Category Archives: Booklist

The Questions That Matter

In the introduction to his recent book, Life Under Compulsion, Anthony Esolen writes about: The Questions That Matter How to raise children who can sit with a good book and read? Who are moved by beauty? Who delight in innocence? … Continue reading

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Ontological Splendor of the Concrete

Glenn C. Arbery begins an article about Flannery O’Connor with: Toward the end of her life, Flannery O’Connor was often asked to speak about being a Southerner, as though this were a peculiar condition in need of explanation. In “The … Continue reading

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How the West Really Lost God

In anticipation of the April release of Mary Eberstadt’s book ‘How the West Really Lost God’ here’s an extract from her article with the same name, from which the book grew: And therein lies a real defect with the conventional … Continue reading

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A Love Supreme

As Dr Esolen remarks, Jesus of Nazareth: The Infancy Narratives is a short volume but for that very reason may be the ideal introduction to Pope Benedict XVI’s writings. In this Monday’s Wall Street Journal, Esolen writes:  Imagine touring the … Continue reading

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One Unique Book

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church states: 105 God is the author of Sacred Scripture. “The divinely revealed realities, which are contained and presented in the text of Sacred Scripture, have been written down under the inspiration of the … Continue reading

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Book Reviews

In this upcoming year, a year of faith, I hope to write weekly book reviews on the two dozen books in my booklist (see the About page). Most books will get multiple reviews and I intend the reviews to revolve … Continue reading

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Trinity

when one goes outside the ‘Christendom’ situation to bring the Gospel to non-Christians, one soon discovers that the doctrine of the Trinity is not something that can be kept out of sight; on the contrary, it is the necessary starting … Continue reading

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Discriminating

Finally, there may be a fourth group of readers who take a favorable view of the book as a whole and who regard it as one of its virtues to have incurred the disapproval of the other three groups. It … Continue reading

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Examined Lives

James Miller describes one path through the history of ideas in his book Examined Lives: from Socrates to Nietzsche. However, as Edward Feser points out in his review in the June/July 2011 First Things, the book places more emphasis upon … Continue reading

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Freedom and the Trinity

From an article by Paul Molnar: There is then a thread that runs through the theologians we have briefly canvassed in this article. That commonality suggests there is a tendency to allow experience rather than the Word of God revealed … Continue reading

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The World I’m Studying

This blog is about the world I’m studying: the world in which I perceive myself to live. Not an imaginary world but, on the other hand, not the “world as it is” - whatever that would mean. The little library … Continue reading

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The School of Sanctification

John Joseph Haldane, a noted contemporary philosopher and author of Faithful Reason (2004) and Reasonable Faith (2010), had an article in First Things back in 1998 entitled The School of Sanctification on Christian education. Here’s a brief excerpt: G. K. … Continue reading

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Historical Slides to Unitarianism

Regarding Newman’s claim that Calvinism tends, historically, to slide into Unitarianism, a post by Tertium Quid connects this with our sensory human nature: ….Thus, if you look at the history of Calvinism in several countries, it follows a pattern: zeal … Continue reading

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The Last Superstition

From the St Augustine Press page on Feser’s book The Last Superstition: …there is not, and never has been, any war between science and religion at all. There has instead been a conflict between two entirely philosophical conceptions of the … Continue reading

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Pagan Christianity

[I’ve updated links on this 2008 posting] There are useful critiques of Viola & Barna’s 2008 book, Pagan Christianity, over on Ben Witherington’s blog. To quote a bit from the second posting (July 1, 2008): Small group gatherings are wonderful … Continue reading

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Why the News Makes Us Dumb

From First Things: What happens when you sell information on a daily basis? You have to make each day’s report seem important, and you do this primarily by reducing the importance of its context. What you are selling is change, … Continue reading

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The Age of Faith and Reason

From an article by Michael F. Flynn: To summarize briefly, the Latins believed that: The universe was rationally ordered because a single rational God had willed it into being, This order was knowable by autonomous human reason by ‘measuring, numbering, … Continue reading

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The Context of Scripture

From a Called to Communion article: The context of Scripture is not merely within its pages, but is the living organism which is the Body of Christ, i.e. the Church. Since the gospel teaches us that Christ founded a Church … Continue reading

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The Protestant Ethos

The 20th anniversary edition of First Things has many interesting little snapshots of past articles. One in particular caught my attention: Charlotte Allen’s review of Harvard historian Steven Ozment’s book Protestants: The Birth of a Revolution in her article The … Continue reading

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Reading Tolkein

Tolkein’s foreward to 2nd edition of The Lord of the Rings has this very interesting comment: But I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so siince I grew old and wary enough to detect its … Continue reading

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