I gave some talks on another campus recently, and someone observed to me that some of my best examples and quotations came from Catholic thinkers. I am well aware of the ways in which I have been learning about Christian faithfulness in recent years from non-evangelical Christians: Catholics especially, but also Eastern Orthodox thinkers and […]
This piece is also available at my On Faith page:
http://newsweek.washingtonpost.com/onfaith/
After a week or so of basking in the afterglow of the presidential election, I am starting to get a little grumpy. It’s not about President-elect Obama. Like many other Americans I wept tears of joy when he addressed the...
By the time I was born, the Great Depression was only a memory. It was an extremely vivid memory, though, for the adults in my extended family. Their ongoing sense of uncertainty, rooted in their experience of economic disaster, was given expression regularly in a sentence that was typically appended to any serious comment they would utter...
In an interview the other day I was asked where some of the “unknown” leaders are right now—folks whose leadership is thus far a well-kept secret, but are people who the rest of the Christian world should know about.
Instead of naming names, I talked in general terms about a whole generation of presently “unknowns.” While...
In some of the speeches I have been giving recently, I have taken to quoting a line from the Epistle to Diognetus. The scholars do not know exactly when this lengthy letter was written, or who wrote it. But we do know that it was composed not long after the apostolic period, by a Christian who wanted...
Recently I was talking with a friend who is a part of a “breakaway” Anglican congregation whose members are in a property dispute with their former Episcopal diocese. He complained bitterly about the large amounts of money both sides are spending in the ongoing litigation, to say nothing of the loss of property that the losers will...
Back in 1994 I joined a number of other evangelicals in endorsing a document called “Evangelicals and Catholics Together.” It was a good group with whom to be associated; it included Father Richard Neuhaus and Father (now Cardinal) Avery Dulles on the Catholic side and Bill Bright, Chuck Colson, and J. I. Packer from the evangelical camp....
I have often puzzled about a comment made by Dr. Samuel Johnson, as reported by his biographer James Boswell. He had often tried to be a philosopher, Johnson said, “but cheerfulness kept breaking in.”
It makes me wonder what philosophers Dr. Johnson had been reading. I certainly know of a lot of gloomy philosophers—Schopenhauer and Nietzsche,...
I’m not going to jump into the fray about Senator McCain’s choice of a vice presidential running mate. But I am concerned about at least some of the flak she is taking for her religious views. This is not the first time we have seen the hypocrisy that characterizes the treatment of believers who speak out about...
Here is a passage that I often return to, from the inaugural address of one of my presidential predecessors, Edward John Carnell:
Whoever meditates on the mystery of his own life will quickly realize why only God, the searcher of the secrets of the heart, can pass final judgment. We cannot judge what we have no access to....
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