Reformation21

We Christians are caught in a dilemma: it is captured succinctly by Amos: "Does disaster come to a city, unless the LORD has done it?" ( Amos 3:6). It is simply not an option for us to remove God from the context of evil and then suddenly invoke him when the sun shines. This is true not just for...

In an article in the Chicago Tribune this week, Jodi Cohen and Maegan Carberry discussed the case of Kate Darmody, a winning member of the National Championship Women's Lacrosse team from Northwestern University. She, along with her fellow players had been invited to the White House to meet the...

Will there be a Starbucks store in heaven? It's a crazy question, I know, but humor me for a second or two. Perhaps we should ask the more theologically precise question: what exactly will heaven be like? It is initially surprising how little information we are given about the exact nature of the...

Shortly before college I read Mortimer Adler's little classic How to Read a Book . That may sound like an odd title. After all, how could somebody read the book unless they already knew how to read? And if they did know how to read, then why would they need to read it at all? How to Read a Book...

We can now take this point a stage further: in this context, that of the god-like aspirations of leadership, sin becomes incredibly attractive. In the Confessions, Augustine makes it clear in relation to a trivial act of the youthful crime of stealing some pears from a neighbour's tree. It was not...

As a historian who is paid to look at the past, I find myself frequently indulging in rants about how we live in an anti-historical age, where history is not taken seriously. Typically, of course, I am referring to those who are so absorbed in the perpetual cultural flux that is consumerism that...

It is arguable that the last hundred years have witnessed an interesting reversal in Western society, where the great taboo of the Victorian era and the great obsession of the same period have dramatically switched places. The great taboo for Victorians was, of course, sex. Human beings all depend...

There is something aleatoric about the content of these columns. Frankly, it depends on what has been buzzing around my head in the last seven days. And what is it this week? Well, a conversation with a Jewish lady who sat next to me on a flight from Toronto to Atlanta! I'd been upgraded--bliss!...

The Welsh have not (generally) adopted that legacy of Platonism in post-Renaissance culture, commonly called "the stiff upper-lip." The Welsh, you see, give voice to their complaints with reckless abandonment. Typical here is Wales's most famous twentieth century poet and writer, Dylan Thomas, in...

At the end of a lecture, I often find myself being asked questions by a student who prefaces what he or she has to say with the phrase `This may be a stupid question, but....' My response is almost always the same: there are no stupid questions, only stupid answers. Perhaps that it a little...