The worldview of a people, though normally left unspoken in the daily business of buying and selling and counting shekels, is to be found in a culture’s stories, myths, and rituals, which, if studied...
For the great Gaels of Ireland, wrote G. K. Chesterton, Are the men that God made mad.For all their wars are merry,And all their songs are sad.
In its manuals for priestly confessors, the church enumerates the sins we must all confess, listing these in order of seriousness from the least (venial) to the most serious (mortal), to those so grav...
But it is also true that this long-winded, unwieldy compilation of assorted prescriptions represents an overall softening—a humanizing—of the common law of the ancient Middle East, which easily prescr...
In the words of Arnaldo Momigliano, the most learned and nimble interpreter of antiquity in our age: All these civilizations display literacy, a complex political organization combining central govern...
The real purpose of religion—at the popular level—was to unify the populace. Let everyone worship his favorite god in some niche or other, but let’s all sacrifice at the same altar, climb the same ste...
In the cities of the Jewish diaspora (especially Alexandria, Antioch, Tarsus, Ephesus, and Rome), Jews were widely admired by their gentile neighbors. For one thing, they had a real religion, not a cl...
In Luke, we are looking at Jesus’s story through a gentile lens, which viewed the biographies of great men as exemplars for others to emulate. So the great men and women of the Christian tradition mus...
If the Aeneid is language as metaphor, as the sacramental ritualizing of human experience, Cicero’s speeches are language as practical tool.
Twas God the Word that spake it, He took the Bread and brake it; And what the Word did make it That I believe, and take it.
There are no mental health services offered to Death Row inmates. For whatever healing is done they themselves must be the healers.
The word grammar—the first step in the course of classical study that molded all educated men from Plato to Augustine—will be mispronounced by one barbarian tribe as glamour. In other words, whoever h...
That the Roman empire was, like all its predecessors, a form of extortion by force, an enriching of well-connected Romans (who make a desolation and call it peace) at the expense of hapless conquered...
Rome fell because of inner weakness, either social or spiritual; or Rome fell because of outer pressure—the barbarian hordes. What we can say with confidence is that Rome fell gradually and that Roman...
Jesus was no ivory-tower philosopher but a down-to-earth man who understood that much of the good of human life is to be found in taste, touch, smell, and the small attentions of one human being for a...
In becoming an Irishman, Patrick wedded his world to theirs, his faith to their life…Patrick found a way of swimming down to the depths of the Irish psyche and warming and transforming Irish imaginati...
Call them the people of the Dark Ages if you will, but do not underestimate the desire of these early medieval men and women for the rule of law.
The Cost of Discipleship, his meditation on Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, disparaging the cheap grace of the majority of German Christians in favor of the costly grace that linked Christian belief to s...
Jesus has become the central reality, the yardstick against which all actions are to be measured. It is no coincidence that the story of Martha and Mary follows immediately on the parable of the Good...
It is no accident, therefore, that the great revelations of God’s own Name and of his Commandments occur in a mountainous desert, as far from civilization and its contents as possible, in a place as u...