To Think God as Love

In this CT article, Marlin Jeschke asks ‘Who killed church discipline’? The first suspect: the mega-church, where the members — insofar as they deserve that description — scarcely know one another, a fact that renders the idea of submitting to discipline absurd. However, small churches fail to exercise discipline, too.  The truth of the matter [...]

In a recent opinion piece, Hauerwas explained what it means to ‘speak Christian’, and why such speaking is necessary. This is a selection: …the most important part of writing and speaking Christian is what is not said. To speak Christian is an exacting discipline. It has taken the church centuries to develop habits of speech [...]

Heresy and Faith: How Early Christians Decided and Why it Matters from The Veritas Forum on Vimeo.

This is the conclusion to Cadoux’s 1919 book, The Early Christian Attitude to War. The testimony of the early Church in regard to the participation of Christians in war will naturally vary very considerably in the strength of the appeal it makes to different types of Christians to-day. In view of all that we have [...]

“Imagine the Loss of the Christian Holy Places” In this recent First Things blog post, Novak worries (not without reason [but perhaps without faith]) about the future of Israel, and about the possible consequences the annihilation of Israel’s holy places — including the mount of our Lord’s famous sermon — might have on the future [...]

How do we think as Christians — which is not the same as thinking as Americans, or as middle-class citizens – about the controversial (inaptly named) ‘Ground Zero Mosque’? I think, among other things, we need to ask how, if at all, the building of this mosque helps or hinders Americans’ openness to the Word of God. The [...]

‘Gabiel Marcel… said that watching television reminded him of seeing a tiny patch of the ocean floor through the hatch of a submarine, imagining it to be the whole world… It is incalculable how much prayer is lost for the Church and the world due to the media, how many treasures God has been robbed [...]

Through our bodies God defeats our flesh.

In philosophical and theological debate, these distinctions have often been radicalized to the point of establishing a clear antithesis between them: descending, oblative love—agape—would be typically Christian, while on the other hand ascending, possessive or covetous love —eros—would be typical of non-Christian, and particularly Greek culture. Were this antithesis to be taken to extremes, the [...]

‘In the end, however, the ideas God has are the only true ones, and ultimately we simply have to submit to them’ 1 Hans Urs von Balthasar ‘Lent: Love Provides a Last Chance’ inYou Crown the Year with Your Goodness (Sermons through the Liturgical Year (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1989). ↩

“American Protestants do not have to believe in God because they believe in belief. That is why we have never been able to produce interesting atheists in America. The God most Americans say they believe in just isn’t interesting enough to deny.”

A couple of years ago, Francis Beckwith, former head of the Evangelical Theological Society and a member of the Discovery Institute, made waves by announcing his return to the Catholic Church. Recently, James K.A. Smith – like Beckwith, a philosopher – reviewed Beckwith’s book-length account of his return to Rome. I found Smith’s criticisms striking [...]

The crisis in art today, where nobody much seems to know how to move beyond the sterile opposition of kitsch sentimentalism on the one hand and in-your-face brutalism on the other, is not to be solved, as Roger Scruton in his recent work seems to want to solve it, by a return to an early [...]

God hides himself from us so he can present us to one another.

‘In short and in conclusion, belief in the uniqueness and finality of Jesus Christ – for all the assaults made upon it in the modern age – remains for the Christian a way of speaking about hope for the entire human family. And because it’s that, we are bound to say something about it. We [...]