“Patience, hard thing!” So begins a stirring poem by the great Victorian Jesuit, Gerard Manley Hopkins. Patience: it sure is a hard thing. Here is a brief meditation on a topic I'm waist-deep in these days. Peter the Apostle knew this hard thing called patience all too well, and in one place he addresses the problem in
I am fascinated by the way accounts of people lost and alone at sea tap into a unique complex of deep human fears of abandonment and isolation, the unknown future and unseen dangers, and the prospect of slow, painful death. Reflecting on them has prompted the question more than once: What of all those biblical
Surely one of life’s greatest pleasures is a worthwhile volume that fits in a coat pocket. John Calvin’s so–called Golden Booklet of the True Christian Life qualifies as a most worthwhile volume, though the fit in the pocket is, in its most recent printing at least, snug.[1] A devotional classic to be placed alongside (but
(N.B. The following was originally written for a publication reaching a general Christian audience.) An Assembly of Divines As I write, a major publication is rolling off the presses. The five-volume Minutes and Papers of the Westminster Assembly (143-1653) (OUP, 2012), edited by Chad Van Dixhoorn, a publication with which I am honored to have had
How should we understand biblical passages in the Pentateuch which prescribe family involvement in the execution of covenant judgments/sanctions of fellow family members? What does this say about the relationship of family relations to the covenant community as family? About family violence? Note the important new book by Caryn A. Reeder, The Enemy in the
"Then came one of the seven angels who had the seven bowls full of the seven last plagues and spoke to me, saying, 'Come, I will show you the Bride, the wife of the Lamb.' And he carried me away in the Spirit to a great, high mountain, and showed me the holy city Jerusalem
Part 1 of 2 is here. A sketch of some conclusions from my month at the Center: 1. The prevailing narrative for explaining the transition from pre- to post-Enlightenment thought and culture is a story of maturing from ignorance to knowledge and, even more condescendingly, myth to science. Particularly when it comes to shifting perspectives on
Freud’s Last Session by Mark St. Germain directed by Mary B. Robinson C. S. Lewis: Jonathan Crombie Sigmund Freud: David Wohl Performed at the Pittsburgh Public Theater March 20, 2012 Children often play at imagining chance meetings of their favorite superheroes or fantasy characters. What if Batman faced off against the Human Torch, or the
The conventional story of the decline of hell in the modern world points out the seismic shift from a premodern and "unscientific" to modern and "scientific" cosmology in the seventeenth century. But is it as simple as that, and was such a decline in fact rendered inevitable by the rise of the natural sciences? By
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