From John Updike's The Carpentered Hen, published 1958.
Professor Varder handles Dante
With wry respect; while one can see
It's all a lie, one must admit
The "beauty" of the "imagery."
Professor Varder slyly smiles,
Describing Hegel as a "sage;"
But still, the man has value - - he
Reflects the "temper" of his "age."
Montaigne, Tom Paine, St. ...
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Who is the Holy Spirit? What is his characteristic personhood, which distinguishes him from the Father and the Son? How is it that he isn't simply interchangeable with the ascended Jesus Christ, or on the other hand interchangeable with the invisible Father, or on the other other hand, identical with the one divine essence? He is God, but he is not the Son and not the Fat...
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Thoughts after six hours of discussing Søren Kierkegaard's beautiful, terrible little book Fear and Trembling, which puts forward Abraham as "the knight of faith," who is greater than all the wise and strong of the world:
great with that power whose strength is powerlessness, great in that wisdom whose secret is folly, great in that hope whose outward form is insanity, ...
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Both China and the Russian Federation have “Most Favored Nation” trading status. Just last week China’s President Hu Jintao visitied the United States. He was courted by capitalist greats like Microsoft’s Bill Gates and Boeing’s CEO Alan Mulally who exclaimed that “China rocks!” in light of their purchase of over 80 aircraft from Boeing in the next few years. The...
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I'm into the Trinity, my son's into knights. So imagine the thrill of finding this image which brings our interests together. It's a picture of a knight preparing to go into battle against an array of evils and vices. It is from a 13th-century illuminated manuscript in the British Library. The knight himself is a big fellow, well covered in mail and a helmet, armed with a ...
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Charles Wesley wrote:
O Love divine, what has thou done!
The immortal God hath died for me!
- - which is a bold thing to say, because it claims so much. "God...died." The Bible itself says it that bluntly in a few places, such as Acts 20:28, "God purchased the church with his own blood." This is how the voice of faith speaks when it confesses what God has done. ...
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Lean to me, Teddy,
As brown as the line of earth,
As I lean to you.
The marker runs out
Burnt umber, then sepia,
At last, sienna.
The negative space
Into which we both impinge
From left and from right.
Jonathan Edwards:
"Being's consent to being
Is the true virtue."
You fold your fat pa...
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As the NFL draft is almost upon us it is hard not to notice the focus sports fans and sports writers have on excellence. Potential professional football players are be scrutinized by owners, coaches, writers and fans about what they could bring to their respective teams. The NFL Combine is where those players are most carefully examined.
At the NFL Combine every college ...
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What the resurrection proves is more important than proving the resurrection.
R. A. Torrey (1856-1928), at the height of his fame as world-travelling evangelist, published a book called The Bible and its Christ. Of the book's ten chapters, the first four provided reasons for believing the Bible to be God's word, the next four were about the resurrection of Christ, and t...
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After posting about Cheynell's 1650 Trinity book, I looked again at the title page and realized he didn't publish it as a book about The Divine Triunity, but about the Divine TriNunity. As far as I can tell, he meant to spell it that way. Later readers who wrote about his book sometimes got the name right, and sometimes unconsciously corrected it (as I did), to Trinity. I h...
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Back in the seventeenth century, you could write a book and give it a title that included most of the content. In fact, as far as I can tell, Cheynell's Divine Triunity has a title page which is nearly a chapter long. If I were to assign this book in class, I'm sure the first question from students would be, "Do we have to read the title as well, or just the book?" And in t...
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The Gospel According to St. Hereticus
Scripture Lesson for Easter
“St. Hereticus” was Robert McAfee Brown (1920-2001), a good old-fashioned left-leaning American theologian who published a series of satirical jabs under his heretical pseudonym for many years around the middle of the twentieth century. This piece was published in Christianity and Crisis, March 16, 1959...
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