“One man looks at a dying bird and thinks there’s nothing but unanswered pain. That death’s got the final word, it’s laughing at him. Another man sees that same bird, feels the glory, feels something smiling through it.” (From the opening monologue in The Thin Red Line) “For the early Christians the knowledge of the
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My regular reading practice of the Gospels has been most acutely altered over the past few years as a direct result of what now strikes me as a painfully obvious hermeneutical principle. In sum, I have learned to read all (without exception–I really do mean all) of Jesus’ sayings and actions in light of His coming death at the end of
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Paul’s warning in 1 Corinthians 6:18 often strikes me as a mystifying exaltation of sexual sin above other sorts of moral failures [note: I do not find persuasive the suggestions of some scholars that this statement actually reflects a Corinthian slogan rather than Paul’s own viewpoint; we're not off the hook that easily]. Why should deviance from
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David Foster Wallace, the enigmatic and fascinating author of Infinite Jest and (the posthumously published) The Pale King, gave a remarkable commencement address at Kenyon College in 2005, which the Wall Street Journal published here. While this transcribed speech has already circulated widely on the internet, I encourage you to check it out if you have not
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In C. H. Dodd’s expert but overlooked work, History and the Gospel, the renowned former professor of divinity at Cambridge pointed out a surprising piece of evidence which indicates the ultimate historical integrity of the early church’s memories about Jesus. By describing Jesus in ways that did not align with any Jewish expectations for what the Messiah would look like–and, moreoever, by
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In reviewing the polemical, vitriolic works of such “New Atheists” as Dawkins, Hitchens, Harris and Dennet in his book Atheist Delusions, David Bentley Hart looks wistfully back upon the more nuanced, honest and tragic atheism of thinkers like Nietzche and Sartre, and concludes with this lament: “It probably says more than it is comfortable to
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Blaise Pascal’s observation about the indelible God-shaped hole or vacuum within each fallen human being is justly famous. However, the larger context is less well-known, and yet I find the entire passage in Pensees to be brilliant:
