Rev. Rich Bledsoe ties together Adam’s betrayal of Eve, trust, the Enlightenment, the Reformation, Descartes’ relations with women, and a few other odds at ends at the Trinity house web site. . . . . Continue Reading »
“Each one’s death is his own” seems like an obvious truism, but in fact it’s culturally specific. In the Bible, the dying gathers together his family for final words, blessings, sometimes curses (cf. Genesis 49), and after he dies he is “gathered to his people.” . . . . Continue Reading »
In 1890, Samuel Warren and Louis Brandeis published “The Right to Privacy” in the Harvard Law Review . According to Jill Lepore ( The New Yorker ), the article proposed that “there exists a legal right to be let alone - a right that had never been defined before.” It was . . . . Continue Reading »
In their contribution to American Space/American Place: Geographies of the Contemporary United States , John Agnew and Joanne Sharp describe the context and import of Frederick Jackson Turner’s famed “Frontier Thesis.” Turner wrote in the context of the downturn of the 1890s, and . . . . Continue Reading »
In his contribution to Christian Theology and Market Economics , Stephen Grabill reviews the “pre-Enlightenment” history of economic theory. That is to say, scholastic economics. For many economic historians, the notion of a scholastic economic theory is fallacious, and Exhibit #1 is . . . . Continue Reading »
Thomas Buchan gave a superb response paper at the Ancient Evangelical Future Conference at Trinity School of Ministry. Buchan’s paper was dynamite under every idealization of Nicea and its effect on the church. For starters, he pointed out that the Nicene Creed was not the only creed in . . . . Continue Reading »
The NYT Book Review has a review of Giovanni Della Casa’s Renaissance etiquette book, Galateo: Or, The Rules of Polite Behavior . The reviewer, Judith Martin sums up some of the wisdom: “Don’t be disgusting. Pretty much everything that comes out of a bodily orifice meets his . . . . Continue Reading »
According to the standard story, Catholicism made its peace with democracy rather suddenly in the first half of the twentieth century, culminating in Vatican II. On this narrative, Vatican I represented the kind of authoritarianism that the second Vatican council overturned. Not so, argues Emile . . . . Continue Reading »
Looking at maps of the 19th-century globe, you get the impression of a solid, complete (and a solidly and completely pink) British empire. That’s a “cartographical illusion,” says John Darwin in his Unfinished Empire: The Global Expansion of Britain . We forget that “this . . . . Continue Reading »
An 1880 ad for Singer Sewing machines offers a vision of humanity united by technology: “On every sea are floating the Singer Machines; along every road pressed by the foot of civilized man this tireless ally of the world’s great sisterhood is going upon its errand of helpfulness. Its . . . . Continue Reading »
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