In worship and prayer, how do we go to God? Groveling, wormy, filled with anxiety and fear? As abject sinners? As those who are dead? That is not how Paul tells us to go. We are to present ourselves not as those who are dead, but as “those alive from the dead” . . . . Continue Reading »
Bulgakov writes, “By nourishment in the broadest sense we mean the most general metabolic exchange between the living organism and its environment, including not just food but respiration and the effects of the atmosphere, light, electricity, chemistry, and other forces acting on our . . . . Continue Reading »
Colossians 2:20-23: If you have died with Christ to the elementary principles of the world, why, as if you were living in the world, do you submit yourself to decrees, such as, Do not handle, do not taste, do not touch! (which all refer to things destined to perish with use) – . . . . Continue Reading »
John R. Levison’s Filled with the Spirit challenges “two-tiered” readings of biblical pneumatology such as that found in Hermann Gunkel: “The activity of the Spirit is . . . not an intensifying of what is native to all. It is rather the absolutely supernatural and . . . . Continue Reading »
Kereszty acknowledges that recent theologians have objected to the “reification” of Christ’s presence in some scholastic theology: “They insist that the sacraments are a personal encounter between human beings and Jesus Christ himself.” Talk of a change in the . . . . Continue Reading »
In his Wedding Feast of the Lamb , Roch Kereszty briefly summarizes some of the ways that the Eucharist degenerated in the late medieval period: “Instead of stressing the building up of Christ’s body the church as the ultimate effect of the Eucharist, the Late Middle Ages saw the . . . . Continue Reading »
Romans 8:10-11: If Christ is in you, though the body is dead because of sin, yet the spirit is alive because of righteousness. But if the Spirit of Him who raised Jesus from the dead dwells in you, He who raised Christ Jesus from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit . . . . Continue Reading »
It was Smart’s belief that God creates and sustains a cosmic harmony upon which the universe is contingent-in effect, God sings the universe into being-and the poet’s duty is to serve as a kind of choir-master leading the creation in an answering song. Because harmony between God and . . . . Continue Reading »
People get outraged by changes in liturgy. Christian Smith ( Moral, Believing Animals: Human Personhood and Culture ) points to the studies of Harold Garfinkel from the 1960s and 70s that highlight this reality: “Garfinkel and his students uncovered standards and boundaries of these . . . . Continue Reading »
In her Sacramental Poetics at the Dawn of Secularism: When God Left the World (Cultural Memory in the Present) , Regina Schwartz describes the collapse of the medieval sacramental system under Protestant assault, and the eventual transfer of longings for a sacred order to secular pursuits: . . . . Continue Reading »
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