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L’affaire Voltaire

Americans know little of Voltaire. French high-schoolers, by contrast, know him the way we once knew Thoreau and Whitman, before social justice eclipsed history as the rationale for our syllabi. Like America’s Liberty Bell, Voltaire’s tomb in Paris’s Panthéon is still visited by school groups . . . . Continue Reading »

Notre-Dame de Paris, 2015

Most evenings I’d meet Daniel right in frontOf City Hall, to walk home for our mealOn Rue Domat, just westward of Rue Dante.We’d stroll across the bridges, always steal A glance at militaires patrolling thereIn threes (in Charlie Hebdo days), while highAbove the gardens and above the . . . . Continue Reading »

Letters

I don’t suppose it will be easy for Carl Trueman (“Turning Inward,” December 2019) and me to avoid talking past each other, but let’s give it a try. My book, The Meaning of Protestant Theology, is not an effort to engage with secondary literature. (Gerhard Forde? Never read him; don’t . . . . Continue Reading »

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