In God’s Shadow: Politics in the Hebrew Bible by Michael Walzer Yale, 256 pages, $28 In the Bible, argues Michael Walzer, God casts a shadow over human politics, making it hard to see that human beings are at work. The Pentateuch’s different law codes, for

Anyone who tries to evaluate the theology of Hans Urs von Balthasar faces not only the sheer size of his work and his vast erudition but his great subtlety. To add to these difficulties, what he says in one book or passage he will often balance and qualify la

• This will be, we should warn you, a Catholic-heavy “While We’re At It.” But then popes don’t resign every day. • First, a word from New York. A friend who works in a New York City agency tells us that its employees have been told not to call anyone “home

It is Spring and the young Are all falling in love. It is Spring and the tongue Of the poet is free. Now Winter is shut Like a snake in a box With the shriek of the owl And the yelp of the fox. Now Winter withdraws To his palace of bones, With a clanging of

Wendell Berry’s recent self-described “general declaration” in support of “homosexual marriage” shocked many, fans and critics alike. Berry, who once wrote that marriage “cannot be altered to suit convenience or circumstance” and has long argued that marriage

Here she is again, old Worm-beak, Breast the color of a mud lake, Perched on a post of the rail fence, An eye of shining insolence. Frowzy, windblown, she whistles twice Some notes retrieved from Paradise, Swoops and spears the lawn and is gone Into the ch

The Next Pope Benedict XVI’s resignation marks the end of the heroic generation. Writing as I am before the conclave, I can’t know who will be his successor, but I can foresee this: No longer will the chief pastor of the Catholic Church be a man who partic

This is the end—for me, the beginning of life.               —Dietrich Bonhoeffer               (from his last recorded words) Words to a prison friend, spoken in haste. Gestapo men had come to transfer him, Low Sunday, sixty-seven years ago Today. The next

How to Create a Mind: The Secret of Human Thought Revealed by Ray Kurzweil Viking, 352 pages, $27.95 What goes into making a human mind? Two key elements, distinguished by Aristotle and Aquinas, are phantasms and concepts—a distinction entirely overlooked

The problem with much Christian worship in the contemporary world, Catholic and Protestant alike, is not that it is too entertaining but that it is not entertaining enough. Worship characterized by upbeat rock music, stand-up comedy, beautiful people taking c

The birth of Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard, two hundred years ago this month, has produced many commentaries and events celebrating the great Christian thinker. It’s not difficult to understand why. In works like Either/Or, Fear and Trembling, and The

A dozen Christian leaders have warned against adding recognition of same-sex partners to any immigration bill. “If your or any other proposal includes [same-sex] provisions, most, if not all of us, would have to oppose it, preventing us from mobilizing our ex

In a recent talk at the Wheaton Theology Conference, the Kenyan Anglican Archbishop David Gitari told of a Christian ministry that hired an ambulance to assist employees at a factory where injuries were being reported regularly. Eventually, someone had the br

My fourth son’s Afghanistan deployment ceremony was in March. It has taken me a while to sort through my still incomplete thoughts. We missed the actual ceremony. An overnight Kansas City snowstorm dropped eight inches over the seventy-five mile route to W

When Dallas Willard’s magnum opus, The Divine Conspiracy: Rediscovering Our Hidden Life in God, came out in 1998, I was a junior in high school. I can’t recall now what made me pick up a copy, but I knew soon thereafter that I’d found a book that would prove

Some twenty-three years ago, Ambassador Max Kampelman—former nuclear arms reduction negotiator with the Soviet Union and Counselor to the Department of State—decided that I needed a bit of diplomatic experience and invited me to be a public member of the U.S.

Two issues back, I spoke ill of a modern form of natural law theory that unsuccessfully attempts to translate an ancient tradition of moral reasoning into the incompatible language of secular reason. Because of an obscurity I allowed to slip into the fourth p

In 1986, Paul Simon took a look at the headlines full of pain and promise—stories about a boy in a bubble, bombs in baby carriages, ubiquitous cameras, and the ever-constant streams of information that engulf us—and wrote “Boy in the Bubble.” His lyrics, coup

The Myth of Persecution: How Early Christians Invented a Story of Martyrdom by Candida Moss HarperOne, 320 pages, $25.99 The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publish