Second Sunday after Pentecost

‘I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are M.D.s or Ph.D.s, have any comparable learning. When they talk about heaven and earth, the relations between men and women, parents and children, the human condition, I hear nothing but clichés, superficialities, the material [...]

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Augustine Blog Conference

The timing of deadlines at work conspired to keep me from attending the conference on Paul and Philosophy in Vancouver which will be taking place next month. But I’m very excited to see that the next entry in the increasingly common phenomenon of blog conferences is the following, over at Per Caritatem:

Conversations with Augustine, [...]

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First Sunday after Pentecost (Trinity Sunday)

‘By “putting forward” the Son, as the apostle Paul wrote, isn’t the Father abusing the Son? Doesn’t substitution constitute another wrongdoing, this time against the innocent Christ?… The Father would be abusing the Son and committing divine wrongdoing – rather than taking away human wrongdoing – if Christ were a third party, beyond God who [...]

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Pentecost

‘Our generation has nobody home in the universe, nobody at all. Eventually, let us understand this: only a personal comforter can comfort man who is personal, and only one Comforter is great enough, the infinite-personal God who exists, that is the God of Judeo-Christian Scripture. Only He is the sufficient Comforter.’
- Francis Schaeffer
‘But it is [...]

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Oh, let’s see you try and stop her

What will I say if the kid ever asks me what Mom was doing coaching a high school softball team when she was six and a half months pregnant? I’ll say, It made her happy.
And if Frogger ever ends up playing for the Red Sox, we’ll know where his/her hitting mechanics came from..

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Calvinism and economic individualism

Over at Speculations and Such, Jonathan has an insightful comment on R.H. Tawney’s Religion and the Rise of Capitalism which includes the following, relevant to an historical understanding of the social implications of Calvinism:
Tawney… makes the important point that “[b]oth an intense individualism and a rigorous Christian socialism could be deduced from Calvin’s doctrine. Which [...]

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Seventh Sunday in Easter

‘Art is the unceasing effort to compete with the beauty of flowers — and never succeeding.’
- Marc Chagall

‘Beauty will save the world.’
- Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Idiot

‘My conceits will never serve to wake the dead. Art has no limit but that. You may come enchantingly close, and you may wither under the power of [...]

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Wolterstorff on Kuyper and Solidarity; Volf on Solidarity and Repentance

Following his review of some of Calvin’s thoughts on the poor in Chapter 4 of Until Justice and Peace Embrace (to which the page numbers in this post refer, unless noted otherwise), Wolterstorff turns to the restating of some of the same themes by Dutch Christian statesman Abraham Kuyper. In 1891, early in the [...]

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