The Gospel is there so that death doesn’t swallow us up while we are creating environments that expand imagination, unleash creativity, and maximize the creative potential in every individual and organization. Continue Reading »
The transcript of my interview with Benjamin Wiker (who wrote Ten Books that Screwed Up the World) of To the Source is up. We talk about my book The End of Secularism.Here’s a clip where I answer Wiker’s question as to whether I am calling Christians to be anti-secular . . . . Continue Reading »
Exploration into God is exploration into darkness, into the heart of darkness. Yes, to be sure, God is light. He is the light by which all light is light. In the words of the Psalm, “In your light we see light.” Yet great mystics of the Christian tradition speak of the darkness in which the light is known, a darkness inextricably connected to the cross. At the heart of darkness the hope of the world is dying on a cross, and the longest stride of soul is to see in this a strange glory. In John’s Gospel, the cross is the bridge from the first Passover on the way out of Egypt to the new Passover into glory. In his first chapter he writes, “We have beheld his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father.” The cross is not the eclipse of that glory but its shining forth, its epiphany. In John’s account, the death of Jesus is placed on the afternoon of the fourteenth day of the month of Nisan, precisely the time when the Passover lambs were offered up in the temple in Jerusalem. Lest anyone miss the point, John draws the parallel unmistakably. The legs of Jesus are not broken, the soldier pierces his side and John writes, “For these things took place that the scripture might be fulfilled, ‘Not a bone of him shall be broken.’ And again another scripture says, ‘They shall look on him whom they have pierced.’” In the book of Exodus, God commands that no bone of the paschal lamb is to be broken. Then there is this magnificent passage from the prophet Zechariah: “And I will pour out on the house of David and the inhabitants of Jerusalem a spirit of compassion and supplication, so that, when they look on him whom they have pierced, they shall mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child, and weep bitterly over him, as one weeps over a firstborn.” Continue Reading »
A culture must believe in its own enculturating responsibility and mission. This a post-Christian Europe cannot . . . . Continue Reading »
Robert Frost: The Poet as Philosopher by peter j. stanlis isi, 350 pages, $28 Poor Robert Frost. Nearly half a century after his death, he is still suffering at the hands of both friends and enemies. Frost brought much of this problem on himself when he selected a troubled young . . . . Continue Reading »
More than ten thousand Nigerians have lost their lives in communal unrest since 1999. One incident in Kaduna State alone claimed more than two thousand lives. And in the 2006 riots that erupted across the world over the Danish cartoons of the Prophet Muhammad, Nigeria had more of its citizens . . . . Continue Reading »
CS. Lewis is hard to like and easy to love. As a solitary, clever, and bookish child he was a study in precocity, a model prig. “I have a prejudice against the French,” he announced, a four year old, to his father. Why? “If I knew why it wouldn’t be a prejudice.” At the age of nine he was . . . . Continue Reading »
The civic catechisms of our day still celebrate Thomas Jefferson’s experiment in religious liberty. To end a millennium of repressive religious establishments, we are taught, Jefferson sought liberty in the twin formulas of privatizing religion and secularizing politics. Religion must be “a . . . . Continue Reading »
My colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Walter Berns, has written that the philosophy of John Locke was decisive in the American founding. According to Berns, Locke’s disguised but unmistakable aims were to break with the traditional Christian understanding of nature and to drive . . . . Continue Reading »
Last Christmas our parish hall displayed a Nativity painting by a local artist, showing a dark-haired woman in a wheelchair holding an infant, with a man in hospital scrubs standing solicitously behind them. The scene was instantly recognizable to anyone who has had a baby in this country in the . . . . Continue Reading »
Subscribe
Latest Issue
Support First Things
