Robert Louis Wilken

The passage quoted by Pope Benedict XVI in his speech at the University of Regensburg that caused an uproar in the Muslim world was written by Manuel II Palaeologus, Byzantine emperor from 1391 to 1425. The "empire" over which he presided consisted of the city of Constantinople, a tiny . . . . Continue Reading »

When I walked into the chapel at St. Vladimir’s Seminary on a bright spring morning for the funeral of Jaroslav Pelikan, I saw an open casket in the center of the church. Next to it was a young woman standing at a reading desk chanting a psalm with tears running down her cheeks. As she turned . . . . Continue Reading »

Christ and the Just Society in the Thought of Augustine by Robert Dodaro Cambridge University Press, 262 pages, $75 In the year 412 Augustine received from the pagan pro-consul of Africa a series of questions about the Incarnation and other Christian teachings. The topics arose out of regular . . . . Continue Reading »

When St. Augustine abandoned the teaching of rhetoric in Milan to enroll for baptism, he asked St. Ambrose, the bishop of Milan, what to read in the Scriptures “to make me readier and fitter to receive so great a grace”? Ambrose told him to read the prophet Isaiah. Augustine took his advice, . . . . Continue Reading »

Faith of Our Fathers: Reflections on Catholic Tradition by Eamon Duffy Continuum. 187 pp. $16.95 Faith of our Fathers is a spirited defense of Catholic ritual, discipline, and communal observance”of the ways in which the collective wisdom of Christian tradition is passed on from one . . . . Continue Reading »

In 1844 Philip Schaff, a Swiss church historian, to the surprise of his academic colleagues, accepted a position at the German Reformed Seminary in Mercersburg, Pennsylvania. At the time the seminary, under the leadership of the Reformed theologian John Nevin, was the center of a movement of . . . . Continue Reading »

Last spring on a trip to Erfurt, the medieval university town in Germany famous for its Augustinian cloister in which Martin Luther was ordained to the priesthood, I learned that only twenty percent of its population professed adherence to Christianity. In fact, when the topic of religion came up . . . . Continue Reading »

Given the contentiousness of public life in America today it was inevitable that the bulky stone monument inscribed with the Ten Commandments and placed in the rotunda of the Supreme Court of the State of Alabama would provoke controversy. When Judge Roy S. Moore commissioned Richard Hahnemann to . . . . Continue Reading »

The Crisis of Islam: Holy War and Unholy Terror by Bernard Lewis Modern Library. 170 pp. $19.95 Among the papers left by Mehmet Ali Agca, the Turk who shot the Pope on May 13, 1981, was a letter containing this sentence: “I have decided to kill John Paul II, supreme commander of the . . . . Continue Reading »

The arcane academic title of this book” Christian Figural Reading and the Fashioning of Identity ”offers no clue to its significance or timeliness. The phrase “Christian figural reading” refers to the Christian interpretation of the Old Testament. But for John David Dawson, . . . . Continue Reading »