The Break

Modernism was not simply a secularizing movement in art. As Richard Harries shows in his recent The Image of Christ in Modern Art , Christ and Christian themes remained important for visual artists during from the period before World War I to the present. His richly illustrated book focuses on . . . . Continue Reading »

Kantian SciFi

Like everyone in his time, Kant believed in the great chain of being, and like many he extended it to the planets and their inhabitants. The further the planet from the sun, the better; like man, earth was midway. Kant wrote: “The excellence of thinking natures, their quickness of . . . . Continue Reading »

Grim Prospects

Timothy Snyder ponders the future of Ukraine . There aren’t many good results. The protests can’t force the issue, since there is no election on the horizon. An attempted no confidence vote has failed. It’s not clear that the police and military will be able to keep the protests . . . . Continue Reading »

Sinful Flesh

Thomas Weinandy’s In the Likeness of Sinful Flesh: An Essay on the Humanity of Christ is a lucid, concise, yet comprehensive study of an issue that has become controversial. He states his thesis clearly at the outset: “While Christian theologians have stressed that the Son ofGod became . . . . Continue Reading »

Agenda for Theology

In a discussion of theological paradox , John Frame comments on and approves a formula regularly used by Cornelius Van Til, “not in spite of, but because of.” Frame sees it as a summons to creative rethinking of a lot of classic “paradoxes”: “the formula ‘not in . . . . Continue Reading »

Distance and proximity

In his essay on “The Intertwining - The Chiasm,” published in The Visible and the Invisible , Merleau-Ponty argues that the correlation of proximity and distance in the act of perception shows that world is designed to be seen by bodies: “We understand then why we see the things . . . . Continue Reading »

Church, Ideal and Real

Aidan Nichols’s Figuring out the Church: Her Marks, and Her Masters is a brief, clear, workmanlike introduction to ecclesiology. The book is divided into two parts, the first organized around the marks of the church (one, holy, catholic, apostolic) and the second expounding the ecclesiologies . . . . Continue Reading »

Heavenly Merchandizing

Mark Valeri attends to minutiae as he examines the interaction between religion and commercial activity in early New England ( Heavenly Merchandize: How Religion Shaped Commerce in Puritan America ). He attends to “merchants accounts and ledgers, businesscorrespondence and personal letters, . . . . Continue Reading »