Though it happened on November 11 of 2010, I just learned of the passing of English Dominican scholar Edmund Hill. Fergus Kerr, O.P. wrote a good obituary of him here. He had a long and eventful teaching career in South Africa (where he made himself persona non grata by criticizing the Apartheid policy) and at Cambridge. Hill is from that generation of Roman Catholic scholars ...
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The Problem Facing our Credentialed Rulers.
America has a serious problem. Those that feel qualified to be our rulers, those credentialed in the right places, have decided that traditional morality must go, but many continue to cling to these worn out notions. Those who worked, if not hard at least successfully, to gain degrees, diplomas, and placement often find their decis...
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Shaun Williams runs Williams Great Books Tutorials here in southern California. That means she leads young people through classic texts, the kind of books that have instructed, challenged, and baffled generations of the greatest adult minds in history. And somehow, it works! These are books that you can learn from all through your life, and Shaun leads students into a very ea...
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So I confess, I've got my browser's home page set up with an automated blog search on my name. What that means is that every time I load my homepage, it uses the power of Google to see if anybody's writing about me anywhere. It's a vanity Google search, but having it automatically performed by robots keeps me from having to say, "And now I will once again search the world wide...
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In the past dozen years or so evangelicals have been recovering the early Christian tradition thanks to books like D. H. William’s Retrieving the Tradition and Renewing Evangelicalism: A Primer for Suspicious Protestants and Bryan Litfin’s Getting to Know the Church Fathers. In one sense Nonna Verna Harrison’s recent book God’s Many-Splendored Image: Theological Anthrop...
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The first 2011 issue of The Examined Life from Wheatstone Academy is online now, and it includes several things that Scriptorium readers are likely to be interested in. John Mark Reynolds has a piece about what he learned from Plato's Phaedrus (and, as he says, could have learned from the Bible). There are essays, updates, and reviews from the Wheatstone Academy staff, and som...
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That part of society that cannot trust in a God big enough to watch over the sparrows will soon try to regulate the fall of every sparrow. Another madman has misused his free will to do evil and politicians pretend evil can be avoided by laws and regulations.
If the politicians could ban free will in the citizens, then they might end evil, but they should not try to do what ...
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Featured Essay
God was dead, to begin with. If you want to understand the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900), you have to start where he started, with the premise that there is no God, and that Christian monotheism had all been a big mistake. As far as Nietzsche was concerned, the best thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century had altogether undermined Christian truth claims: Strauss...
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For the next several weeks, I'll be teaching a Sunday School class on the Trinity by leading discussions of my book The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. We'll be studying one chapter per week, and I'll be producing a study guide for the class as we go. The heart of the study guide will be a dozen or so discussion questions on each chapter. But I'm also i...
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The new issue of Christianity Today has a nice, long review of The Deep Things of God: How the Trinity Changes Everything. Guess what: They like it, give it five stars, and recommend that you ought to drop everything and go buy multiple copies right now. Well, that last part might be between the lines, but you could tell that's what they were thinking.
The review, under the...
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A.M. Allchin's is one of those names that you run across all the time, in many different contexts, and you ask yourself: who is this man? As it turns out, Allchin was quite a man and he appears to have known most of the biggest names in Anglican, Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox circles over the past 60 years. Born in 1930, Allchin was educated in London and Oxford, and li...
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Trinitarian Evangelicalism From Days of Old, entry #3,827 in an endless series: Joseph Irons (1785-1852) and his hymns:
WE sing the FATHER's love--
We trust the SAVIOUR's grace;
The HOLY SPIRIT's power we prove,
Amidst the chosen race.
We give the FATHER praise--
We glorify the SON--
We bless the SPIRIT for his grace,
Which makes salvation known.
'Twas Go...
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