Lauren Winner has offered a short but pungent volume on the way central Christian “practices” are historically suffused with distortive, even abusive energies. Focusing specifically on eucharist, prayer, and baptism, she presents an argument that is pointed, deft, often elegant and always enlivened by injections of narrative energy and provocative conceptual summaries. Winner is a…

Preaching, as Menno Simons puts it, is a “high and holy office” and thus not to be entered casually or cavalierly. Who, then, should dare enter the pastorate? The well-educated? The well-spoken? The well-favored? Simons (c.1496–1561), the radical leader of a Dutch Anabaptist group that preached nonviolence and withdrawal from the world, argued on the…

The early cantos of Purgatorio feel obsessed with haste and urgency as well as light and shadow, continuing the themes of right desires and purification I identified in the first two cantos. Stepping Partly in the Light The pilgrim often notices the sun and its path, and he and the many souls frequently notice and…

Reading Journal Home << Previous Entry Next entry >> Canto IV Grace in Hell? Given the laments and curses of Canto III, and how eager the souls are to cross the Acheron, it’s almost easy to miss that the first place the pilgrim arrives at actually lacks much sign of suffering. Virgil describes the doctrine…

But I wanted to write this in order to put it into the hands of the people from whom I cannot ask back what I have already published and needs correction. … Hence those who are going to read these works should not imitate me in my errors but in my progress towards the better. —St….

Next Wednesday February 20th, The Henry Center is hosting Michael McClymond for our next Scripture & Ministry series. Michael McClymond is an Associate Professor of Theological Studies at Saint Louis University. His lecture, entitled “Christ Between the Thieves: The Theological and Pastoral Challenge of Christian Universalism,” will address the hot issue of universal salvation, popularized…