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Letters

Matthew Dal Santo’s “Theopolitics of Ukraine” (August/September 2023) is a welcome counterweight to “What Ukraine Means” from the May 2023 issue. The Ukrainian Orthodox Church is the largest Orthodox church in Ukraine by number of parishes with more than 12,000. Before the start of the . . . . Continue Reading »

Seriously, God Is Love

Sergius Bulgakov has long been hailed by Orthodox and non-­Orthodox alike as a titan of twentieth-­century theology. He wrote on everything. After a youthful flirtation with Marx, he published Philosophy of Economy (1912), an anti-Marxist work of social theory. In The Tragedy of . . . . Continue Reading »

Briefly Noted

Pepperdine professor Paul J. Contino is a well-known and well-regarded scholar and teacher of Christianity and literature, and he proves himself an engaging and insightful guide to The Brothers Karamazov with this new study. “I began work on this book over thirty years ago,” he notes. . . . . Continue Reading »

Let’s Lead, Not Be Led

Paul Ryan will not seek another term in Congress. No doubt the personal reasons he gave for bowing out are important. But it’s likely he’s also frustrated that the market-oriented and freedom-focused conservatism he took for granted has lost traction. He’s not alone. The ideas and priorities . . . . Continue Reading »

Letter to an Aspiring Intellectual

You’ve asked me how to become an intellectual. You’re young, it seems (only young people ask questions of that kind), and you think you might have an intellectual vocation, but you can’t see what to do about it. What should you do in order to become the kind of person an intellectual is? What . . . . Continue Reading »

Mirror of Magistrates

For Christians, 1 and 2 Samuel are “history.” For Jews, they are among the writings of the “Former Prophets.” But the books can also be read as wisdom literature, especially when we recognize that biblical wisdom is royal wisdom. What follows is a sampling of the many lessons about good and . . . . Continue Reading »

The Fruit of Wisdom

I want to think about how “male and female,” a duality essential to the goodness of creation , play an essential role also in the first disobedience in the Garden of Eden. But to do that I need to address a prior question: Why does God command the man not to eat the fruit from the tree of . . . . Continue Reading »

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