Robert Louis Wilken

I taught at the University of Virginia for twenty-five years. Thomas Jefferson, who founded the university, did not call the graduation ceremony “commencement.” He deemed it more fitting to call the occasion the “final exercises,” and it is called that to this day. Continue Reading »

The Richard I knew and loved was a man of prayer and of liturgy. He knew that the greatest gift we could offer to God was not our words, not our ideas, not our projects, but a heart ablaze with the fire of love. “Honor and glory belong to God alone,” said St. Bernard, “but God will receive neither if they are not sweetened with the honey of love.” . . . Continue Reading »

A Christian Pilgrim in Medieval Iraq: Riccoldo da Montecroce’s Encounter with Islam? by rita george-tvrtkovic ?brepols, 248 pages, $116 Toward the end of the thirteenth century, a friar named Riccoldo da Montecroce left his Dominican house in Florence to make the long journey to the Middle . . . . Continue Reading »

Defending Constantine: The Twilight of an Empire and the Dawn of Christendom by Peter Leithart IVP Academic, 373 pages, $27 Anti-Constantinianism is a form of ecclesial primitivism. Like other modern historical theories of the “fall of the Church””for example, Adolf von . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the Enlightenment it has been fashionable to denounce Christians for prostituting the legacy of classical culture. Edward Gibbon wrote that Christians had “debased and vitiated the faculties of the mind” and “extinguished the hostile light of philosophy and science” that . . . . Continue Reading »

The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years By Christopher Page Yale, 692 Pages, $45 The pipe organ receives the highest praise in John Dryden’s poem “A Song for St. Cecilia’s Day”: What human voice can reach / The sacred organ’s praise? / Notes inspiring . . . . Continue Reading »

Hugh of St. Victor BY PAUL ROREM OXFORD, 256 PAGES, $27.95 In the Paradiso Dante locates Hugh of St. Victor (d.1142) in the second circle of Christian teachers circling the sun, among whom he first mentions St. Bonaventure who introduces Hugh and asso-ciates him with two early Franciscan brothers . . . . Continue Reading »

Among the Gentiles: Greco-Roman Religion and Christianity By Luke Timothy Johnson Yale, 461 pages, $32.50 It is generally recognized that early Christian thinkers drew on the philosophical traditions of the world in which they lived. A good example is the appropriation of the cardinal virtues: . . . . Continue Reading »

Within a few paragraphs the perspicacious reader of this “new” history of early Christianity will sense that here is another recycling of old and tired clichés that are predictable in popular histories of Christianity. The tip offs are the buzzword diversity and the villain, the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Forge of Christendom: The End of Days and the Epic Rise of the West by Tom Holland Doubleday, 476 pages, $30 In 1872, Chancellor Otto von Bismarck stood before the German Reichstag and declared, “We shall not go to Canossa.” By calling up the image of the German king Henry IV standing . . . . Continue Reading »