No discussion of Yoder would be complete without yet another review of the question of pacifism. But this is no tangent from the present discussion. God calls kings to inhabit His city. He promises that they will respond. When they do, do they remain kings? Can they be disciples of Jesus while . . . . Continue Reading »
The following two posts excerpt from my response to Mark Thiessen Nation and Vigen Guroian, who critiqued my Defending Constantine at a session at the recent AAR national meeting in San Francisco. My response can be summed up with two questions, one for Vigen and one for Mark. To Vigen, my question . . . . Continue Reading »
Father George Zabelka was chaplain to the Hiroshima and Nagasaki squadrons that dropped the bomb, and administered the Eucharist to the Catholic pilot of dropped it. He later renounced his actions: “To fail to speak to the utter moral corruption of the mass destruction of civilians was to . . . . Continue Reading »
In his The Historical Road of Eastern Orthodoxy , Schmemann notes the importance of the anomaly of Constantine’s unbaptized condition. In Byzantine liturgical tradition, the conversion of Constantine is compared to that of Paul - both encountered Christ directly, without mediation of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Schmemann ( Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy and the West ) admits that in the east the church “surrendered” its “juridical” and “administrative” independence to the empire. But he claims that this is not a betrayal of the church’s true . . . . Continue Reading »
Pugnare mihi non licet , St Martin is supposed to have said. Not everyone buys is. J. Fontaine, who edited the text of the life of Martin, says that such a declaration in Martin’s time is unbelievable: “an aggressive proclamation of conscientious objection, forty-two years after the . . . . Continue Reading »
In his 1995 Foreordained Failure: The Quest for a Constitutional Principle of Religious Freedom , Steven Smith challenges the notion that there is a single ideal of religious liberty and argues that any quest for such an ideal principle is doomed to failure. Religious freedom comes in various . . . . Continue Reading »
You can feel the outrage when David Carrasco ( City of Sacrifice: The Aztec Empire and the Role of Violence in Civilization ) observes, “all significant theories of ritual sacrifice, from Robertson Smith through Hubert and Mauss, Rene Girard, Walter Burkert, Adoph Jensen, and J.Z. Smtih, . . . . Continue Reading »
Peter James and his colleagues dispute the existence of a three-century dark age in ancient history. They find it implausible to think that civilization died in the 12th or 11th century, and then revived, almost intact, three centuries later. Language provides one example of the difficulties of . . . . Continue Reading »
In his encyclopedic and highly intelligent The Christian West and Its Singers: The First Thousand Years , Christopher Page details how the “soundscape” of Christendom expanded through the establishment of hospitals, many of which were supplied with service books that included notation . . . . Continue Reading »
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