Wesley Hill

At an academic conference not too long ago, I delivered a paper on St. Paul’s view of marriage and celibacy. In my paper, I took Paul’s side, extolling his vision of marriage and celibacy as interlocking, mutually reinforcing Christian vocations. On the one hand, I said, marriage can be a melody hummed by any pedestrian Christian couple that still calls to mind the full grandeur of the symphony of Christ’s love for the Church. Likewise, the Christian celibate can bear witness to that same love. By giving up the solace of an earthly spouse and the prospect of birthing heirs, the celibate gestures with her very body to a future time when “they neither marry nor are given in marriage . . . because they are equal to angels” (Luke 20:35, 36). Continue Reading »

If there’s one theological commitment that unites both sides of the same-sex marriage debate, it’s semi-Pelagianism. Taking its name from the fourth-century monk Pelagius, semi-Pelagianism may be thought of as a theological mood or a set of impulses that’s opposed to a strong doctrine of original sin. Fearing that talk of our broken wills may hamper moral striving, the semi-Pelagian stresses perfectibility as a motive for action. Continue Reading »

Adam Greene’s Bibliotheca project presents the Bible in multiple codices. It’s an elegant effort, but it’s not what the early Church eventually came to endorse. Continue Reading »

Christopher W. Mitchell was a scholar of C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien who directed The Wade Center at Wheaton College for many years. Wesley Hill remembers him as a good friend. Continue Reading »

One of the pleasures of recording on the inside cover of a book the date you finished reading it—I’ve been doing that now for over a decade—is that, when you return to it, you can instantly imagine yourself back in time. When I recently opened Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, for . . . . Continue Reading »

I recently took part in a conversation among some young theologians and ethical thinkers, most of them Catholic, many of them gay or same-sex attracted. We found ourselves talking about the shelter the Catholic Church provided in Victorian England to many homosexual people. In a culture suspicious . . . . Continue Reading »

Marilynne Robinson repeats the conclusion that Jesus had nothing to say about homosexuality. But that conclusion severs the connection between Jesus and his specially commissioned apostolic witnesses. Continue Reading »

Although the resurrection of Christ is unique and unrepeatable, there are analogies for it in the lives of Christians. Jesus says as much when he makes his raising of Lazarus to be an icon of the greater resurrection that’s to come. Continue Reading »

Darren Aronofsky’s Noah portrays the patriarch as a man of mercy. But according to St. Paul’s theology, even the godly patriarchs needed mercy for themselves. Continue Reading »

Did St. Paul’s originality as a thinker, preacher, and letter-writer lie in his Christology or in his teaching on the inclusion of the Gentiles in the Church? Trying to answer that question on its own terms misses the interconnectedness of Paul’s Christology and his missionary practice. Continue Reading »