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Seeing the Whole

A few years ago, I visited Albi, a small town in southern France famed for its Cathedral of Saint Cecilia. Constructed of the rose-colored brick typical of the region, the building was begun in the thirteenth century, about a hundred years after the Albigensian Crusade against the region’s . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

In the late sixth century, the monk John Moschos called the Judean Desert a “spiritual meadow,” one blossoming with men and women seeking God alone. Fourteen centuries later, William Dalrymple retraced Moschos’s footsteps in From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the . . . . Continue Reading »

When Campion Met Miss Anscombe

Edmund Campion (1540–81) and Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) were among the most brilliant of their generations of Oxford students: he at St. John’s College, she at St. Hugh’s. Later, each held fellowships in the university and delivered sermons in the university church of St. Mary the . . . . Continue Reading »

The Best Catholic Bible

Of the making of ­Bibles, it seems, there is no end. When I was growing up in the eighties and nineties, there were three dominant translations: Mainline Protestants had the Revised Standard Version (the major American Bible in the ­Tyndale–King James tradition), and then the . . . . Continue Reading »

Praying the Psalms

Athanasius, the heroic bishop of Alexandria in the mid-fourth century—who was sent into exile five times—is best known for his defense of the creed of the Council of Nicaea (325 a.d.) against its Arian detractors. The three-volume treatise Against the Arians is his most . . . . Continue Reading »

Evangelicals and Race Theory

For many years, apart from sporadic eruptions in American society, the issue of race has played Banquo’s ghost at the American evangelical banquet: an unsettling, unwelcome, somewhat passive guest. But recent trends in American public opinion, fueled by reports of police violence, have made race . . . . Continue Reading »

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