classics digests, reflections and reviews
Sanctuary in Our Time According to a NPR report today, a Protestant Church in the Hague Netherlands has kept a nonstop service since Oct. 26 to protect an Armenian immigrant family from deportation, for what New York Times refers to as “an obscure Dutch law” forbids police from disrupting a church service. This reminds me of Victor Hugo’s Hunchback of Notre Dame, in which “sanctuary” protected Esmeralda from the gallows. […]
Read more
In Preface of Book I, Augustine writes, “I treat of [City of God] both as it exists in this world of time, a stranger among the ungodly, living by faith, and as it stands in the security of its everlasting seat.” Augustine’s conception of time underlies his view of history. In his Confessions, his writes that time exists only within the material world as God’s creation, which is subject to […]
Read more
Augustine of Hippo’s magnum opus The City of God is one of the greatest works of the Western intellectual tradition—so powerful, in fact, that one could argue all of Christian theology has been a series of footnotes to Augustine. — Charles Mathewes, Professor of Religious Studies, University of Virginia In the beginning of 2010, I read Augustine’s Confessions for the very first time, and immediately followed up with City of […]
Read moreMan as Scrooge Watching the movie “Scrooge” (1951) starring Alastair Sim has become part of Christmas tradition for me. I’ve seen other film adaptions of Dickens’ “A Christmas Carol”, but no actor conveys the joy of reclamation as infectiously as Sim did in the 1951 film. Scrooge was rich, but he lived as a poor wretch. He had no appreciation of human worth, neither the worth of his fellow human […]
Read more
Reading Kierkegaard without sufficient knowledge of Christian theological tradition and the Western philosophical tradition, Hegel in particular, is like watching a boxing match where one opponent is invisible to the audience: you see the movement of only one boxer, you might appreciate his physique and agility, but you don’t know at all whether his attacks and dodges are effective. I’ve read eight of Kierkegaard’s works, and enjoyed them all, but […]
Read moreBackground and Disclaimer Almost three years ago, I wrote a series of posts on John Calvin’s “Institutes of Christian Religion“, one of which critiqued the principle of sola scriptura. A recent debate with a few Roman Catholic and Eastern Orthodox Christians helped me appreciate Calvin’s position better than before. In the 500th anniversary of the Protestant Reformation, it is fitting to write in defense of sola scriptura, the formal principle […]
Read moreA Matter of Identity As an armchair Platonist, I find the philosophy behind Darwinian evolution not only intellectually unsatisfactory, but also self-contradictory. On the one hand, it asserts constant change, that, given enough time and proper conditions, anything can change into anything else; on the other hand, it asserts identity, that there is a “struggle for existence” of the individual and/or group. It is a self-contradiction to state that something […]
Read more