To be human is to be on a quest. To live is to be embarked on a kind of unconscious journey toward a destination of your dreams. As Blaise Pascal put it in his famous wager: You have to wager. It is n...
The doubter’s doubt is faith; his temptation is belief, and it is a temptation that has not been entirely quelled, even in a secular age.
The body of Christ is that unique community of practice whose members own up to the fact that we don’t always love what we say we do—that the devices and desires of our hearts outstrip our best intent...
Radner rightly presses us to recognize that pursuing the common good with gospel integrity requires both a healthy state and an ecclesial anchor. For some of us, that will mean rethinking our tendency...
Music gets in us in ways that other forms of discourse rarely do.
It’s not meaning, and it’s certainly not meaning in general, he says. Indeed, there is something absurd about the idea that our lives could be focused on meaning as such, rather than on some specific...
Implicit in Christian worship is a vision not just for spiritual flourishing but also for human flourishing; this is not just practice for eternal bliss; it is training for temporal, embodied human co...
I don’t think you should write something as long as a novel around anything that is not of the gravest concern to you and everybody else, and for me this is always the conflict between an attraction f...
He meets us where we are, as creatures of habit who are shaped by practices, and invites us into a community of practice that is the very of his Son. Liturgy is the way we learn to 'put on' Christ.
For Lyotard, metanarratives are a distinctly modern phenomenon: they are stories that not only tell a grand story (since even premodern and tribal stories do this) but also claim to be able to legitim...
Focusing on the intellectual artifacts of the earthly polis, we miss the formative power of its rituals. This is the inconvenient truth that is pressed upon us by the new black theology of Willie Jenn...
First, the Apostles’ Creed functions like the church’s pledge of allegiance.
And when our songs attribute the action of worship to us (Here I am to worship, here I am to bow down . . .), then worship is understood as fundamentally an expression of human will, a Pelagian endeav...
What does it look like to bear witness in a secular age? What does it look like to be faithful? To what extent have Christians unwittingly absorbed the tendencies of this world? On the one hand, this...
We should emphasize that the narrative of Scripture is a primary fund for the Christian imagination.
The end of Christian education has been seen to be the dissemination and communication of Christian ideas rather than the formation of a peculiar people.
Third, the recitation of the Creed is the I believe moment in Christian worship.
Things which are not in their intended position are restless. Once they are in their ordered position, they are at rest.9
The state isn’t just the guardian of rights; it is also a nexus of rites that are bent on shaping what is most fundamental: my loves. The state doesn’t just ask me to make a decision; it asks me to pl...
The music moves us very strongly, because it is moved, as it were; it captures, expresses, incarnates being profoundly moved. (Think of Beethoven quartets.) But what at? What is the object? Is there a...