The Wittenberg Door

Unfortunately, much of what is currently driving the discussion is not reason nor compassion but anger.

Those who are inclined to agree with Patrick Deneen (and others) that liberalism has indeed failed may ask what way of life would be...

Elevated figures in church history have a great deal to teach us, but we should not forget that we can also learn from the early, run-of-the-mill Christians who were as ordinary as we are, yet who, as the collective body of Christ, experienced vibrant faith and incredible growth in an inhospitable environment.

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 the loss of what was so hastily displaced and soon forgotten. The medieval worldview that Lewis cherished was replaced by an ideology that breeds nihilism and despair.

Many religions understand suffering to be laden with the potential for spiritual awakening through a reduction of worldly attachments. But Christianity has a unique understanding of suffering that offers a particular kind of solace.

Ironically, by searching for the self, we also lose ourselves. The more intently we look within, the more elusive our sense of self becomes.

Christian monastic pioneers saw that books left on the windowsill are more likely to make an impression on those outside than on those within.

In the Christian imagination, Dorothy Day looms as one of the 20th century’s great saints. A Communist convert to Christianity and co-founder of the...

In short, we need to rely less on building rigid ideological superstructures and more on our guts, guts kept healthy by a diverse diet of conversation and friendship. We need to have more personal encounters and trust in the general “goodness” of people. In other words, we need to take the seriousness with which we treat this Left-Right stuff down a notch and lighten up!

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 are all too often deaf to: the language of our quotidian lives, in which the undifferentiated mass of uncertain “certain things” forms the alphabet of grace.