best stated in the formula of Job 1:21 “The Lord gave, and the Lord has taken away.” At one level that sounds uncritically pious. But if we linger there, it may suggest something else. It may suggest that Continue reading

The Greek philosopher Plato once told a myth about eros in the voice of a comic poet named Aristophanes. According to the whimsical story he spins, human beings were originally spherical creatures with four arms and four legs and two heads. As punishment for trying to usurp the gods’ power, the gods sliced them in Continue reading

In the end, both virtues and vices are habits that can eventually become “natural” to us. Philosophers describe the perfect achievement of virtue as yielding internal harmony and integrity. Compare, for example, the following two married persons: The first, let’s call Jane. Although she resists them, Jane regularly struggles with sexual feelings for men other Continue reading