Blog Posts

  • The Transfiguration of Jesus

    The transfiguration is one of those odd episodes in the Gospels which seem disjointed as far as its place in the flow of the narratives go. Immediately before each of the Transfiguration accounts – found only in the Synoptics – Jesus proclaims that he will die, and that those who must follow after Him must

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  • Karl Barth on “Blessed are the Pure in Heart”

    Karl Barth was the son of a pastor. As such, from a very young age he was intimately involved in the life of the church. When he came of age, he decided he wanted to study theology academically, and perhaps then to go into the pastorate like his father. Eventually, this is what he did.

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  • Humanae Vitae as (an) Outcome of Trinitarian Theology

    – – The Encyclical Humanae Vitae is the name of the papal encyclical written by Pope Paul VI in 1968 which addresses issues of the family and birth control. It was written before large amounts of the world decided to make artificial birth control a legalized medical reality, and the heart behind the letter was

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  • REVIEW: Byzantine Style and Civilization by Steven Runciman

    – – Runciman, Steve. Byzantine Style and Civilization. London, UK: Penguin Books, 1990. Byzantine Style and Civilization by the late Steve Runciman is hailed as a classic introduction to the field of Byzantine studies. It is a short, fascinating read, which includes in summarized form the various political, theological, and above all artistic flavors of

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  • Theology After Wittgenstein by Fergus Kerr

    “What if despising signs for their inert and inorganic materiality is to collude, however unwittingly, in centuries of discrimination against the mundane realities of how human beings live in community with one another?”

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  • Embodiment, Presence, Modernity: A Selection from Robert Jenson’s “Visible Words”

    – – I don’t think I have read a more prophetic, life-giving, convicting, or true set of sentences in the past year than these written by Robert Jenson in 1978: “Personal life occurs only in community. Just so, it can fail, according to either of its aspects, spirit or body.             Were I a fundamentally self-contained

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  • Robert Jenson and the Logos Asarkos

    – – Bruce McCormack’s landmark study on Christology, The Humility of the Eternal Son, leans heavily on the work of Robert Jenson to disprove the tradition’s positing of a bifurcated “Christological Subject.” He claims that this idea argues that there are two identities in God the Son: the “Eternal Son,” conceived as an identity of

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  • Robert Jenson: The Church is the Presence of Christ

    – – “Plainly, for Paul the concept of personal embodiment is not itself a biological concept. We may discover what sort of concept it then is, and simultaneously declare our own usage, by first recalling our general interpretation that for Paul a person’s embodiment is his or her availability to other persons and thereupon to her or

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  • Josef Pieper’s What is a Feast?

    Josef Pieper was a philosopher who sought to recover the classical Christian tradition’s theological and philosophical foci. In conversation (or perhaps debate) with the form of mainstream existentialist thought that arose after the end of World War II – the form of thought that sought to completely flip the script on the West’s self-understanding –

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  • The Son of the Father: T.F. Torrance on the Divinity of Jesus

    – – T.F. Torrance is one of those theologians you can confidently say is a pretty homogenous writer when his whole corpus is considered. If you have read one of his books on theology – unless it is a highly specific monograph or journal article or something of the sort – you have read them

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