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Pope Francis’s Dichotomies

Pope Francis’s thought involves a series of dichotomies: North-South, imperial-populist, ideological-historical, abstract-concrete, and so on. Rourke shows in detail the intellectual formation that gave rise to this eccentric version of the social magisterium. Continue Reading »

The Evangelical Academy

We were doing an interview on an NPR station, a kind of “point-counterpoint” thing. The other interviewee was a self-identified agnostic , and the topic was the rights of academic institutions to “discriminate” on the basis of religious beliefs. My dialogue partner was not overtly hostile to religion as such. Indeed he said some nice things about the school where I was president at the time. Fuller Seminary produces some excellent scholarship based on our religious convictions, he observed. But why do we hire only folks who subscribe to those convictions? Having religious beliefs is fine, he said. But for institutions to hire only faculty who subscribe to those beliefs is contrary to the principles of academic inquiry. Continue Reading »

A Penny for the Guy

Within two weeks of his return from Rome in 1586, Father Robert Garnet had been selected to be the superior of the Jesuit mission in England. For twenty years he persisted: traveling, hiding, celebrating the sacraments, and coordinating the movements of his brother priests. By 1606, however, Garnet . . . . Continue Reading »

From Aquinas to Aquarius

In his witty and affectionate autobiography, Ours: The Making and Unmaking of a Jesuit, the Islamicist F. E. Peters has this to say about his Jesuit training: “It was a marvelous nineteenth century English university education of the type that Arnold Toynbee believed he was among the . . . . Continue Reading »

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