Get back to where you once belonged
|

Get back to where you once belonged

“Well, who wants to keep the human race going?” This is the question considered in the slim volume entitled Curing Mad Truths: Medieval Wisdom for the Modern Age by Rémi Brague, a French intellectual and historian of philosophy. Lest any of Brague’s characteristics give one pause about the books’ accessibility, the reader may draw reassurance…

Two Brits banter about the past
|

Two Brits banter about the past

Most history podcasts sound like modified lectures or highly detailed disquisitions on discrete issues, requiring copious quantities of listening time and a certain degree of monomania. For the history fans for a moderately long walk, run, or drive, The Rest is History is an accessible, entertaining, and well-produced listening experience. The hosts are two British…

Taking the long view
|

Taking the long view

The title suggests a guide to the worthy books of the past, but it is actually Alan Jacobs’ argument for why we should assign any worth to such books. The necessity of his argument, Jacobs explains, is a modern mindset that is overloaded with information, experiencing change at a rapid pace, and inundated with the…

The Revolution No One Sees

The Revolution No One Sees

There are many articulate explicators and defenders of the intellectual and moral legacy of Christianity in the modern world. Writers like David Bentley Hart, Larry Siedentop and Charles Taylor are incredibly erudite and persuasive, yet their books do not easily fit into the category of leisure reading, given their need for full consciousness, uninterrupted focus, and ready access to dictionaries.

Built on Lies

Built on Lies

The name Chernobyl has lodged itself into the modern consciousness. It triggers many of the defining anxieties of the twentieth century: nuclear power, environmentalism, and the potential for humanity’s technological achievements to wreak untold destruction.

Reform on a large scale

Reform on a large scale

Eire is not negative about religion in general or Christianity in particular. A reader from a Reformed background should find Reformations informative and engaging, but the final page may leave the question in one’s mind of whether it was all worth the cost, not just in blood and strife, but in the very idea of Christian unity.

From one moral system to another

From one moral system to another

Throughout his survey, Rubin gives special emphasis to the role of Christianity in Western society, and he concludes the work by offering his forecast on Christianity’s role in a society based on the morality of self-fulfillment.

What Athens had to do with Jerusalem

What Athens had to do with Jerusalem

Debates between religion and science often seem to be paradigmatic of a conflict between two irreconcilable things.

Setting the record straight

Setting the record straight

Recent events have made Karen Armstrong’s recently published Fields of Blood: Religion and the History of Violence tragically topical. New stories splashed across our computer and television screens do little to dispel the prevalent notion that religion is disproportionately linked to the less positive aspects of the human condition.

A caution against comfort

A caution against comfort

The true message of James, in Ellul’s view, describes a faith that is both transformative and existential. We cannot be Christians merely as an intellectual or spiritual exercise, nor can we be Christians in isolation from the world.