The Epistle of James in the Current Crisis
by Peter J. LeithartThe Epistle of James, as understood within its first-century context, is still relevant today. Continue Reading »
Letters
by VariousImmigration Reinhold Niebuhr’s Christian realism, which was lately set forth in Matthew Schmitz’s “Immigration Idealism” (May), famously relegates Jesus’s social teaching to the realm of the ideal rather than the possible. Schmitz’s endorsement of this realism makes a mistake that . . . . Continue Reading »
Nietzsche’s Pilate
by Mark BauerleinIn one of his most irreverent moments, in the wild little book The Anti-Christ, composed not long before he completely lost his mind, Nietzsche states that there is only one admirable figure in the entire New Testament, one character alone who deserves our respect: Pontius Pilate. It’s an . . . . Continue Reading »
Politics and the Sacred
by R. R. RenoBret Stephens recently championed the “classically liberal concept of a neutral public square.” In this issue, Matthew Schmitz examines similar assertions by George Will. These accounts characterize any substantive basis for civic life as “illiberal,” even “theocratic.” They entail a . . . . Continue Reading »
Fear of the Word
by Hans BoersmaMy students are afraid to preach—not all of them, but more and more, it seems. And it is often the brightest and most eloquent, those who are least justified in parroting Moses’s excuse—“I am slow of speech and of tongue”—who lack the confidence to open the Scriptures for the . . . . Continue Reading »
Word for Word
by Paul V. MankowskiThe Hebrew Bible: A Translation with Commentary by robert alter norton, 3500 pages, $125 In 1582, Catholic scholars in exile at Rheims published an English version of the New Testament prefaced by a lengthy explanation and defence of their rendering, which, they said, accorded with the rule of . . . . Continue Reading »
Woke Totemism
by Alexander RileyA year ago in April, a student group at the university where I teach invited Amy Wax, a law professor at the University of Pennsylvania, to speak on the topic of racial inequality. Days before the talk, the faculty email list exploded with vituperative attacks on Wax and on the student group . . . . Continue Reading »
No Liberal Home
by Bruce D. MarshallJesus promises his followers that they will be hated in this world. “If the world hates you, know that it has hated me before it hated you. If you were of the world, the world would love its own; but because you are not of the world, but I chose you out of the world, therefore the world hates . . . . Continue Reading »
Belief Limbo
by Ronald W. DworkinIn September 2017, the Public Religion Research Institute published a study of religion in America that showed a tripling of the religiously unaffiliated since 1990, from 8 percent to 24 percent of the population. The majority of the unaffiliated call themselves secular; a quarter of the . . . . Continue Reading »
Chaucer’s Divine Seriousness
by John V. FlemingChaucer: A European Life marion turner princeton, 624 pages, $39.95 Chaucer has not lacked for biographies, but Marion Turner’s is of a rare ambition and competence. Its method is geographical, even topographical, approaching the poet’s life by way of the extraordinarily disparate places . . . . Continue Reading »
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