Subtraction stories Accounts that explain the secular as merely the subtraction of religious belief, as if the secular is what’s left over after we subtract superstition. In contrast, Taylor emphasize...
Pascal knew that Montaigne was cheating: to most humans, curiosity about higher things comes naturally, it’s indifference to them that must be learned.
Not many people can confront the truth about themselves. If they did they’d run a mile, would take an immediate and profound dislike to the person in whose skin they’d learned to sit quite tolerably a...
Indeed, the for a Christian Christ: Jesus Christ is the very embodiment of what we're made for, of the end to which we are called....and how does this happen? By being regularly immersed in the dram...
Formative Christian worship paints a picture of the beauty of the Lord--and a vision of the he desires for creation--in a way that captures our imagination....The biblical vision of --of a world wher...
For example: never underestimate the formative power of the family supper table. This vanishing liturgy is a powerful site of formation. Most of the time it will be hard to keep the cathedral in view,...
Derrida. Deconstruction’s claim that there is nothing outside the text [il n’y a pas de hors-texte] can be considered a radical translation of the Reformation principle sola scrip-tura. In particular,...
Christendom, then, is a missional endeavor that refuses to let political society remain protected from the lordship of Christ while also recognizing the eschatological distance between the now and the...
Being a disciple of Jesus is not primarily a matter of getting the right ideas and doctrines and beliefs into your head in order to guarantee proper behavior; rather, it's a matter of being the kind o...
Because our hearts are oriented primarily by desire, by what we love, and because those desires are shaped and molded by the habit-forming practices in which we participate, it is the rituals and prac...
A song gets absorbed into our imagination in a way that mere texts rarely do.
Education is most fundamentally a matter of formation,
What we believe is not a matter of intellectualizing salvation but rather a matter of knowing what to love, knowing to whom we pledge allegiance, and knowing what is at stake for us as people of the b...
Unlike sermon-centric congregations that profess high views of Scripture but leave the reading of the Bible to the preacher’s whim and circumscribe it within sermon time, in catholic Christian worship...
Too many readers regularly overestimate Augustine’s affirmation here and seem to regularly ignore his persistent affirmation that justice is found where God, the one supreme God, rules an obedient Cit...
Those formed by such liturgies then become the kind of people who pursue and desire that end. So if we are unreflectively immersed in the liturgies of consumerism, we will, over time, learn that the e...
Third, following from this, the liturgical practice of the offering indicates that Christian worship—which is a foretaste of the new creation—embodies a new economy, an alternative economy.
The upshot is a hermeneutics of suspicion; if someone tells you that he or she has converted to unbelief because of science, don’t believe them. Because what’s usually captured the person is not scien...
The secular3 age is a level playing field. We’re all trying to make sense of where we are, even why we are, and it’s not easy for any of us.
The place we unconsciously strive toward is what ancient philosophers of habit called our --our goal, our end. But the we live toward is not something we primarily know or believe or think about; rat...