Timothy George

If ideas have consequences, Fr. Richard John Neuhaus will long be remembered as the most serious Christian thinker and the most consequential public theologian in America since Reinhold Niebuhr. . . . Continue Reading »

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor dropped two balls on New Year’s Eve. At midnight she pressed the button to signal the descent of the famous ball in Times Square, marking the end of one year and the beginning of another. But, from the perspective of the Obama administration, she had already “dropped the ball” by issuing an order just two hours earlier granting temporary relief on the contraceptive mandate to the Little Sisters of the Poor. Without her intervention, the steamroller enforcement of the Affordable Care Act would have proceeded apace . . . Continue Reading »

Christmas Eve and Christmas Day are over now, but the melodies linger on—not only for those who observe the full twelve days of Christmastide, but also for others for whom the season has been mostly about lots of good food, good cheer, and the feel-good sentimentality of “God’s in his heaven, all’s right with the world.” . . . Continue Reading »

It is that season of the year when the Blessed Virgin Mary takes center stage—at least for a brief while—among almost all Christians everywhere. She does this because she has to. No Mary, no Christmas. No Christmas, no Christ. No Christ, no Christianity. Even John Calvin, the chief pioneer of Reformed Protestantism, recognized this. “We cannot enjoy the blessing brought to us in Christ,” he wrote, “without thinking at the same time of that which God gave as adornment and honor to Mary, in willing her to be the mother of his only begotten Son” … Continue Reading »

How much can one learn about another person in slightly less than one month—especially a person never seen before nor met again? “Not very much,” would be a reasonable answer. Yet that was not true of a special friendship I developed with AME Bishop Sarah Frances Davis during the month of October 2012. Bishop Davis died last month in Houston at age sixty-five… . Continue Reading »

Paul Robert Schneider (1897-1939) was the first Protestant pastor to die in a concentration camp at the hands of the Nazis. His story is one of unmitigated courage, self-sacrifice, and martyrdom. Only in recent years has he begun to receive some of the recognition he deserves… . Continue Reading »

I do not possess the gift of healing, nor have I ever spoken in tongues—although when I was a high school student a charismatic Methodist friend of mine prayed that I would do so. Back then, in the 1960s, the charismatic renewal was still a new phenomenon in the mainline Protestant churches and virtually unheard of in the Southern Baptist Convention to which I belonged. Of course, the historic Pentecostal churches had been around since the Azusa Street revival of 1906, but the lines between them and other evangelical Christians were fairly hard and fast. . . . Continue Reading »

I believe in hell. Not only the hell within, for there are those “private devils that hang like vampires on the soul,” to use the language of Thomas Merton”and not only the metaphorical hell around evident in war, violence, and destructive evil on a global scale”but also the hell to come… . Continue Reading »

American evangelicals and serious theology are not terms that just naturally snuggle up to one another with easy equipoise. That, despite the fact that Jonathan Edwards, the greatest theologian America has yet to produce, stands at the headwaters of the evangelical tradition. The diminution of the evangelical mind since Edwards”and not only in theology”has been often rehearsed… . Continue Reading »

“America loves success stories.” This is how a 1983 admiring profile of the famed Robert Harold Schuller began. And back in 1983 “Bob” Schuller, as his friends called him, was certainly successful. The son of pious Dutch Reformed parents, Schuller was born on a farm in Sioux County, Iowa, in 1926. That was one year before Sinclair Lewis published Elmer Gantry, a satirical novel about a ne’er-do-well preacher from Kansas. Though Schuller would match Gantry in exuberance and flamboyant style, he was no charlatan… . Continue Reading »