Biggar again, defending the Augustinian view that killing in some circumstances is not a violation of love of neighbor: “I may (intend to) kill an aggressor, not because I hate him, nor because I reckon his life worth less than anyone else’s, but because, tragically, I know of no other . . . . Continue Reading »
In a 2009 article responding to Richard Hays’s pacifist reading of the New Testament ( Studies in Christian Ethics ), Nigel Biggar argues that Hays’s Anabaptist reading of Romans 13 is “incoherent.” Hays argues that while the use of force in punishment is ordained of God, . . . . Continue Reading »
Father George Zabelka was chaplain to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki squadrons that dropped the bomb, and administered the Eucharist to the Catholic pilot of dropped it. He later renounced his actions: “To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to . . . . Continue Reading »
Make allowances for Schmemann’s settled anti-Western bias, but there is still a lot to be said for his account of the rise of secularism in the West. Its roots lie in the abandonment of the eschatological character of early Christianity: “It replaced the tension, essential in the early . . . . Continue Reading »
In his The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy , Schmemann notes the importance of the anomaly of Constantine’s unbaptized condition. In Byzantine liturgical tradition, the conversion of Constantine is compared to that of Paul - both encountered Christ directly, without mediation of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Schmemann ( Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West ) admits that in the east the church “surrendered” its “juridical” and “administrative” independence to the empire. But he claims that this is not a betrayal of the church’s true . . . . Continue Reading »
Pugnare mihi non licet , St Martin is supposed to have said. Not everyone buys is. J. Fontaine, who edited the text of the life of Martin, says that such a declaration in Martin’s time is unbelievable: “an aggressive proclamation of conscientious objection, forty-two years after the . . . . Continue Reading »
John Paul II wrote, “Today, as yesterday, musicians, composers, liturgical chapel cantors, church organists and instrumentalists must feel the necessity of serious and rigorous professional training. They should be especially conscious of the fact that each of their creations or . . . . Continue Reading »
Page again: “For those who oped to rise in the flesh for the Millennium and then the general judgement, ritual singing was a way to celebrate the continuity of bodily existence on both sides of the grade. The voice was one of the higher faculties of the body that Tertullian and others . . . . Continue Reading »
Page again: “The musical stave was a Latin-Christian invention and was confined, for many centuries, to the Occidental lands where Latin was the exclusive language of liturgical singing. It provided the means for an aggressively expansionist civilization to train singers relatively quickly so . . . . Continue Reading »
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