In his encyclical Quam Singulari (August 1910), the remarkable Pope Pius X comes very close to endorsing paedocommunion. He quotes the gospel passages about Jesus welcoming children, and observes that, following the example of Jesus, the church “took care even from the beginning to bring the . . . . Continue Reading »
At the end of his Remembering Constantine at the Milvian Bridge , Raymond van Dam suggests that Constantine’s opponent, Maxentius, had his own inspiration before the battle: “During his reign Maxentius had represented himself as the defender of Rome, ‘his city.’ Perhaps it . . . . Continue Reading »
Jeremy MyNott begins his TLS review of Birds & People with this wonderful overview of ornith-anthropology: “Birds are everywhere. They span the globe from the most inhospitable regions of the Arctic and Antarctic, across oceans and seas, through desert, mountain and plain, forest and . . . . Continue Reading »
Moshe Halbertal reviews the late Ronald Dworkin’s final book, Religion without God, in The New Republic . Dworkin’s position is “religious” first in the sense that it is non-naturalist, and for this he gives, Halbertal says, two main lines of argument, moral and aesthetic. . . . . Continue Reading »
Badiou ( Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism ) gets a lot wrong. Primarily, what he gets wrong is the very modern effort to fit universalize Paul into a herald of “the Event.” Badiou has no interest or belief in the specifics of the gospel Paul preaches, only in the formal . . . . Continue Reading »
Alain Badiou begins his Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism by describing the simultaneous homogenization and fragmentation of late modern civilization. The homogenization he links to the globalization of capitalism economic structures: there is free circulation, but free circulation of . . . . Continue Reading »
Princeton University Press recently launched a new series, “Lives of Great Religious Books.” Each volume examines an important book - Genesis, Augustine’s Confessions , the Bhagavad Gita - and traces the book’s origins, history and uses. They are brief (some are a little . . . . Continue Reading »
A student, Andrew Bittner, takes re’shiyt (beginning) in Genesis 1:1 as “firstfruits,” suggesting a translation along the lines of “As the firstfruits God created the heavens and earth.” The translation is philologically plausible, since the Hebrew word refers to . . . . Continue Reading »
Emily A. Bernard Jackson asks this question concerning Byron in a TLS review of Roderick Beaton’s Byron’s War: Romantic Rebellion, Greek Revolution . It’s a “troublesome” question for Byron scholars: “Byron was certainly political: he maintained a lively interest . . . . Continue Reading »
Ask Eusebius of Caesarea, and he won’t give a straight answer. Ask Jerome, and he knows it was the Arian Eusebius of Nicomedia. Ask anyone between the sixth and the sixteenth century, and they’ll tell you, with great assurance, Sylvester of Rome. Hans Pohlsander ( Emperor Constantine , . . . . Continue Reading »
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