Edward T. Oakes

When Karl Barth was at the height of his fame and productivity in the years between 1930 and 1960 and making neo“orthodoxy the dominant force in Protestant thought, another trend in theology was competing for the attention of the public. Sometimes known as the history“of“salvation . . . . Continue Reading »

The Forbidden Image: An Intellectual History of Iconoclasm By Alain Besançon Translated by Jean Marie Todd University of Chicago Press. 408 pp. $40 One of the oddest features of contemporary English”indeed of modern languages across the board”is the habit speakers so often indulge . . . . Continue Reading »

In the course of the lectures that later became The Idea of a University , John Henry Newman neatly de­ scribed the favorite rhetorical trick of secular intellectuals: “They persuade the world of what is false,” he said, “by urging upon it what is true.” Newman wrote these . . . . Continue Reading »

Confessions of a Philosopher: A Personal Journey Through Western Philosophy from Plato to Popper By Bryan Magee Modern Library. 512 pp. $13.95 paper Philosophers, it would seem, are born, not made. At least that is the impression one gets from reading some of their childhood reminiscences. Stephen . . . . Continue Reading »

It is of course the case that only God knows what will happen in the next century and the next millennium. But we human beings are created with an irrepressible disposition toward the future, as well as a capacity to recall the past. In the last year we published a “millennium series” of . . . . Continue Reading »

Copyright (c) 1999 First Things 98 (December 1999): 17-24. When debate about an artist’s merit no longer seems to have any point, one is left either with an icon of culture, too sacred to enjoy, or with a target of satire, brought down to our more humdrum level by a vaudeville lampooning of the . . . . Continue Reading »

As a way of dividing up history into discrete, manageable wholes, the habit of clustering events according to centuries is probably no more (or less) superficial than any other. And surely it must be safer and more reliable than bandying about such descriptive monikers as “the Age of Faith,” . . . . Continue Reading »

Natural Law in Judaism.by David Novak.Cambridge University Press. 210 pp $54.95. I At first glance, no marriage in the history of ideas would seem more unlikely to succeed as an artificial union of opposites (“arranged,” as it were, by Yenta the village matchmaker) than that between Jewish . . . . Continue Reading »

Unauthorized Freud: Doubters Confront a Legend Edited by Frederick Crews Viking, 301 pages, $24.95 In his book Modern Essays , Cambridge University’s distinguished literary critic Sir Frank Kermode called book reviewing”at least when honestly done and not just as an adjunct to the . . . . Continue Reading »

No doctrine inside the precincts of the Christian Church is received with greater reserve and hesitation, even to the point of outright denial, than the doctrine of original sin. Of course in a secular culture like ours, any number of Christian doctrines will be disputed by outsiders, from the . . . . Continue Reading »