The Wittenberg Door 157

A Cain and Abel Story for Modern Man

It’s a new year, and many of us are thinking about self-improvement. This is a wonderful thing to do. We all need a bit of a tune-up now and then.…

“I don’t roll on nobody,” I said, abysmal grammar and all, but a jail cell is no place for linguistic niceties. My voice was rough, as much scared as aggressive.…

Unaware, we can stand in a museum, in a temple of modernity that extracts life from all other temples. We can gaze into the vengeful gift of a god while…

Was May demonstrating, knowingly or not, that even the isolated and disparaged—on the very nose of their ridicule—could be pointing the way brightly ahead through a dark and foggy future?…

On this year’s Feast of the Nativity of the Light in Our World in the Age of the Machine, my prayer is this: may our ceremonies not be one dimensional,…

Christina Rossetti's 1872 devotional poem, "A Christmas Carol," has held a special place in my heart from the moment I first heard it at a high school friend’s Christmas concert…

Like the people I grew up among, Puddleglum speaks hope sideways, hope being too sacred to speak outright. But he speaks it anyway, sideways and hedged but there, the way…

Witnessing the ascendancy of the Machine, Lewis understood what was at stake. He watched this ideology sweep across his society and take hold in its schools, and he keenly felt…

Criticizing the ministry-industrial complex does not mean professional resources have no place in ministry. It is not so much their use as their guiding role in congregational life that prevents…

Oppenheimer replies to him “Why I chose the name is not clear, but I know what thoughts were in my mind. There is a poem of John Donne, written just…

I’ve found that in perplexing or challenging circumstances, “why?” is a boring question. We like why. The leadership guru Simon Sinek asks us to start with why. It’s a popular…

Mr. McNabb recognizes the central passion of Fr. Vincent: his deep love for Christ, expressed through a severe asceticism, a total devotion to traditional Catholic doctrine and social teaching, a…

“Truth, wherever it is found, belongs to God.” This is true, then, when dealing with ancient writings of cultural value and significance. The truth and beauty found therein belong to…

What’s stopping you from blessing your yard, neighbors, and neighborhood, your watershed, the land you drive over everyday? Bless the world, literally, and with your being. Offer it up to…

I continued to stumble on, frequently forgetting my own story, seeking evermore opportunities for dislocated, immortal, heroic freedom from the chains of that finite, particular history. It was only a…

Vodolazkin’s critical vision of the Medieval Russian past is no different in essence from Augustine’s similarly sharp and un-glamorous vision of Roman history.

Instead of opposing one religion to another, we need the conscience and that humorous raised eyebrow, which Powys described, with feminine overtones, as “that withdrawn, quizzical look which conscience, that…

Accompanying the poor or inhabiting their number, the honest among us recognize our own fundamental impoverishment. Bernanos, a father and husband who long depended on others for sustenance, inhabited the…

One can have a very merry Christmas with great simplicity. And maybe, thinking of charity toward our less fortunate neighbors, modeling simplicity has its virtues.

But the promise of the coming of the Messiah is that all these animals will be changed from enemies of the human race into its friends, or at least comfortable…

The rivalry we’re experiencing goes deeper than symptoms, political principles, and even the need for responsive, wise leaders. Indeed, it may bypass principles and wisdom altogether. But to explain it,…

As we enter this season of Advent, we would do well to share the skepticism of Mary and her misfit Son about the powers of this age to establish an…

His books are not a diminishment of historic and intellectual Christianity. They are a translation of Aquinas, Barth, Calvin, and the rest into the language we all speak innately but…